Tucker Carlson is continuing his reversal on previous support for Donald Trump, this time telling NPR nihilism drove the president to start his war against Iran.
Carlson, a former Trump ally and former Fox News host, spoke with NPR’s Steve Inskeep last week. In that video interview, Carlson tells about a private conversation he had with Trump in the Oval Office shortly before Trump attacked Iran.
As others have suggested, the war in Iran is all about satisfying Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Carlson said.
In the Oval Office meeting, Trump waved off the risk of attacking Iran with the justification that “in the end we all die anyway.”
Carlson told Inskeep: “I was shocked by that because it’s nihilism, and that’s the last thing any leader should display or any person should display. It does matter who lives or dies. It does matter; the future does matter.”
“I was shocked by that because it’s nihilism, and that’s the last thing any leader should display.”
Carlson said he had just flown back to D.C. from Tel Aviv after seeing U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee there. Two days later he was in the Oval Office alone with Trump.
“He was annoyed that I had given Huckabee a hard time. … I said, ‘As the son of an ambassador, I know what the job entails and your ambassador, your representative to this nation, just called for rearranging the Middle East and allowing Israel to take parts of Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria. This is a diplomatic incident.”
Huckabee made those claims in a video interview with Carlson.
Carlson says he told the president, “This war is not about Iran’s nuclear program, which you told me and the world you eliminated back last summer in June. This war is being pushed by Israel with three aims.”
Those aims, Carlson said, are to “take Iran off the map,” diminish the power of the Gulf Cooperation Council, and get the U.S. out of the Middle East.
All these goals are about Israel exercising “its own regional hegemony,” he said. Even the U.S. stands in the way of Netanyahu’s agenda, he added. “We constrain their ambitions. Getting our bases out, destroying our bases, Israel wants our bases out of the Middle East.”
Then Carlson told Inskeep: “I said this to Trump to his face in the Oval Office days before the war began. And he looked at me and said, ‘Yes, you’re right, but in the end we all die anyway so it doesn’t matter.’ That’s exactly what he said: ‘In the end we all die anyway.’ And I said to him, shocked, ‘But what about our kids and our grandkids and our country?’ He goes aaaargh.”
The goal of the U.S. military action in Iran is to “get the U.S. out, to diminish the GCC and obviously to take Iran off the map and sink it into permanent internal strife, into civil war,” Carlson reiterated.
NPR requested a response from the White House about Carlson’s assertions. What they were sent instead was a social media post by Trump that describes Carlson and others as “stupid people” who want Iran to have a nuclear weapon.
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