Tucker Carlson had some concerns. So he called President Donald Trump.
The right-wing podcaster and provocateur wanted to understand why the U.S. was attacking alleged drug smuggling boats off the coast of Venezuela and he warned against pursuing regime change there — a prospect that has alarmed the more isolationist “America First” Republicans in Trump’s movement.
The conversations last weekend, which Carlson recalled in an interview, show how the Fox News castoff is at the center of some of the most heated disputes in MAGA — over foreign policy, antisemitism and conspiracy theories, among other topics heightening tensions in the movement. As the right wrestles with what it should stand for and against in the coming years, Carlson is a divisive and influential figure with an audience — on social media, among MAGA commentators and inside the White House.
Trump doesn’t always heed Carlson’s opinions. The administration ratcheted up pressure on Venezuela in recent days, even as Carlson urged against it. But as a growing number of MAGA activists clash with Trump and each other, clouding the future of the movement, Carlson has become a more central figure this year, viewed as consequential by detractors and supporters alike.
“I’ve never talked to him more,” Carlson said of his relationship with Trump.
Carlson is trying to push the party away from foreign intervention and divorce it from Israel, which he argues exerts burdensome pressure on U.S. foreign policy, drawing accusations that he is repeating antisemitic tropes. He has entertained conspiracy theories about the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk that have angered many MAGA influencers, including Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk. And this fall, he interviewed white supremacist commentator Nick Fuentes, who has espoused antisemitic conspiracy theories — fueling concerns that he and his allies are promoting bigotry while setting off a debate over where the MAGA movement stands on rejecting hate speech.
Carlson vehemently rejects accusations of antisemitism. “Just because I don’t want to bow to the will of a foreign leader does not make me an antisemite, okay?” he said. “I think antisemitism is immoral and I am against it.”
Amid the right’s infighting, some Republicans said they worry the party has grown too extreme, posing long-term risks. Carlson argued the recent uproar, particularly over his Fuentes interview, is overheated, in part an attempt by critics such as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) to “tar” his friend JD Vance — who is widely seen as a 2028 presidential aspirant — “with my opinions.” Carlson said he is uninterested in making his own run for president, and has tried to “stay away” from Vance because “the last thing I want to do is harm him.” He said he sees Cruz’s attacks in particular as a proxy battle over the future of the party. “This is a war about who succeeds Trump,” Carlson said. (Cruz’s office dismissed Carlson’s remarks.)
To Carlson’s fans, he’s a champion of the populist “America First” agenda they see as the future of the GOP — a movement also embodied by MAGA stars such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Georgia), who earlier this year called Carlson one of her “favorite humans on the planet.”
But others see Carlson as a threat to the conservative movement, elevating extreme ideas that the GOP has a responsibility to condemn — or at least not magnify. He is a “Nazi promoter” and a “profit-driven lunatic,” said conservative commentator Mark Levin. A “super spreader” of bad ideas and an “intellectual coward,” according to pro-Israel conservative podcast host Ben Shapiro.
Trump has defended Carlson for interviewing Fuentes. “If he wants to do it, get the word out, let him,” Trump said last month. Vance disavowed Fuentes months before the interview as a “total loser” but has not explicitly weighed in on Carlson hosting him. He denounced subsequent attacks on Carlson’s son, Buckley, a staffer in Vance’s office.
Carlson, 56, has long been an agitator on the right, trafficking in conspiracy theories and other provocative claims. He has alleged that “the Democratic Party is trying to replacethe current electorate … with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World.” His comment that immigration makes the country “poorer and dirtier” sparked advertiser boycotts when he was at Fox. He has defended Russian President Vladimir Putin and, in February 2024, became the first Western journalist to interview him following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He spoke at length last year with a podcaster who explainedwhy Winston Churchill, not Adolf Hitler, was “the chief villain of the Second World War” — and later declared him “America’s most honest historian.” He has shifted positions in ways that have mirrored some of the changes in the GOP, traveling from economic libertarian to protectionist, from Iraq War supporter to intervention skeptic.
In recent months, Carlson releaseda series of documentary films promoting allegations of a wide-ranging “cover up” of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks; argued Israel “stands out”as a foreign power that may have known about the attacks in advance; interviewed a conspiracy theorist best known for calling the Sandy Hook school shooting a hoax; and lingered on an accused killer’s unsubstantiated claim that Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) ordered the murder of Democratic lawmakers in his state.
Critics have accused him of reckless attention-seeking and many say he is fanning harmful tropes about Israel and Jews, embodying the kind of dangerous fixation he once criticized, decades ago, in Pat Buchanan. “Famously Pat always beats up on Goldman Sachs but never Morgan Stanley,” a young Carlson saidon C-SPAN. “I do believe that there is a pattern with Pat Buchanan of needling the Jews. is that antisemitic? Yeah.”
Defiance, Carlson said, is a chief motivator for him.
“You tell me I can’t do that, then I want to do it all the more,” Carlson said. “I have to hate Russia? Okay, I’m going to fly to Moscow and interview Putin. You tell me that I’m not allowed to listen to Nick Fuentes? I’m going to interview him.”
‘Frauds and grifters’
A former bow tie-wearing Washington fixture, Carlson spent years as a conservative commentator on CNN and MSNBC before landing at Fox News, where he rose from being a little-watched weekend host to the network’s most popular star.
He was dismissed in 2023 following Dominion Voting Systems’ lawsuit against Fox News, which exposed his private comments disparaging colleagues, management and Trump. Carlson now splits time between his homes in Maine and Florida.
Carlson’s departure from Fox threatened to dramatically reduce his visibility in the party. Instead, freed from corporate constraints, he has rebuilt a large audience and established a subscription-based and niche-advertising business model that is more impervious to the kinds of transgressions that used to earn him corporate reprimands.
The threat of Carlson’s disapproval does not strike the same fear in elected Republicans as it did at the height of his Fox News stardom, some on the right said. Still, Carlson boasts nearly 22 million followers between YouTube and the social media website X, and a side business selling nicotine pouches. His show was one of the 10 most-streamed podcasts of 2025 on Spotify.
“Tucker is more influential today post-Fox,” said former Trump strategist and podcaster Stephen K. Bannon. “His topics are broader, his guests more interesting.”
Carlson continues to be a big draw on the activist circuit. When the Kirk-founded conservative group Turning Point Action released a 63-speaker lineup for its December conference in Arizona, Carlson got top billing over Cabinet secretaries, congressional leaders and MAGA stars — preceded only by Vance and Erika Kirk.
It didn’t take long on opening night for MAGA infighting to flare, with Carlson at the center.
Shapiro, the conservative podcast host, used his speech to condemn Carlson and other influencers he labeled “frauds and grifters,” drawing gasps and cheers. He ticked through Carlson’s most controversial guests in detail. He mocked the idea that Carlson is “just asking questions.”
Carlson took the stage just over an hour later and said the attacks made him laugh. “To hear calls for deplatforming and denouncing people at a Charlie Kirk event — I’m like, what?” he said, grinning. “This is hilarious.”
Kirk, he argued, was once under pressure to deplatform him. “Just lost another huge Jewish donor. $2 million a year because we won’t cancel Tucker,” Kirk wrote months earlier in a text exchange confirmed as authentic by a TPUSA spokesperson. Kirk believed in vigorous debate, and here Carlson was, addressing a cavernous room of students and activists.
Carlson took a question from a young man who asked if it was “America First” for lawmakers and the president to take money from the pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC.
No, Carlson said. “It’s just an obvious statement,” he added to whistles and cheers.
An interview that sparked outrage and MAGA infighting
No episode of “The Tucker Carlson Show” — in which Carlson sits down with guests for longform interviews that regularly exceed two hours — has received more attention this year than his Oct. 27 interview with Fuentes.
Over 139 minutes, Carlson quizzed Fuentes about his upbringing, his attacks on Republican politicians and whether “going on about the Jews” might actually “help the neocons.” But he didn’t press Fuentes on his praise for Hitler or his declaration that “Jews are running society, women need to shut the f— up, Blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part, and we would live in paradise.”
Fuentes lamented that established conservatives tried to sideline him for what he called “reasonable questions” and said the right’s free-speech advocates didn’t stand up for him.
“So I realized that the conservative movement was completely bankrupt in that way,” Fuentes said.
“Yeah,” Carlson said. “You’re absolutely right.”
The Fuentes interview got more than 18 million views on X and nearly 7 million views on YouTube — more than almost any other episode of Carlson’s show posted to YouTube this year, surpassed only by one of his 9/11 videos. It also triggered an outcry.
“If you sit there with someone who says Adolf Hitler was very, very cool, and that their mission is to combat and defeat global Jewry, and you say nothing, then you are a coward and you are complicit in that evil,” Cruz said at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s summit days later in Las Vegas.
Rep. Randy Fine (R-Florida), at the same event, called Carlson “the most dangerous antisemite in America.” Minutes later, bookers for Carlson began calling Fine’s staff to try to get him on the show, the congressman said.
Fine said he was torn about the invitation and ultimately decided not to accept. He said he hated the idea of Carlson making money off his criticism.
Carlson argued that he did push back on Fuentes by saying antisemitism is wrong. He also said he believes that the best way to expose Fuentes’s beliefs is to let him talk and let others judge.
“I think it’s important to understand how we got so many kids like Nick Fuentes,” he said. “We made a lot of mistakes in the way that we treated young people, and they’re really resentful and that’s not their fault, it’s ours.”
Fuentes, 27, was once dismissed across the GOP, barred from most social media platforms and relegated to the fringe. When Trump had dinner with Fuentes in 2022, it caused an uproar. But Fuentes, now reinstated on X, has reemerged this year.
Among pro-Israel conservatives, “there was hope that Nick Fuentes would fade,” said David Brog, a Republican activist concerned about his rise. “And now everyone’s woken up to the reality that the system incentivizing their behavior — clicks, likes and follows — is real, powerful and not going away.”
Worries about Carlson’s influence ‘growing every day’
The Fuentes interview united an unusual coalition of Republicans against Carlson, with traditional GOP figures such as Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) finding common cause with MAGA die-hards including the pro-Trump influencer Laura Loomer.
“Good morning to everyone who knows the GOP is going to lose the midterms because GOP leadership would rather protect their friendship with [Carlson] than have moral clarity,” Loomer wrote recently on X. In an interview, she warned of “hostile actors that are trying to redefine the Republican Party so it can become modern-day Hitler Youth.”
Gabriel Groisman, a Republican consultant and former board member at the Republican Jewish Coalition, said antisemitism is flaring on the right in the podcast and think-tank world rather than inside the halls of power. “But we know that line is a thin line,” he said.
“Inside, those voices still have not taken hold yet,” he said, “but we know that unless there is an aggressive response rejecting those things, that’s what comes next.” He said he worries that Carlson’s influence is “growing every day.”
Other MAGA figures are on Carlson’s side. Like it or not, they have argued, Carlson and his audience are part of the GOP coalition. Pushing Carlson away “would be a huge mistake” for Republicans, said Terry Schilling, a GOP strategist and activist. “He’s not going anywhere. And you don’t want Tucker Carlson as a third party.”
“We need Tucker to be in the party to help JD,” he continued. “The people that follow Tucker hate the establishment, they are the people that Trump brought into the party.”
Carlson’s ability to maintain media attention endears him to Trump, according to a Republican operative who knows both men and spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly discuss their relationship. “There’s nothing Donald Trump respects more than someone who can lead a news cycle,” the operative said.
A White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss private relationships, said, “the beauty of the movement is that many voices are able to be heard, whether the President agrees or disagrees with them.”
Over the summer, Carlson criticized the Trump administration’s bombing of Iran, prompting Trump to call him “kooky.” Carlson said in the interview that was so troubled by the attack, which he saw as being done to help Israel, that he decided to speak out. “The second I did, it was, ‘You hate all Jews. You hate the Jews, you’re a Nazi,’” he said, describing his view of the backlash he received. “I guess I knew this was coming, but I was still shocked by it,” he recalled.
This past week, Carlson said he heard Trump was about to announce a war with Venezuela in a national address — and turned out to be incorrect.
But the two have also kept open lines of communication and praised each other.
“I found him to be good,” Trump said of Carlson last month when asked about his Fuentes interview. “He said good things about me over the years. I think he’s good.”
Kadia Goba contributed to this report.
The post Tucker Carlson inflames a raging battle for MAGA’s future appeared first on Washington Post.
