President Donald Trump defended Tucker Carlson on Sunday for interviewing white nationalist Nick Fuentes, nearly three weeks after the former Fox News host triggered backlash within the conservative movement for giving the far-right activist a platform.
Speaking to reporters Sunday night, Trump seemed to shrug off questions about whether Carlson should have invited Fuentes on his podcast. Fuentes, whose followers call themselves “groypers,” openly espouses antisemitic conspiracy theories and once called Adolf Hitler “awesome.”
“We’ve had some great interviews with Tucker Carlson, but you can’t tell him who to interview,” Trump told reporters. “I mean, if he wants to interview Nick Fuentes — I don’t know much about him, but if he wants to do it, get the word out, let him. You know, people have to decide. Ultimately, people have to decide.”
Later, Trump again indicated he did not see a problem with Carlson granting Fuentes a friendly interview.
“Meeting people, talking to people — like for somebody like Tucker, that’s what they do. You know, people are controversial,” Trump said. “Some are, some aren’t.”
Trump’s public comments defending Carlson were the first he has made about the Fuentes interview since it triggered a MAGA civil war over who should be welcome — and what rhetoric should be tolerated — in the conservative movement. The infighting has consumed the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank that produced Project 2025, after its president also defended Carlson for the interview.
The backlash echoes the rare rebukes Trump received from within the GOP after his 2022 dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Fuentes and the rapper Ye, who also has a history of making antisemitic remarks. On Sunday night, Trump again downplayed that dinner.
“Kanye asked if he could have dinner, and he brought Nick. I didn’t know Nick at the time,” Trump said.
Fuentes, 27, was once barred from nearly every social media platform and an array of payment processors, either for violating hate-speech policies or for encouraging rioters to storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
However, Elon Musk, who owns the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, reinstated Fuentes’s X account, and he now has more than 1 million followers there. Online and in his podcast, Fuentes has continued to rail against conservatives who support Israel and to push racist and antisemitic ideas.
“Jews are running society, women need to shut the [expletive] up, Blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part, and we would live in paradise. It’s that simple,” Fuentes said on his podcast in March.
In recent months, Fuentes has broken with Trump over his support of Israel, calling Trump’s second term “objectively a colossal disappointment and a catastrophic failure.”
“MAGA is dead,” Fuentes declared last week.
But Fuentes seemed to take Trump’s defense of Carlson as a tacit defense of him as well, sharing a clip of Trump’s Sunday night remarks to reporters on X with a note: “Thank you Mr. President!”
Will Oremus contributed to this report.
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