Tucker Carlson has begged for forgiveness for helping put Donald Trump back in the White House.
The former Fox News host, 56, has emerged as one of the most prominent MAGA voices to turn on the 79-year-old president—who has responded with a string of furious Truth Social broadsides. They have included branding his former ally a “broken man” and a “low IQ person,” and saying he was one of a number of his critics who were “Flailing Fools.”
During a groveling mea culpa on his podcast The Tucker Carlson Show on Monday, with his younger brother Buckley—a former Trump speechwriter known to the family as “Uncle Buck”—Carlson said: “I do think it’s like a moment to wrestle with our own consciences.
“You know, 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, that’s all I’ll say.”
The podcaster accepted personal blame for Trump’s return to power, telling his brother: “You and I and everyone else who supported him—you wrote speeches for him, I campaigned for him—I mean, we’re implicated in this for sure.”
He added, “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.”
Carlson admitted there had been warning signs about Trump’s character that he and others chose to overlook, asking: “Was this always the plan? You don’t want to be a conspiracy nut, but clearly, there were signs of low character. We knew that.”
His brother went even further, raising the prospect of the 25th Amendment—the constitutional mechanism for removing an unfit president—saying it was “not crazy to talk about it in this context.”
Amid the escalating feud, Carlson’s son, also called Buckley, last weekend quit his role as deputy press secretary to Vice President JD Vance.
But Carlson’s newfound anguish is unlikely to wash with those familiar with the cache of private text messages exposed in 2023 through the $1.6 billion defamation suit filed by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News.
They revealed he had been savaging Trump behind the scenes for years while publicly championing the then-president to his millions of primetime viewers.
In a now-notorious exchange from Jan. 4, 2021—just two days before the Jan. 6 Capitol attack—Carlson wrote of Trump: “I hate him passionately.”
In the same thread he wrote off the entire first Trump term as a “disaster,” and in a separate exhibit released through the case he was shown to have privately described the then-president as a “demonic” force.
Carlson’s on-air criticism of Trump stretches back months, most notably over the president’s bombing of Iran under Operation Epic Fury, which the podcaster has slammed as being carried out solely at Israel’s behest.
When approached for comment, White House spokesperson Davis Ingle replied with a link to Trump’s Apr. 9 Truth Social post about Carlson, which the Beast reported on at the time.
