Das ist ein riesiges Interview mit Tucker Carlsson, der versucht hat Trump vom Iran Krieg abzubringen. Ich muss das irgendwo aufbewahren und hier ist der sicherste Platz. Leider werden die Fragen des Journalisten nicht mehr durch Fettdruck hervorgehoben, wie das im Original in der New York Times gewesen ist,also ein bisschen raten ist nötig.
By Lulu Garcia-Navarro
May 2, 2026
Updated 7:19 a.m. ET
Tucker Carlson has been at the center of our political conversation and conservative media for a decade now. Few media figures are more closely identified with the Trump era. His hugely popular Fox News show started just after the 2016 election, and despite being fired by that network in 2023, Carlson has remained a Trumpworld fixture, launching his own network, boosting Donald Trump on his podcast and at campaign rallies, sitting in Trump’s box during the Republican National Convention and attending his inauguration.
Then, in February, President Trump made the call to attack Iran alongside Israel, a decision that Carlson is completely opposed to. He now says he regrets supporting Trump and has become a vocal and influential critic of the administration on his show. He also blames Israel for making Trump a “slave” by, as he characterizes it, pushing the president into war. Because of this focus on Israel, and his high-profile interview of the white nationalist influencer Nick Fuentes, critics have accused him of antisemitism.
To understand this break with the president and more, I traveled to Maine to sit down with Carlson, and then we spoke again remotely a few days later. We had a wide-ranging conversation about his views on the war, his Fuentes episode, his friendship with Vice President JD Vance and, more surreally, whether he thinks Trump is the Antichrist — something he’s been musing about on his show.
Hanging over our whole two-part discussion was one central question: Will Carlson’s anti-Trump conversion last — and portend a wider cracking of the MAGA movement
I want to get your perspective on this moment, on your evolution, your worldview. You recently made quite a dramatic break with President Trump over the war in Iran, and I’d love to hear about that. I want to start, though, in the lead-up to the conflict. You said that you spoke to the president several times about the plan to attack Iran before it actually happened on Feb. 28. Was it just you and the president in those meetings? Can you give me a sense of what was going on there? Well, I’ve been speaking to him about Iran for 10 years. Literally since 2016, maybe ’15, because there was enormous pressure on him, as there has been on many presidents, to regime-change Iran. We know, based on our experience with a much smaller country, Iraq, that that’s a tall order, it doesn’t necessarily lead to a place you want to go, and it’s not good for the United States. Trump knew that. And that was the main reason that I supported him during my time at Fox News and campaigned for him. It was really central to my views of Trump’s candidacy and presidency.
So when it became clear in June that we were starting down this road toward a regime change with Iran, I was baffled. I was very upset. Not because I have allegiance to Iran, but because I thought it would be terrible for the United States, as it has been, worse even than I imagined. But I could see exactly where this was going. And he was under enormous pressure to do this, as all presidents in my lifetime have been. So we talked a lot in June. He embarked on this effort to take out Iran’s nuclear program, which is really just the opening salvo in a regime-change effort. He knew that. I told him that. Charlie Kirk told him that. We did it, we got out, and then it became clear in January that we were moving toward this thing that we’re in now, and I was absolutely panicked about it.
Did he explain to you why he wanted to take the country into war? I’m just trying to understand the dynamics of that conversation. There were multiple conversations. I flew to Washington three times in the weeks before and met with him in the Oval Office alone with people filing in and out — the White House chief of staff, the secretary of state, etc. I had lunch with him on one of those occasions. And then I spoke to him by phone many times on this topic. And he would begin almost every conversation with, Do you want Iran to have a nuclear weapon? To which I said: Well, I’m sort of opposed to nuclear weapons. I don’t want nuclear weapons, I don’t want Israel to have a nuclear weapon, I don’t want anyone to have a nuclear weapon. It doesn’t seem like a good thing. But that’s not the question. The question is: What do you do about it? And that was the end of the rationale for doing this. He never seemed enthusiastic about it, ever.
I would say: Here are the potential effects of this, the geography of Iran being the most important fact of Iran. Iran is not a military power, it’s an economic power. That was obvious, because it controls the greatest span of coastline along the Persian Gulf, which is the source of a fifth of the world’s energy, all well known now, and well known to him then. I think he perfectly understood the consequences.
Why was he taking your calls then, if he knew your position and he understood the perils? Was he trying to convince you to back the war? No. He made no effort to convince me at all other than to say: It’s going to be all right. Everything’s going to be OK. And I just didn’t feel that way. None of this, I should say, was about Trump or my relationship with Trump or my feelings about Trump or his hair color or anything like that. I just didn’t want the United States to go to war with Iran. And my strong feeling by the end of those conversations — the last one was probably a week before the war began — was that he felt he had no choice and that he was resigned to it. He was unhappy about it. He didn’t seem enthusiastic at all. There was no effort to say, once we do this, the United States will be at peace, we’ll be safe, we will be more prosperous. There was none of that. Zero.
You speak to many people in the administration. Who was for the war, who was against it, while all this was being discussed? I’m guessing to a certain extent. I do talk to a lot of people there still, but I don’t work there, so it’s hard to really know. There are people with a long record of making bellicose noises about Iran. Specifically, the secretary of state slash national security adviser has said, for many, many years, Iran is the greatest threat we face, which is a ludicrous statement.
You’re talking about Marco Rubio. Correct. But that said, I didn’t hear a single time from anyone, including from the secretary of state himself, who I spoke to about this, any enthusiasm for doing this. My strong impression, and I could be wrong because I don’t work there, is that no one in the building was pushing for this, at least overtly. That all the pressure was coming from outside — constant calls from donors and people with influence over the president. Rupert Murdoch, Miriam Adelson, etc., and then a small constellation of, I guess they’d be called influencers, beginning with Mark Levin, but there were others, Sean Hannity, pushing the president to do this and telling him that you will be a figure out of history, you will save and redeem Israel or something. I think that was the case they were making. [Hannity and Levin deny this claim. Murdoch and Adelson did not respond to our request for comment.] I didn’t hear of anybody making the case that this would be good for the United States. I don’t think that was ever a conversation.
There’s been a lot of speculation about the president’s mind-set during this period. Part of it is about what happened after Venezuela and the successful, in their view, operation there, removing Maduro from office, and that he felt emboldened by that and felt that this was going to be similar. That he underestimated the Iranians and what they might do in response to an attack. I don’t believe that. I think the Venezuela operation allowed him to retreat into a kind of fantasy in which he told himself this is going to be easy. But I don’t think he believed that. And I should say, having spoken to him a lot in this calendar year, I detected no evidence at all of dementia, mental decline. You hear people say he’s gone soft. That was not my impression at all. Trump is not well informed on a lot of topics, is proudly ignorant on a lot of topics, but he has remarkable powers of insight into people and power dynamics. You don’t get to be president by accident. The guy’s smart in the ways that matter politically. And my strong read was that he was doing this against his will.
You know, famously, the head of the counterterrorism center, one of the top intel officials in the country, Joe Kent, resigned shortly after the war began and said exactly the same thing: I think this decision is connected to a series of seemingly disconnected events, all of which revolve around violence, and we need to find out more about how this happened. And he was dismissed and threatened with an F.B.I. investigation. And no one followed up on that. And again, I don’t know the answer. But this was not a normal decision-making process. And my strong impression was that Trump was more a hostage than a sovereign decision-maker in this.
ImageTucker Carlson, Byron Donalds, Donald Trump and JD Vance standing in a row, above a sign that reads “Make America Great Again.” Carlson is clapping and smiling at Trump, who is giving two thumbs up toward the crowd.
Tucker Carlson with Byron Donalds, Donald Trump and JD Vance at the Republican National Convention in 2024.Credit…Leon Neal/Getty Images
Tell me what you’re getting at when you say the president of the United States, the most powerful country in the world, had no choice. I don’t know what I’m getting at. I’m just telling you what I observed. That’s the question. What I’m fascinated by is the lack of curiosity on display into how exactly this happened. What are the mechanisms by which a guy who’s supposedly sovereign, in charge, granted this authority by voters, tens of millions of them, can’t make a decision in the country’s interest or even in his own interest? He knew, and I know he knew because I talked to him about it directly, the potential consequences were profound and profoundly bad — the end of his presidency, to start, which I think it has proven to be. He knew that. This is my read and I could be completely wrong — I don’t know what’s in his head and I don’t want to overstate my knowledge at all. But this is my strong perception on the basis of many conversations on this topic.
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He felt he had no choice and he said to me, Everything’s going to be OK. Because I was getting overwrought. Don’t do this. The people pushing you to do this hate you. They’re your enemies. This will destroy you. This will gravely harm our country. We’ve got kids. I’m hoping for grandkids. Let’s not go there. And he said, It’s going to be all right, and he said, Do you know how I know that? And I said no, and he said, Because it always is. There’s a kind of Teddy Rooseveltian optimism there, but that’s not really what it was. This is my read. That was more a justification from a man who feels he has no choice. That is my strong view. And not just my strong view, the view of others who are around him and involved in this deliberation to the extent it was a deliberation, which is not much.
Who were the other people around him who had that view? I can’t speak for the views of others, but I will just say once again that I never saw, nor did I hear about anybody who works for the Trump administration, who was enthusiastically pushing this war on Trump, being like: “You want to make this country great again? We need a regime-change effort in Iran.” Instead there were a lot of cowardly people, as there always are, and Trump engenders cowardice in the people around him through intimidation. And there is a kind of quality that he has that’s spellbinding. And I think it probably literally is a spell. And the effect is to weaken people around him and make them more compliant and more confused. And I’ve experienced this myself. You spend a day with Trump and you’re in this kind of dreamland. It’s like smoking hash or something. It’s interesting, very interesting. And there may be a supernatural component to it. I’m not a theologian, but it’s real, and anyone who’s been around him can tell you it’s true. But whatever the cause, no one around him was weighing in strongly, as far as I know, on either side, for or against. But people from the outside were strongly weighing in, calling him constantly.
I’m going to give an alternative view on what may have happened —— And you may be right, by the way, because I don’t want to overstate what I know.
We’ve seen the president in his second term be much more interested in foreign policy, as many presidents are, much more open to taking action, not only in Venezuela, but talking about Cuba, wanting the Nobel Peace Prize, wading into situations he wasn’t terribly interested in, in his first term. For sure. That’s real.
Could that not be part of this? It’s a huge part of it. There’s no question about that, and all presidents decide at some point that they’re not interested in running the United States because it’s hard, and how do you fix Baltimore and Gary, Ind.? And what do you do about homelessness in Los Angeles? These are hard questions. We can’t even make Head Start work, despite many billions and a lot of well-meaning people spending their lives on it. So these are hard problems and I think it’s a universal experience among American presidents, but also among U.S. senators, to decide: I’d rather run the world, because the details are opaque. I don’t speak these languages.
First of all, it’s a display of male power: Send the bombs in to kill the bad people. But moreover you get to feel like I did something, and that’s important and I get it. And this is, as you wisely note, a process that all presidents tend to go through. And so Venezuela, Cuba, I object to both of those efforts very strongly, but neither one, in my view, risks the future of the United States in the way that the Iran war now does. So it’s a big deal. But because it is, by the way, a contiguous neighbor of Iraq, and because Trump spent years talking about what a terrible idea the Iraq invasion was — defined his candidacy in 2016 on that point — it’s hard for me to believe that he just organically reached this place at the end of February, like, Oh, I think it’s a good idea. He did not think it was a good idea. Shutting down a fifth of the world’s oil and gas? Of all people, Trump knows that’s bad.
You said he’s a hostage just now. You told the BBC he’s a “slave” to foreign interests. Correct.
I just want you to be explicit. Trump is being held hostage by whom? By Benjamin Netanyahu and by his many advocates in the United States. And we know that not simply because Trump started the war on Feb. 28, but because he couldn’t get out of it. He declares we’re having a cease-fire. He says, We’re having a cease-fire and we’re having these talks and they’re going great, and we are going to open the strait. And Iran says, Yeah, one of our conditions is Israel’s got to pull back from southern Lebanon. You can’t use the Iran war as a pretext for stealing more land from a sovereign country that’s not your country. And it’s not just Iran who felt that way. I think the rest of the world is like, What are you doing? I thought we were fighting the great existential threat, Iran. And now you’re taking the opportunity to take Lebanon’s shore, the Litani River, and bombing downtown Beirut. What is this?
Anyway, this was all very well known. And within hours of Trump announcing this, Israel publicly, in a way that was designed to get the attention of everyone, including the Iranians, starts killing civilians in Lebanon. Now, what was the point of that? Not to secure the Israeli homeland. The point of it was to end any talk of a negotiated settlement, to keep this going until Iran was destroyed and chaotic, which is the Israeli goal. I’m not attacking Israel by saying that. Their goals are different from ours, they’re a different cou
They would argue that what they are doing is neutralizing the threat that has been persistent in Lebanon through Hezbollah. OK, but they invaded Lebanon in 1982. That was 44 years ago. They’ve had a lot of time to fix Lebanon. They killed Nasrallah, they blew up Hezbollah with explosive pagers. They’ve done a lot since Oct. 7 in Lebanon. They chose that moment to derail the negotiations. And they’ve done this repeatedly.
And so my perspective as an American is we’re the United States, we are a country of 350 million people. You are wholly dependent on us. You’re a country of nine million people with no natural resources. I’m not against you, but we’re not coequals here. But the point I’m making is Trump could not restrain Netanyahu. Netanyahu is the one person to whom Trump couldn’t say, “Hey, settle down or we’ll just defund you and your country will collapse in about 10 minutes,” which is true. Israel can’t defend itself without the United States, despite whatever propaganda you may have heard.
So again, it’s not an attack on Israel. It’s an attack on American leadership for not constraining its partner in a way that helps the United States. Trump said, I want a negotiated settlement. Israel stopped the settlement. Trump refused to even criticize Netanyahu in public. Are you joking? That’s slavery. That is total control of one man by another. And that’s between Trump and Bibi and God, as far as I’m concerned. But as an American, that is our elected president, whose job is to protect our country and our interest and our economy. And he is looking out for Israel first. That’s outrageous. And no amount of “Oh, you’re an antisemite” — which I’m not, and I’m never going to be — is going to stop me from noting that that’s outrageous. It is outrageous