Trump Becomes the Very Thing He Swore to Destroy. And It Might Cost Us Our Country.

**Tucker Carlson** (0:00)
It's an interesting and revealing experience to talk to Trump voters right now. They're having a lot of conflicting thoughts. Now, most people who voted for Donald Trump in 2024 did so not because they were more popular with their neighbors, but because they felt that Donald Trump was the last chance this country had to make fundamental changes it needed to make to avert obvious disasters looming on the horizon. And so, because people who voted for Trump did so against the considered advice of every news organization in the United States basically, and all educated, fashionable people, they kind of went out on a limb to vote for this guy. There is a natural hesitance to concede that things aren't working as planned. So if you talk to them, they will almost all concede, that a regime change war with Iran was kind of not part of the plan. Very few people voted for Trump, hoping that, you know, the Iran nuclear program that didn't actually exist in any meaningful way would be the central focus of the administration, like that nobody thought that, who voted for Trump two years ago. And some of them will tell you, no, it's actually very important that we ended that, or continue to fight Iran for whatever reason. Those of the Fox News viewers are almost all over 70 But for most Trump voters, it's an obvious betrayal. Like obviously, of course we didn't want that. Of course you promised you wouldn't do it, you did it.
So, they'll tell you that. But that's not the same as regretting their vote for Trump. Because most people who voted for Trump, I should say, are some of the best people in the country, whatever you think of Trump. It's sort of this weird situation where the best people in the country elected one of the worst people in the country, or another way to put it, the people who care most about the United States, who are the most vested in the system, who believe most fervently in, say, the Constitution, somehow elected a guy who doesn't care at all about any of that. So how did that happen? Well, only historians probably will unravel that mystery. But in the meantime, most people who voted for Trump that we've talked to anyway, are not at the point where they're rejecting Trump. They don't want to reject Trump. They vested so much in the guy that it's too hard to concede that, wow, that was a mistake. And, of course, most of them wouldn't vote for Kamala Harris under any circumstances. So it's not like they had someone else to vote for.
But if you press them a little bit, they say, look, yeah, of course, this is not going as planned at all. And they'll tell you what a lot of them said in his first term from 2016 to 2020 They'll say, you know, he's a good guy, but he's surrounded somehow by bad people who don't share the same vision, who are not America first, who are in it for themselves or in it for a foreign country or whatever. They've sold Trump out, but Trump either can't get a handle on the federal bureaucracy or he just doesn't know. He doesn't know that they're doing this. If only Trump knew.
And then if you press them still more, they will say, yeah, well, look, it's not great in a lot of ways, but immigration. He sealed the border. He kept his promises on immigration. And that's not a small thing because Trump's position on immigration is the core of the Trump movement and has been since 2015 when he first emerged as a candidate. Not a credible candidate. He was still kind of a joke to a lot of people in Washington, New York and LA., but he soon became a force in the Republican Party and then pretty swiftly took over the Republican Party because of his position on immigration, really for two reasons. One, it was a lot more popular than anyone in New York, Los Angeles or Washington had any idea, just didn't know that there was a whole world out there that disagreed with him vehemently on the question of immigration, and not just illegal immigration, but immigration broadly, like who should live here? Do we have too many people here? Too few people here?
Most people feel there are too many already. It's becoming a crowded country and most Americans are not for that. Why would they be for that? And they felt this way even 10 years ago. And so Trump's position on that is the thing, the single thing that vaulted him from failed casino magnet to presidential nominee. It was immigration and his willingness, and this is the second part of the equation, to basically give the finger not simply to the establishment, but to the Republican establishment. Trump was never an orthodox Republican. That's not a knock against him. That's the whole reason that so many Republican voters supported him, because they were dissatisfied with their own party. They'd voted for these guys since Reagan, at least, since 1980