NPR’s Steve Inskeep interviewed Tucker Carlson for an hour for NPR’s Newsmakers podcast in Carlson’s studio in Maine and the interview, which was released on Thursday, appears to have been a rather freewheeling discussion. One element that stands out is their discussion on how President Donald Trump got into the Iran war. Carlson says he was at the White House frequently in the weeks leading up to the US-Israeli start of the war on Feb. 28 and spoke to Trump at least ten times in that period. “He was pushed by a foreign country to do this,” Carlson asserted. “It is the most profoundly destructive thing any— any single decision a president has made in our history. ... I don’t think that he had the latitude to make this decision on his own.”
In response to Inskeep’s question whether or not Trump should be impeached for the war, Carlson replied “he’s not going to be removed for this because both parties agree with it.”
Otherwise, Carlson insists that Trump knew what he was doing, knew what the consequences would be but did it anyway, thus dismissing any notion that Trump didn’t know.
“This war is being pushed by Israel with three aims,” Carlson argued. “One, its own regional hegemony, take Iran off the map. You can’t— they don’t have freedom of movement as long as Iran is a regional power. Two, diminishing the power of the GCC, the six Gulf states, which are rivals to Israel and are becoming this kind of Switzerland of the Middle East, and that’s bad for Israeli interests. And three, getting the US out of the Middle East because we constrain their ambitions. Getting our bases out, destroying our bases. Israel wants our bases out of the Middle East. I said that 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? And he goes, ugh!”
“And I was shocked by that because that’s nihilism,” he added, “and that’s the last thing any leader should display or any person should display. It does matter. Who lives or dies does matter. The future does matter. I believe that. I have four children.”
Earlier, Carlson argued that Trump should be removed from office because he threatened a nuclear attack. “It’s enough for me to say he should be removed from office. He should have been removed from office by his own cabinet secretaries the moment he threatened a nuclear attack,” he said. “He should have been bundled up and taken out. That is a crime. There’s no greater crime than that. You think of all the people who go to jail for violating FARA or cheating on their taxes. Here, you have a guy threatening to eliminate the human race. And that’s not considered a crime? It tells you how deranged our moral scale has become. So he should be removed from office for threatening first-use nuclear strike.”
One weakness that Carlson displayed was his admiration for Peter Thiel protégé J.D. Vance, who he counts as a friend and who has opposed foreign wars but who “sees his job primarily as backstopping the president, supporting the president, displaying public loyalty to the president. Most vice presidents have felt that way. But, you know, so I grieve for the position that he’s in. And I say that with deep affection for him, which I still have.”
