Donald Trump on Monday took aim at Tucker Carlson after the former Fox News host very loudly broke with the president over his stance toward Iran and its ongoing conflict with Israel.
“I don’t know what Tucker Carlson is saying. Let him go get a television network and say it so that people listen,” Trump told reporters Monday, making a not-so-subtle jab at Carlson’s firing from Fox News in 2023.
The conflict between Trump and his close ally Carlson — who Trump resorted to calling “kooky Tucker Carlson” in a Truth Social post Monday night — is emblematic of a broader divide in MAGA world over how best to handle a potential conflict with Iran.
Some Republicans in Congress have also come out explicitly against direct U.S. involvement in Israel’s conflict with Iran. Among those was Sen. Rand Paul, who wrote on X: “I urge President Trump to stay the course, keep putting America first, and to not join in any war between other countries” after Israel’s strikes against Iran.
“Israel doesn’t need US taxpayers’ money for defense if it already has enough to start offensive wars,” Rep. Thomas Massie added on X.
Trump appears to be listening — but bristled at the advice over the weekend in an interview with The Atlantic. He told the magazine that he alone determines what “America First” policy means in the context of global warfare involving close ally Israel.
“Well, considering that I’m the one that developed ‘America First,’ and considering that the term wasn’t used until I came along, I think I’m the one that decides [what it means],” he told the magazine.
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) June 16, 2025
It all started when Carlson posted Friday on X that, “The real divide isn’t between people who support Israel and people who support Iran or the Palestinians. The real divide is between those who casually encourage violence, and those who seek to prevent it — between warmongers and peacemakers.”
“Who are the warmongers? They would include anyone who’s calling Donald Trump today to demand air strikes and other direct US military involvement in a war with Iran. On that list: Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Rupert Murdoch, Ike Perlmutter and Miriam Adelson. At some point they will all have to answer for this, but you should know their names now,” the post continues.
Carlson’s Friday edition of his newsletter, Morning Note, also opened with the header, “This Could Be the Final Newsletter Before All-Out War.”
“While the American military may not have physically perpetrated the assault, years of funding and sending weapons to Israel, which Donald Trump just bragged about on Truth Social, undeniably place the U.S. at the center of last night’s events,” the newsletter states.
Carlson also wrote that Trump was “complicit in the act of war.”
“It’s worth taking a step back and wondering how any of this helps the United States,” the newsletter reads. “We can’t think of a single way.”
Carlson stood his ground Monday, telling Steve Bannon on “War Room” that “if you think that saying, ‘Hey, let’s focus on my country, where I was born, where my family’s been for hundreds of years, that was the promise of the last election, please do it’ — if you think that’s hate, you know, you’ve really lost perspective, I guess, is what I would say.”
It’s a marked change in tone for the pair. Trump has lavished praise on Carlson before, including for his journalism. Trump congratulated him “on one of the biggest ‘scoops’ as a reporter in U.S. history” after House Speaker Kevin McCarthy handed Carlson more than 40,000 hours of surveillance footage from the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection. Trump even chose Vice President JD Vance after lobbying from Carlson, according to the Associated Press.
And even after Carlson was let go from Fox News, he was the first one to greet Trump after his dramatic entrance into the Republican National Convention last summer.
During a primetime speech, Carlson credited the president for promoting unity after almost being assassinated at a rally earlier that summer—and even suggested that it was divine intervention that spared Trump.
“He turned down the most obvious opportunity in politics to inflame the nation after being shot,” Carlson said. “In the moment, he did his best to bring the country together.”
“People who don’t believe in God are starting to wonder — maybe there is something to this.”
—
Nuha Dolby is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.