President Donald Trump escalated his feud with his one-time vocal ally Tucker Carlson, telling reporters Monday that no one is paying attention to the former Fox News host or his concerns about Israel’s military action in Iran.
“I don’t know what Tucker Carlson is saying. Let him go get a television network and say it so that people listen,” the president said after Carlson, a highly watched Fox News personality until his 2023 firing, accused Trump of being “complicit” in Israel’s attacks on Iran.
Carlson raised his concerns in a Friday newsletter, lashing out at Trump after Israel launched attacks that killed hundreds of Iranians on Thursday.
“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,” Carlson wrote.
“They aided Israel in carrying them out. Politicians purporting to be America First can’t now credibly turn around and say they had nothing to do with it. Our country is in deep,” his newsletter continued.
Trump responded Saturday in an Atlantic interview.
“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 that,” Trump said, adding: “For those people who say they want peace—you can’t have peace if Iran has a nuclear weapon. So for all of those wonderful people who don’t want to do anything about Iran having a nuclear weapon—that’s not peace.”
PATRICK T. FALLON via Getty Images
Carlson remained firm in his stance during an appearance on Steve Bannon’s podcast Monday.
“You’re not going to convince me that the Iranian people are my enemy,” he said to Bannon, who served as one of Trump’s chief strategists during his first term in the White House.
The U.S. is “on the cusp of entering a war on behalf of a political leader in a faraway country that’s going to really hurt my country,” Carlson continued, adding: “I just don’t want my country to be further weakened or destroyed by another one of these wars.”
