Tucker Carlson: 'I so overstated my power it was embarrassing'

Does Trump's loudest critic still have his finger on America's pulse?

It is a long drive to Tucker Carlson's barn in Maine, and his latest podcast on Israel's wars makes for an odd soundtrack on the rental-car stereo as I wind my way through a landscape of placid lakes and towering pines, moose crossing road signs and more than a few lobster shacks. The sun is setting when I arrive at the unremarkable building set back from the road. It feels a long way from the city of power and privilege where Carlson made his name as a journalist and then a prolific rightwing commentator. But, in the view of the American politicians and powerbrokers he so unnerves, it's not nearly far enough.

These days, the former Fox News star-turned-podcaster is best known for offending the American mainstream with his controversial views (whites are under attack, women were happier before the advent of modern feminism, Ukraine's president is a corrupt "murderer", while Vladimir Putin has shown "restraint") and conspiracy theories (the 2021 assault on the US Capitol by Trump supporters was part of a liberal plot to jail true patriots). Not to mention the apparent sympathy he has displayed during interviews with Putin, the far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and antisemitic self-described white nationalist Nick Fuentes.

But he is also known for wielding huge influence in the political era that brought us Donald Trump. During the first Trump administration, Tucker Carlson Tonight became the most-watched news show on cable television, and Carlson a favourite, if unofficial, adviser to the president. Sometimes, it seemed as though Carlson had the ability to speak ideas from his primetime pulpit directly into government policy.

Carlson's influence didn't wane with his firing from Fox in 2023. Instead, he launched The Tucker Carlson Show, recorded from his barn and streamed to millions over YouTube and other platforms. He says he actually doesn't know what he earns from the show "but it seems good" and his audience is "many multiples" of what they were during his top-rated run at Fox. In 2023, during the presidential primaries, he and Trump commandeered attention away from the only televised Republican debate, which the resurgent Trump had skipped, by posting their own interview on X.

Carlson didn't just campaign for Trump in 2024. He helped him pick his running mate, JD Vance, and other key administration officials. So confident was he in the power of his influence over the president that Trump's "betrayal", when it came, served as perhaps the rudest awakening in his life. He had believed Trump would avoid foreign entanglements, that he wasn't going to have "another neocon war".

Then, in February of this year, Trump launched his war against Iran. The spectacle of US and Israeli bombs raining down on Iran, and Trump's apparently naive vision of regime change, seemed all too reminiscent of America's previous quagmires. Carlson felt Trump had committed the ultimate breach of his pledge to the American people. Much to the chagrin of the White House, in the midst of an election year, he has turned his podcast into a megaphone for pointed criticism of the administration, devoting hours to wrestling over the question of how he got Trump so wrong. This was a guy with "a trail of bankruptcies and personal betrayals", Carlson reflected on a recent episode. He should have known better.

In the course of eight months, Carlson has become a Maga outcast -- a brave rebel, "a loser" or "the single most dangerous demagogue in this country", depending on who you listen to. The man whose show had for years functioned as a bullhorn for Republican leaders and their ideas is now being portrayed by many of those same lawmakers as an unhinged has-been, exiled to the backwoods of Maine.

Before our meeting, Carlson had given me a frank assessment of his views on Russia (he thinks there's a 50 per cent chance Putin will use a nuclear weapon in the next six months -- "believe me, I talk to the Russians a lot"), Congress ("stupid") and US defence secretary Pete Hegseth ("a tragedy"). His views never fit neatly into partisan boxes, but now when he talks about the Middle East, the tax code and poverty, his overlap with his ideological opponents can be outright confusing. Yet, despite his political evolution, his staying power in the American psyche is undeniable.

Notably, even as the tide turned against Carlson, his old friend JD Vance, the man touted as a future leader of the Republican Party, has refused to denounce him -- a choice that raises the question of whether Carlson could one day return to the fold in a Vance-led party. The midterms could prove pivotal as the GOP navigates the path to 2028. Does Carlson represent the vestiges of a Maga movement gone awry under Trump? Or the future of a revised conservative movement not yet realised?

"I think it's an open question how much is Carlson channelling a lot of people's opinions, and how much is he actually shaping people's opinions," says Alex Conant, a GOP strategist. "The party is in such a dynamic state right now." Trump will soon become "a lame duck, and we'll start to see the next generation of Republicans step up, including JD Vance, but potentially others," he says. The direction they take will be "the big question for the party over the next two to four years".

We meet six weeks ahead of the midterms. Americans are grappling with high gas prices and mounting inflation. The Republicans are polling badly. Two years after Trump's landslide comeback, the party is at risk of losing its control over both chambers of Congress -- in part because of his decision to go to war, which led to a sharp increase in energy prices.

Carlson's barn has been radically renovated from its previous life as the garage for the local town's snow ploughs. It is a warm, wood-panelled space adorned with taxidermy. Faded photos, oil paintings and political propaganda posters look down on the large wooden dining table where Carlson hosts everything from raucous holiday dinners to podcast interviews. There are old hunting rifles, antique guns and an ancient-looking spear.

Two of his staff are fixing supper behind a bar where dozens of podcast guests have scrawled their names in marker pen. There is Hunter Biden, the Harvard political scientist Stephen Walt and the CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou, as well as Jones and Fuentes. Across the room, beneath the stuffed torso of a bear leaping from the wall as if poised to attack, stands Carlson, smiling warmly.

For the past few days, he has been receiving text messages over his latest controversy: his defence of Democratic Senate candidate in Michigan Abdul El-Sayed, whom Trump has targeted for being a Muslim and a leftist. "You know the one thing I never expected in middle age was to become a professional defender of Muslims," jokes the man who spent much of the past two decades denigrating Islam as a violent religion and questioning whether Muslims could live in harmony with "western" society.

We sit down to talk at the table where Biden sat a month earlier for a somewhat surreal interview, in which the son of the former Democratic president told Carlson that he was "the most talented communicator of [his] generation".

Carlson thinks the Republicans will lose badly on November 3. A lot of people "kind of went out on a limb to vote for [Trump]" he said in one recent podcast episode titled, "Trump Becomes the Very Thing He Swore to Destroy. And It Might Cost Us Our Country". Now, if you talk to those voters, "they will almost all concede that a regime change war with Iran was kind of not part of the plan", he added.

In another recent episode, "Gas Prices Skyrocket, Trump Freaks Out & His Powerlessness Is Exposed: The True War Agenda Revealed", Carlson mused that "no matter how many arches he builds or Kennedy Centers he names after himself", Trump "will always be remembered as a failure" if fuel prices are allowed to climb much higher.

Trump is clearly irked. "Tucker's 'views' have fallen through the floor, and will only get worse. Nobody cares about him any longer in that he has become totally irrelevant, and happens to be, surprisingly, a very Low I.Q. individual," the president wrote on his Truth Social platform a couple of weeks before my visit.

But what makes Carlson so threatening to his former party is not just his fixation on Trump's unpopular war. It is that he believes Trump launched this war, in violation of his own principles and US interests, because Israel wanted him to. By explicitly tying a major US decision to pressure from Israel, Carlson has tapped into an undercurrent of antisemitism on the far right that the GOP would rather see sequestered. He has also managed to violate the greatest taboo in American foreign policy by questioning Washington's relationship with Israel, the recipient of billions of dollars annually in US military aid. This is terrain where the mainstream of the party has so far been unwilling to go. But polling suggests that it's where the larger US population is tilting.

Since the start of the Iran war, Carlson has become consumed by what he sees as Israel's outsized impact on American foreign policy. When I spoke to him by phone in August he was at the airport having just returned from Europe, where he had visited certain Arab Gulf royals on their Mediterranean yachts. "I wanted to know what was going on with the Iran war," he explained.

Unburdened by a primetime TV show, Carlson tells me he no longer feels obliged to track the daily news. He has no TV in the Maine house, and no newspaper gets delivered. His late father, a prominent conservative journalist and ambassador, always encouraged his boys to seek knowledge from books. "TV is for morons," he would say. "Who watches TV? Dumb people." He gets his updates via text messages and phone calls, corresponding with "hundreds" of people a day. Many friends, interview subjects and sources make the trek up here to see him. When it's important, he'll drive three hours to Boston and fly to see them. When it's a highly sensitive discussion, they'll leave their phones outside.

A few months ago, Carlson hosted some of his fellow Maga outcasts, including the Republican congressman Thomas Massie, the former Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and Trump's former counterterrorism director Joe Kent. All three were once Trump enthusiasts. Now they were meeting to discuss a possible new way forward in an American political system that they believe is held hostage by Israel. They think others, angered and disappointed by the party, will join them. Recent polls have shown Republican approval of both Trump and his war slipping, and a majority of young Republicans now hold an unfavourable view of Israel.

"Tucker may not be where the party is now, but Tucker is where the party is going," Massie told me. He's also "the person with the biggest microphone, who's the most independent of anybody on the right currently".

"He clearly represents a significant part of the Republican Party that is more isolationist, more anti-immigrant, anti-globalisation . . . and that's the part of the Republican Party that got Trump nominated three times," says Conant. "So I don't think anybody is going to dismiss his viewpoints."

Before meeting Carlson, I had attended the Republican Jewish Coalition's annual summit in Las Vegas, where I listened to lobbyists, congressional leaders and Israeli officials invoke Carlson's name so many times it was clear he had touched a nerve. "A year ago, before all of you, I declared Tucker Carlson was not Maga," said congressman Randy Fine, who proudly goes by the moniker the "Hebrew Hammer". "Thanks to President Trump, one year later, we have expelled him and his filth from the Republican Party," he added, garnering applause from the room.

Israel's ambassador to the US, Yechiel Leiter, told me that while Carlson may sit at the fringe of the Republican Party, "it's important to emphasise that he does have a following on social media, and he needs to be put in his place". Leiter, Fine and other backers of the Israeli government insist that Carlson isn't just a critic of Israel, he's a virulent antisemite.

It's a label that Netanyahu's backers have applied generously to Israel's critics, including to many American Jews. And Carlson dismisses it as an attempt to discredit him. "Antisemitism is evil, and it's precisely as evil as every other form of ethnic and racial bias," he tells me.

It can be hard to reconcile this man with the Carlson of some of his podcasts, when he juggles sprawling government conspiracies and dog-whistle allusions to an elite Jewish cabal. When I ask him later about an episode of his show titled "Ben Shapiro to America: Shut Up and Eat Your Goyslop" -- invoking a neo-Nazi internet term -- Carlson says that his team had opted to use the term because Shapiro himself had been throwing it around.

Carlson's viewers these days consume his shows across a host of online platforms. Carlson says his viewing numbers on YouTube alone are bigger than those his Fox show garnered, but "that's true of everyone on the internet".

His career has spanned several magazines and four television networks, and the launch of rightwing political website, The Daily Caller, with his college roommate and business partner, Neil Patel. His run through cable news was often contentious. "I was fired so many times," he says. But by the mid-00s he was a household name. While he says Fox never gave him a reason for letting him go, some speculated that his controversial defence of the January 6 Capitol rioters as victims of a liberal conspiracy contributed to his firing.

He has a knack for spotting political trends, and was one of the first major conservative commentators to grasp Trump's popular appeal back in 2015. He liked the way Trump went against the grain, saying things that were taboo to Republicans and Democrats alike. He liked that the standard bearers of both parties seemed threatened by him. Trump "would say stuff that was this combination of like intentionally provocative trolling, crazy but also kind of interesting. Like he would say, 'Why do we have Nato?' That was my favourite."

Carlson believed Trump trusted his advice, that he had accrued a certain influence with the president over the course of his first term because Carlson never asked for special perks. He didn't want to go to the White House movie theatre. He didn't want invitations to exclusive parties. What he did want, or so Carlson claims, was an "America First" conservative agenda. He wanted America to stay out of foreign wars and he "worked single-mindedly towards that goal for the entire first term, fighting all kinds of battles", he said, particularly against secretary of state Mike Pompeo, who had urged a confrontation with Iran.

Now, he concludes, "I got completely deluded . . . Like I so overstated my power that it was embarrassing. He didn't care what I thought at all. And you know, why would he actually?"

Trump's decision to go to war, the party's acquiescence and his own ostracisation make Carlson think of the closing scene in Orwell's Animal Farm, when the farm animals peer through a window only to find that their former allies, the pigs, have come to resemble the totalitarian overlords they collectively overthrew. "That's how I felt," he says. And that's how he thinks American voters feel.

He seems surprised at times by his own political evolution, particularly on the Middle East. For more than two decades following 9/11, he was better known for his generalising suspicion of the Middle East and Islam.

Muslims have "a tolerance of violence that you don't find among, say, Presbyterians or Jews", he said on Fox in 2017, a claim that he attributed to polls. One in five Muslims "think it's OK to kill you", he told his presumed non-Muslim audience. "Did I buy into the vilification [of Islam]?" he asks now. "Big time. One hundred per cent." Now, as he has deepened his scrutiny of Israel, not just as a force of influence in American politics, but as the perpetrator of violence on a massive scale against Palestinians, he says has come to view the Arab and Muslim world in a new light. "I'll always enjoy the Middle East, war or not," he texted me a few weeks after our dinner, during another trip to the region. "It's a fundamentally charming place."

I knew that Carlson hadn't had a drink for many years; he's a recovering alcoholic. Still, I thought it might be rude to show up empty-handed to dinner, so I had asked ChatGPT for ideas. "If you're trying to feed Tucker Carlson," the AI bot told me, my best bet would be "New England clams/oysters + excellent French cheese + sharp cheddar + fruit and nuts + coffee, with Fig Newtons lurking somewhere nearby". I opted for chocolate-covered pretzels and cookies from the little shop next to my motel and across from the cornfield. When I presented the sweets to Carlson, he seemed genuinely enthused. He loves this shop, he says, and he trapped several troublesome coyotes in that cornfield.

One of Carlson's great skills -- or flaws, depending on who is watching -- as an interviewer and conversationalist is that he is able to come across as empathetic to nearly everyone he speaks with. His fans say this approach elicits more thoughtful conversation. His critics say he winds up sounding like a "useful idiot" or apologist for people with horrific views.

In an episode last year, Carlson praised the far-right pundit Alex Jones for his ability to "piece together fragments of evidence to create an accurate picture of the future", after Jones claimed that the US government had paid and trained the 9/11 hijackers, and that Barack Obama had created the Covid-19 virus. Jones, who founded the conspiracy site Infowars, was ordered by a judge in 2022 to pay $1.4bn for defaming the surviving families of children slain in a mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. "In a normal world that rewarded, you know, excellence and prescience, you'd be a billionaire because of your predictive powers," remarked Carlson.

The only controversial interview that Carlson says he regrets is with Fuentes, whom he found to be simply "repulsive". He adds that Fuentes sat in the chair that I am occupying now, before bursting into one of his distinctive high-pitched laughs. He also admits to having been wrong in his support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. "Having been an advocate for the Iraq war" on a top-rated cable news show, "I think I played some small role in that disaster." But he insists he has "never once" espoused a view on air that he didn't genuinely believe at the time.

Carlson says he has no plans to run for political office. ("I don't know why anybody in Tucker's position would really ever get into an administration or into an elected office," Massie told me. "He's got far more influence than anybody inside the administration.")

He says he'll have a better sense after the midterms of what direction his vision for an alternate route, or even party, built with his fellow outcasts might take. The chances of a reconciliation with Trump seem vanishingly slim. Carlson tells me he now keeps a list on his phone of people harmed by their proximity to the president. "There is a one-to-one correlation between working for Trump and getting hurt," he says. And the vice-president is among them.

Carlson befriended Vance "long before he even entertained the possibility of going into politics", back when he was the promising young author of the New York Times bestseller Hillbilly Elegy, his memoir of growing up in rural Ohio. Now, he sees the vice-president as a victim of circumstance, a loyal deputy of the president who is tied to bad policy simply by the virtue of his job title.

It's easy to imagine a triumphant Carlson returning to Washington under a Vance presidency. But Carlson dismisses the idea and acknowledges that Vance may not be able to escape the legacy of Trump's war, when the time comes. "It's something I've thought about a lot . . . just as someone who really loves JD as a person. I feel sad about it."

There is also the question of whether Vance, should he become a viable candidate in 2028, would even want Carlson on his side as he seeks to court a majority of voters and GOP donors, who skew heavily in favour of Israel. Vance made a pilgrimage to the Republican Jewish Coalition to show his support for Israel. Vance's office did not respond to a request for comment.

It's close to midnight when I leave the barn, venturing out into the near pitch black of rural Maine, the sky awash with stars.

As I walk towards the door and back to the car, he has one more message: "You can write whatever you want about me," he tells me cheerfully. "I won't read it."

Abigail Hauslohner is the FT's US-Mideast foreign affairs correspondent