Tucker Carlson Says He Regrets Supporting Trump and Is “Tormented” by It. The journalist said he had “misled his supporters.”
Journalist Tucker Carlson said he is “tormented” by his support for Donald Trump—and accompanied that admission with an unusually public act of contrition, calling for what he described as “a moment of wrestling with one’s conscience.”
Carlson laid out his position in Monday’s episode of The Tucker Carlson Show during a conversation with Brother Buckley, a former Trump speechwriter. The two discussed how “new money” is displacing traditional conservative values inside a Republican Party that has fallen fully under the president’s control.
“You know, this is going to torment us for a long time—me, certainly,” Tucker Carlson said. “And I want to say: I am sorry that I misled people. It was not intentional, and I have nothing further to add.”
As far back as 1999, Carlson called Trump “the single most repulsive person on the planet.” Yet ahead of Trump’s first election victory in 2016, he was among the earlier commentators to insist that Trump should be taken seriously. When Trump ran for a second presidential term in 2024, Carlson backed him throughout the campaign and appeared at one of his rallies just five days before Election Day.
Now the podcaster has found himself in conflict with the president over American support for Israel and the war that the United States and Israel launched against Iran in late February. Carlson described Trump’s rhetoric toward Iran as “disgusting on every level” and took personal responsibility for helping return the president to power.
“You, me, and everyone else who supported him—you wrote his speeches, I campaigned for him—we are absolutely implicated in this,” he told Brother Buckley. “It is not enough to simply say, ‘Well, I changed my mind,’ or ‘This is bad—I’m out.’”
He added: “In a small but very real sense, you, me, and millions of people like us are the reason this is happening now.”
Carlson’s reassessment came shortly after Trump lashed out at him and a number of other right-wing media figures who, until recently, had remained central pillars of his Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement—including Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, and Alex Jones. In a recent social-media post, the president called Carlson “a low-IQ individual—always easy to hit, extremely overrated!!!” and threatened to publish a “list of the good, the bad, and those somewhere in between” within the MAGA camp.
This latest statement builds on Carlson’s earlier remarks. In early April, he told Newsmax: “I have always liked Trump, and I still feel sorry for him—as I feel sorry for all slaves. He is boxed in by other forces. He cannot make his own decisions. It is painful to watch.”
Later, on his podcast, he wondered aloud whether Trump might be “the Antichrist”—after the president launched verbal attacks on Pope Leo XIV, an American-born critic of the war with Iran, and also posted an AI-generated image on social media depicting himself in the likeness of Jesus Christ.
“He is mocking Jesus. He is mocking Christianity. The central figure of the religion is being turned into an object of ridicule,” said the host of The Tucker Carlson Show. “Could he be the Antichrist? Well, who knows. At the very least, that is my conclusion. Who knows?”
In his new comments, Carlson returned to his criticism of the war with Iran, saying that Trump “obviously had no plan [on this], he was not eager [to go to war], he fully understood the risks, fully understood that this was a betrayal of the explicit promises he had been making for ten years—and yet he did it, he did it against his own will.”
This latest swipe at Trump came three years after Carlson was fired from Fox News, where he had worked for 14 years. His dismissal followed the network’s $787.5 million settlement with voting-machine manufacturer Dominion. The company had sued Fox News over false claims aired on the network alleging that Dominion had participated in a conspiracy to steal the 2020 presidential election, which was won by Joe Biden, who interrupted Trump’s first term.
Soon after leaving Fox, Carlson launched his own media company. In October, his podcast again became the center of controversy when Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist with antisemitic views, appeared as a guest.
Even earlier, Carlson had already become notorious for a string of other contentious episodes—from promoting testicle tanning on Fox to lavish praise for the quality of a Russian supermarket he visited in 2024, two years after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.