Tucker Carlson’s on-again, off-again relationship with President Donald Trump took a new turn this week when the podcaster apologized for “misleading people” about Trump and said he will be “tormented” by knowledge that he helped the president get elected.
The remarks came during a conversation with Carlson’s brother, Buckley Carlson, who previously wrote speeches for Trump and supported the president until recently.
“You wrote speeches for him. I campaigned for him. I mean, we’re implicated in this, for sure,” Tucker Carlson said, addressing his younger brother. “It’s not enough to say, ‘Well, I changed my mind,’ or, like, ‘Oh, this is bad, I’m out.’
“In very small ways, but in real ways, you and me and millions of people like us are the reason this is happening right now. So I do think it’s a moment to wrestle with our own consciences. We’ll be tormented by it for a long time. I will be, and I want to say I’m sorry for misleading people — it was not intentional.”
The remarks came on the heels of increasing tension between Tucker Carlson and the president. Carlson has been a vocal critic of America’s military action in Iran, saying that Trump betrayed his supporters because he promised he would not enter any new wars. After the president made a profane threat to Iran on Easter morning on social media, Carlson rebuked him, saying, “How dare you speak that way on Easter morning to the country? Who do you think you are?”
And in his latest podcast, he said the president has “low character,” which seems a direct response to Trump saying on social media that Carlson and other anti-war podcasters have low IQs.
The acrimony between Tucker Carlson and Trump may have spilled over into Carlson’s family in other ways. Tucker Carlson’s son, also named Buckley, has left a position as a deputy press secretary for Vice President JD Vance and plans to start a political consulting firm, Politico reported Saturday.
The change was said to be in the works for several months, although Trump critic Laura Loomer and others had been raising questions for months about Buckley Carlson’s continued employment, given his father’s recent criticism of the president.
This isn’t the first time that Carlson, once the most highly rated personality at Fox News, has spoken critically of Trump. In text messages made public when Dominion Voting Systems sued Fox for defamation, Carlson said of Trump, “I hate him passionately” and “We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait.” He was let go from the network a few months later and went on to start his own media company.
But later, he told Roseanne Barr that he had “always agreed with Trump’s policies and that he became an ”active Trump supporter" after the Mar-a-Lago raid in 2022. He gave a prime-time speech at the Republican National Convention in 2024, and Donald Trump Jr. said that week he would have been happy with either Vance or Carlson as his father’s vice president.
But by June of 2025, Carlson was criticizing Trump’s foreign policy, and Trump began calling him “kooky” in social media posts. Trump wasn’t the only person to characterize him that way; Carlson’s interviews with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Iran President Masoud Pezeshkian and other foreign leaders have raised eyebrows, and raised questions about whether Carlson was acting as a journalist or “platforming” American adversaries.
Shortly after America began military operations in Iran this year, Carlson denounced the action as “Israel’s war” and said that Trump was beholden to Benjamin Netanyahu’s “ambitions.” Those remarks and others have caused many people to say Carlson is either antisemitic, or promoting antisemitic views, accusations he vehemently denies.
Although the war has divided many in Trump’s base, including the commentariat that helped to elect him, it’s unclear how — or if — Carlson’s public feuding with Trump will affect the podcaster’s numbers over time. Carlson has more than 5 million subscribers on YouTube, although his latest conversation with his brother had fewer than 100,000 views there. It’s difficult to quantify the reach of podcasters whose audience is spread across several platforms.
Left-leaning analysts are using his remarks this week as a springboard to write about other things Carlson has said throughout the years that they found abhorrent. At the Mother Jones website, Alex Nguyen called Carlson and other anti-war podcasters “hucksters who sense a good business opportunity.”
Writing for the website of MS Now (formerly MSNBC), Lyz Lenz, who in 2018 wrote a lengthy profile of Carlson for Columbia Journalism Review, said, “Carlson is not the most reliable narrator for his own actions. But even taking his words at face value, Americans still do not owe this man forgiveness. He made his fortune stoking the fires of American hate, and now that it has burned the country down, he can’t say sorry as we poke the smoking ash with a stick.”
And, not surprisingly, some steadfast supporters of the president piled on, including Scott Jennings, who wondered on CNN if Carlson is “misleading” people again with his apology.
“I mean, is he now claiming he had no idea that Donald Trump held the position that he would never permit Iran to have nuclear weapons? If that’s what he’s saying today, he’s kind of a moron. I mean, I don’t know how else to put it, or he’s willfully misleading people,” Jennings said.