Donald Trump had nothing but nasty things to say about one of MAGA’s top pundits after the commentator dared to criticize the president’s handling of war with Iran.
“Tucker’s a low IQ person that has absolutely no idea what’s going on,” the president said in comments first reported by New York Post journalist Caitlin Doornbos. “He calls me all the time; I don’t respond to his calls.”
“I don’t deal with him,” Trump went on. “I like dealing with smart people, not fools.”
It comes after Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host and otherwise a darling of the president’s Make America Great Again movement, spoke out against an Easter Sunday tirade in which Trump appeared to threaten nuclear war against Iran while bizarrely offering up praise to the god of the Muslim faith.
“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!!” Trump posted to Truth Social on the holiest day in the Christian calendar. “Open the F---in’ Strait, you crazy b-----ds, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH!” he continued, before adding: “Praise be to Allah.”
Carlson was quick to take Trump to task over the post. “The morning of Easter is a uniquely joyful and peaceful moment,” he said. “And yet that peace yesterday was shattered,” he went on, before reading Trump’s expletive-laden post in full.
“A lot of people reading that imagined, of course, this can’t be real. Did the president of the United States really just write that?” the pundit added. “It is real. It is maybe the most real thing this president has ever done and also the most revealing on every level. It is vile on every level.”
Carlson—otherwise a steadfast supporter of Trump’s, and who has marched in lockstep with the president on everything from the Russiagate inquiry to claims of a Democratic Party “hoax” on Jan. 6—has lately turned against Trump amid the president’s ongoing war in Iran, which he has described as “absolutely disgusting and evil.”
Trump, for his part, appeared indifferent to Carlson’s remarks in a follow-up to his Easter Sunday tirade, posted on Truth Social Tuesday morning, in which he warned he would annihilate the entire country of Iran if the country’s regime did not agree to reopen a regional trade route by that evening.
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will,” Trump wrote, amid mounting anxiety over the exact scale of any attack the president may now be weighing.
Carlson had foreshadowed those anxieties, and the likely human cost of large-scale strikes against Iranian infrastructure, during his Monday podcast appearance.
“What happens when [a country] loses power? Well, people die. Babies connected to incubators die. People in hospitals die. And those are the first-level effects,” he said.
“Then people begin to starve. And then you have refugee crises,” he went on. “People leave the cities looking for food. And then yes, they move into other countries in the region, in Europe, in the United States.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment on this story.
