Tucker Carlson Broke with Donald Trump. He’s Still Terrible 

Eighteen months ago, at a campaign rally for Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson gleefully portrayed the Republican nominee as a “dad” poised to tell America, “you’ve been a bad girl,” who is going to get a “vigorous spanking.”  

Last week on his podcast, he said he will be forever “tormented” by the part he played in helping Trump regain the presidency, adding, “I’m sorry for misleading people.” 

Carlson—the shapeshifting conservative commentator now pontificating to 17.5 million X followers—generated much mainstream media coverage with his public break with Trump. But the coverage often stopped at the apology, suggesting that his days of misleading people were over. But in Carlson’s podcast conversation with his brother Buckley, a former Trump speechwriter, what he said after the apology shows he is as creepy and manipulative and misleading as ever.  

“Was this always the plan?” Tucker asked Buckley, sounding exactly like the cutting impression of him by Saturday Night Live’s Jeremy Culhane. Before getting an answer, Tucker acknowledged, “You don’t want to be a conspiracy nut.” But then the brothers proceed to sketch out a bizarre web of conspiracies. 

Buckley confusingly pointed to the two failed assassination attempts of Trump during the 2024 campaign: “You could get really deep about it and say, ‘What was Butler [Pennsylvania]?’ Like, how was it that he—And Ryan Routh [who was recently sentenced to life in prison]. I mean, he was subject to two legitimate assassination attempts. Have we ever gotten to the bottom?” 

Tucker answered with the great certainty of a conspiracy nut: “I don’t know the answer, but I know that those investigations have been stymied. Fact.” Buckley concurred, “Stymied from the very top from people who actually would have the power to get to the bottom of it.” “And the motive,” chimed in Tucker, implicitly acknowledging Trump would have no reason to block an investigation into his own attempted murder, without explanation why they are suggesting he did.  

From there, Buckley wove in another conspiracy thread, highlighting “the enormous amount of money [Trump] got from Miriam Adelson,” the Israel-born scientist-turned-multibillionaire-casino-and-media-mogul after her marriage to the late Sheldon Adelson. While she resides in Las Vegas, she holds dual citizenship and reportedly spends more time in Israel, where she owns the country’s largest newspaper. “Why would someone who has obvious and demonstrated allegiance to a foreign power give Donald Trump $250 million while he’s running for president [actually, it was $100 million to Adelson’s pro-Trump political action committee]? I mean, how is that defensible? It’s really not. … Like, what did they get in return for that amount of investment? And it’s clear.”  

No, it’s not clear. The day before this podcast, Adelson’s Israel Hayom newspaper ran a column criticizing both Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, concluding that “after 925 days of fighting since October 7, Israel has failed to achieve a decisive result on any front,” with Hamas and Hezbollah still kicking and Iran potentially “stronger than before.” The columnist, Yoav Limor, chided Trump for being “tired of wars” and “looking for a quick and elegant exit before being dragged back into them,” while Netanyahu “failed” to resist when Trump demanded a ceasefire with Lebanon. Limor deemed Netanyahu’s acquiescence “a public humiliation and a severe blow to Israeli power and deterrence.” 

Moreover, we have no evidence that Trump attacked Iran in the first place because of Adelson’s money or any direct lobbying. The basic logic of the insinuation is inherently flawed. Trump is never going to be on the ballot again and doesn’t need any more campaign contributions. He doesn’t have to make her, or anyone else who has supported him, happy.  

Tucker somewhat recognized the reality of Trump’s penchant for throwing his own backers under the bus, but argued that the president makes exceptions. “Given his behavior and his demonstrated disloyalty and viciousness to previous supporters, why wouldn’t he display the same lack of loyalty to Miriam Adelson?” Tucker rhetorically asked. Then he answered, “The only people he’s been loyal to are the neocons and his donors.” 

This is wrong. While Trump is involved in all sorts of unethical pay-to-play activities with donors, his signature tariff and immigration policies have disrupted the global economy and labor markets, which squeeze many of his corporate-class backers. In September, the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute gathered Fortune 500 CEOs to discuss the state of the economy. Two-thirds of business leaders said Trump tariffs hurt their businesses, and more than 75 percent criticized Trump for trying to strong-arm the Federal Reserve into changing its interest rate policies.  

And the neocons, as indicated by the Limor column, are increasingly unhappy that Trump has pulled back from further military action against Iran and Lebanon.  

You may have been sensing an anti-Semitic undercurrent to the Carlsons’ exchange up to this point. By the end of it, Tucker removes any doubt.   

After alluding to Trump’s sarcastic praise of Allah when threatening on Easter to destroy Iran’s civilization and Trump’s blasphemous portrayals of himself as Jesus Christ, Tucker concludes, “the one person he’s never going to attack is Rabbi Schneerson,” referring to the late Hasidic leader considered by his followers to be a messiah. “He’d die first. So, you tell me what that is.” 

But Trump has attacked prominent Jews when he feels crossed by them. He lashed out at Netanyahu at a campaign rally in 2023, telling a provably false tale that the Israeli leader bailed on a planned joint operation to assassinate Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps General Qasem Soleimani. What got Trump so mad? During his first term, Trump was angry with Netanyahu for trying to annex Palestinian territory aggressively, but it was Netanyahu’s acceptance of the 2020 election results that enraged him most.  

Trump has also repeatedly attacked Democratic Jews as “disloyal” to Israel, and routinely refers to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer as a “Palestinian.”  

The preponderance of evidence suggests Trump will attack anybody who threatens his agenda or mocks his words, from the highest religious leaders to the lowliest podcasters. He lashed out at the Pope for opposing the Iran war. If any Jewish leaders criticize his handling of the war, either from the left or the right, expect the same treatment.  

Tucker’s assertion that Trump favors Jewish leaders over Christian and Islamic leaders, while ignoring the times Trump did attack Jewish leaders, leads me to conclude that Tucker is either anti-Semitic or, at a minimum, comfortable feeding anti-Semitic fears of Jewish domination of the world for social media eyeballs. 

And remember, the whole exchange begins with the two brothers suggesting there’s something suspicious about the Trump assassination attempts before stressing Trump’s relationships with Jewish leaders and claiming Trump is giving them unbreakable loyalty.  

And don’t forget that when Joe Kent resigned from the Trump administration over the Iran war, he ran to Tucker Carlson’s show to baselessly suggest that Israel was behind the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. 

To close out their conversation, the two Carlsons suggest dark forces have been purposefully trying to destroy America from within for decades: 

BUCKLEY: The prospect of more Americans dying in a country they can’t find on a map and fighting a fight that they can’t articulate, don’t understand, and don’t want.  

TUCKER: You got to wonder if that’s accidental. I mean, if you wanted to destroy the country, this is exactly what you’d do.  

BUCKLEY: Well, the entire program for the latter half of my life has seemed designed to weaken this country, to divide people, to make them less happy and more enslaved. 

TUCKER: It does seem that way. I don’t know that there was a meeting at Bilderberg or Bohemian Grove or whatever.  

BUCKLEY: It’s so precise and so overwhelming and so universal on every front that it could not have been accidental. 

Just when your head is about to explode at seeing Tucker Carlson, who spent seven years at Fox News blasting racially divisive rhetoric and abetted the same from Trump, fretting about a decades-long conspiracy to weaken and divide America, he revisits the mass protests following the murder of George Floyd to claim they were about “more than simply about the death of some guy” but an agenda “to get rid of all the white cops” and “destroy. That’s the point of evil.” To destroy what exactly is not explained yet, Buckley reiterates, “It can’t be a confluence of random events. It is clearly by design. It’s clearly been a long-term plan. That’s just obvious.” 

Then, to end the show, the two men, deeply concerned about dividing people, lament that Trump has not done enough to deport immigrants. 

So we’re supposed to believe there’s a grand conspiracy going back decades connecting two failed assassination attempts of Trump, a war with Iran, anti-police brutality protests, insufficient mass deportation, a multibillionaire Israel-born donor, and the Hasidic messiah. Trying to connect the dots would break your brain, and they don’t try; they just leave the suspicions hanging in the air. That’s what “conspiracy nuts” do. 

Watching MAGA leaders splinter over Trump’s abandonment of “America First” isolationism is great schadenfreude. Political reporters should cover it because it could have electoral implications. However, that coverage or related punditry should include reporting on the anti-Semitic conspiracy theorizing in far-right fever swamps, and not intimate that those breaking with Trump do so out of enlightened principles.