Weekend Listen: Tucker Carlson on How Trump Failed America

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

**Tucker Carlson** (0:10)
I've defended Republicans for 35 years in public, and then we wound up in a war with Iran that has gravely hurt the United States. Trump has been disloyal, totally disloyal to the United States. He cheated on the United States with a foreign power.

**Mishal Husain** (0:23)
Tucker Carlson, on breaking with the leader, he helped reelect. At the point that we're talking right now, President Trump, without Benjamin Netanyahu by his side, has said the ceasefire is over, and the United States in the last 24 hours has hit more than 80 Iranian targets.

**Tucker Carlson** (0:41)
Right.

**Mishal Husain** (0:41)
Isn't the more honest and direct thing to do hold him fully accountable for his actions?

**Tucker Carlson** (0:47)
It's his fault, he's the US president, and a huge part of the job is resisting pressure from outside forces. And he didn't, so he's weak.

**Mishal Husain** (0:56)
From Bloomberg Weekend, this is The Mishal Husain Show. I'm Mishal Husain.
What was envisaged as a short but overwhelming war against Iran by the United States and Israel has turned out five months on rather differently. Ceasefires have proved fragile. Iran's power over the Strait of Hormuz is still apparent. And the war may yet have a significant political fallout in the United States. A president who promised no more wars has in fact repeatedly used force in his second term. But it is the Iran War that has sparked a spectacular fallout between Donald Trump and one of his most prominent allies, the former Fox News host and conservative commentator Tucker Carlson. He worked hard to get Donald Trump re-elected. He was dismayed when the first strikes against Iran took place last year. Then came the start of this war in February. And at that point, the Carlson-Trump relationship imploded. Since then, in episode after episode of the Tucker Carlson show, he has gone after what he's portrayed as a betrayal of America first. And he's gained a larger audience along the way. Episodes now get tens of millions of views across social media and podcast platforms each time. And Tucker Carlson has more than 17 million followers on X. He has long been a polarizing figure, disliked on the left from his bowtie-wearing Fox News days. Now, though, he has lost friends and allies. That's partly because of his rift with the Republican Party, but also because of the way that he talks about Israel, amplifying narratives and stereotypes, his critics say, that cross the line into anti-Semitism. Our conversation was recorded between London and Maine, where Tucker Carlson lives. And we do go into some tough territory. There are a number of responses and some extra information that you'll hear at the end.
In fact, for this episode in particular, please do read my notes, which you'll find at bloomberg.com/mishal.
That's where you'll get a sense of why a question was asked in a certain way. What might have been left out of an answer, how I prepared and indeed what I read afterwards, the places where I've added context.
So that's the background. And here's how my conversation with Tucker Carlson began.
Thank you for talking to us.

**Tucker Carlson** (3:51)
Oh, of course.

**Mishal Husain** (3:53)
You know, I was thinking about your home in Maine, because I was reading the last bit of this book where you write quite emotionally about tidying up the house at the end of the summer. And I was thinking that you don't have to do that anymore, right? Because you live there all year round now.

**Tucker Carlson** (4:07)
That's true. That's true. I'm grateful.

**Mishal Husain** (4:10)
Yeah.
Tucker, you know, in this conversation, we are going to range far and wide, how you see the US., how you see the rest of the world, especially the Middle East right now. But before we do that, I really wanted to understand your influences, because I think you're clearly in the midst of a really intense time in your life as well as in the news. Can we talk a little bit about your father, first of all?

**Tucker Carlson** (4:34)
Of course.

**Mishal Husain** (4:35)
I was reading, as I prepared for this, what you and your brother wrote about him when he died last year. And I was just struck by what an unusual life he had, and obviously curious about how that influenced you. A difficult start to life in many ways he had.

**Tucker Carlson** (4:52)
Well, it influenced us enormously.
He had the most interesting life of anyone I've known personally. He was born an orphan, grew up in an orphanage in foster care, then was adopted, never finished high school, joined the Marine Corps, went into journalism, started working for the government, traveled the world, knew everybody. He was just a fascinating, self-educated person, intensely curious, very smart, very honest, kind of swashbuckling, complicated, and just a great guy. My brother and I had the privilege of growing up alone with him when we were little. Our mother left when we were small, and my father got custody because she wasn't there. And so we grew up with him in this kind of eccentric, not kind of eccentric, extremely eccentric environment, but a happy and wholesome one. And for many years, I really never told anybody other than my wife about my childhood because it sounded so bad, but it wasn't bad. It was great. And we really sincerely enjoyed it, but it was not mainstream at all in the sense that my father never felt like he had to believe something because everyone else believed it. He came to his own conclusions. He wasn't always right, but he was very often right. And he was consistently more right than the majority of public opinion in the United States. He was just an independent thinker and very American in that way. And there's so little of that left.