Former Fox News host and former Trump defender Tucker Carlson feels remorse for the role he and others played in publicly promoting Donald Trump as a candidate and as president.
“In very small ways, but in real ways, you and I and millions of people like us are the reason this is happening right now,” Carlson said Monday on his podcast, “The Tucker Carlson Show.” He was chatting with Buckley Carlson, his brother and former Trump speechwriter, about the erosion of conservative values within the Republican Party under Trump.
“I think it's a time to wrestle with our own consciences,” Carlson said. “You know, we're going to be haunted by this for a long time. I will be, and I want to say I'm sorry for misleading people. It wasn't intentional, and that's all I'll say.”
After nearly 10 years of complaining nightly about Trump's greatness, Carlson chooses now to shorten the conversation?
There's a lot more to say, but this time it's Carlson's too-little, too-late mea culpa. His claim that he did not intentionally mislead the public is itself misleading. While Carlson promoted Trump and the Big Lie ad nauseam on his prime-time Fox News show, “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” he privately disparaged the president and debunked Trump's claims that the 2020 election was stolen.
His off-camera thoughts were revealed when internal communications among Fox staff became public in 2023 due to Dominion Voting Systems' defamation lawsuit against Fox News for knowingly broadcasting false claims that its machines rigged the 2020 election. Text messages and emails from Carlson and other high-profile hosts suggested they knew Trump's voter fraud claims were baseless but still pushed the “rigged” narrative on air.
In one such example, Carlson texted that Trump needed to concede and agreed that “there was not enough fraud to change the outcome” of the election, according to the document. However, three nights later, he went on air stating that there were “legitimate concerns” about the integrity of the election. There were several more communications from Carlson in which he expressed doubt about Trump's claims. But in the public eye, he continued to attack the election results and the legitimacy of Biden's victory.
The Fox News host also privately disparaged Trump's first presidency as a “disaster,” then turned around and stumped for Trump in 2024, praising him as a “national leader” at the Republican National Convention and campaigning with him in Arizona just days before the election.
If that's not intentionally misleading the public, then what is?
Perhaps Carlson should have listened to his initial instincts about Trump. Before gaining notoriety with her show on Fox, she posted on the website Slate about Trump in 1999, referring to him as “the most repulsive person on the planet.”
Today, the podcaster is among a growing number of right-wing influencers who have turned against their former leader. Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones want to oust Trump from office by invoking the 25th Amendment. Carrie Prejean Boller, who was a member of the Trump-appointed Religious Liberty Commission until February, simply called him an “evil psychopath.”
Carlson criticized the Trump administration's decision to go to war in Iran, calling it “absolutely disgusting and evil” in March, and later said it was the “biggest mistake” of the Trump presidency. And when Trump demanded on Truth Social that Iran “open the damn strait, you crazy bastards,” Carlson called the post “vile on every level” and “the most revealing thing the president has ever done… Who do they think they are? Are you tweeting the F-word on Easter morning?” Carlson said on his podcast.
The president responded to Carlson's criticism by telling the New York Post that his critic is “a low-IQ person” who “has absolutely no idea what's going on.”
But Carlson isn't the only American with buyer's remorse. A recent NBC poll found that Trump faces the lowest job approval rating of his second term, largely due to strong disapproval of how the president has handled inflation and the cost of living. Carlson, unlike the rest of the country, rode the MAGA wave to prosperity. His show began in 2016, just weeks after the election, and rose to prominence thanks to the fervor of Trumpism. Supporting Trump was a family business. From his brother, a Republican operative who previously wrote speeches for Trump, to his son, who until recently worked in Vice President JD Vance's press office.
Now Carlson is returning to the conversation by opposing the man he once claimed to revere.
He apologizes for endorsing a defective product, while claiming to be a victim of its seductive charms. “You and I and everyone who supported him… you wrote speeches for him, I campaigned for him. We're involved in this for sure,” Carlson told his brother on the podcast. “It's not enough to say, 'Well, I changed my mind,' or 'Oh, this is bad. I'm out.'”
It is true that that is not enough. Carlson should apologize for intentionally misleading the public.
