Republican critics of Trump are missing the mark by labeling the president the "Antichrist," Democratic political strategist James Carville said.
"I've called Trump the MF word, and I've called him worse than that. I've called him a sack of [expletive]," Carville said Tuesday on Politicon. "Rod [Dreher], who is Vance's spiritual mentor and Tucker Carlson, who is a person of some substance in the Republican Party, have both called Trump the Antichrist. Well, even I haven't gotten there."
Carville said that "even I haven't gotten there," but not because he thinks they're too soft. Rather, Carville thinks that Trump's right-wing critics are simply giving him too much credit by calling him the Antichrist.
"All of the people that fight in the street about my name calling, understand this. I have not yet referred to Donald John Trump as the Antichrist. All right? Because I think the Antichrist would be smarter," Carville said.
Carville stressed that the Antichrist comments are significant because Dreher "is a much much much much bigger deal than anybody realizes" and Carlson is also "a big deal," he said.
However, "I'm just going to keep calling him a [expletive] and not even worry about," Carville concluded.
Former Fox News host and right-wing podcaster Tucker Carlson's recent apology might signal more than just regret — it could mean he's considering a presidential run in 2028, an analyst suggested on Tuesday.
The Guardian's Arwa Mahdawi described how Carlson's admitting he was "tormented" by his decision to support President Donald Trump could ultimately challenge the president's pick to succeed him. Carlson hasn't directly said he plans to run, but Mahdawi points to multiple takes that suggest it could be on his mind.
"I don’t know how genuine this mea culpa is, but it’s the most recent example of the growing fractures within the Maga movement," Mahdawi wrote. "While Carlson privately admitted he hated Trump in text messages that surfaced during the 2023 lawsuit between Fox News and Dominion Voting Systems, he has stood by him in public, drumming up support for the Maga agenda at rallies. He has been one of the president’s biggest supporters for a decade. And while that support has waned during Trump’s second term, largely driven by Carlson’s criticism of Israel and the Iran war, this public denunciation of the president feels like a pivotal moment."
He also can't be ignored, the writer added.
"He’s not a fringe figure: he knows how to work the attention economy," Mahdawi explained. "He had the highest-rated show on Fox before his abrupt departure and his YouTube channel has more than 5 million followers. And now, it seems, he has broader ambitions."
Author and co-host of the Pivot podcast sees Tucker's public apology as a strategic move and "less a road-to-Damascus moment and more a route-to-the-White-House moment."
"I think I absolutely know what’s going on here," Galloway predicted on the podcast last week. "He’s running for president … I think here and now Tucker Carlson is the most likely GOP nominee for president in 2028. Put him on stage with Rubio and Vance, he’s going to slice and dice them."
Trump has not publicly endorsed a successor for the 2028 presidential election, though Vice President JD Vance has been widely considered the frontrunner among administration officials and Republican party leaders. Other potential candidates who have been discussed include Secretary of State Marco Rubio and various other members of Trump's cabinet and allied figures within the Republican party.
In a column published on Friday, Goldberg described how the conversation between Tucker and his brother, Buckley, a former Trump speechwriter, exposed much more of their message — a false narrative.
"I'm all for embracing converts to the anti-Trump cause," Goldberg wrote. "But if you listen to the dialogue between Tucker and his brother, it's clear that rather than honestly reckoning with their role in America's derangement, they're developing a new conspiracy theory to explain it away."
The brothers have argued that the president's recent decisions show he has been influenced by foreign actors.
"Trump, they strongly imply, has been compromised — maybe even blackmailed and physically threatened — by Zionist or globalist forces seeking the deliberate destruction of the United States," Goldberg wrote. "On Tucker's podcast, Buckley described a systematic undermining of America through the George Floyd protests, mass migration and now the war with Iran."
"I don't want to minimize the malign role Israel has played in persuading Trump to launch his catastrophic war on Iran," Goldberg explained. "As former Secretary of State John Kerry has said, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel tried to persuade previous American presidents to strike the Islamic Republic, but only Trump was vain and gullible enough to agree. America's hand-in-glove relationship with Israel has become a liability, and we should end it."
"But it wasn't Israel or Zionist donors or some shadowy internationalist cabal that made Trump a buffoonish maniac who glories in threats of violence," Goldberg wrote. "If the second Trump administration is worse than the first, it's largely because the establishment figures once demonized by Carlson as deep-state subversives are all gone. Trump is who he always was. He's just more politically unfettered than before."
Now, Tucker and Buckley Carlson are pushing more disinformation, and "some former Trump acolytes are defaulting to an older conspiracy theory: The ones in control are the Jews." That aspect is most concerning, according to Goldberg.
"This need that some MAGA apostates feel to rationalize their previous poor judgment can be harmless, if irritating. It's dangerous only when they insist on creating a scapegoat," Goldberg added.
Tucker Carlson told the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee that Trump is “a wonderful person. I know him well. By the way, the funniest person I’ve ever met in my life, actually. You can’t be funny without perspective or without empathy, which is true.”
But on Tuesday, Carlson admitted that he’ll be “tormented” for a long time by his support for Trump in the 2024 presidential election and that “I want to say I’m sorry for misleading people.”
Well, thank you, Tucker. I — and I’m sure many others — appreciate your apology.
And we hope your torment continues.
By the way, I’ve got to ask: Are you also tormented by — and apologetic for — supporting Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen?
And what about your minimizing the presence of white nationalists among those who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021? And your claim that the attack on the Capitol “barely rates as a footnote?”
Are you now tormented and apologetic for any of this?
And while we’re at it, Tucker, what about your racist screeds? Does any of the filth you’ve spewed for years make you ashamed?
You pushed the “great replacement theory,” claiming that immigrants made America “poorer and dirtier.”
You said a Black Democratic politician spoke like a “sharecropper.”
You told your viewers that America is a “civilization under siege” — by violent Black Lives Matter protesters, by diseased migrants from south of the U.S.-Mexico border, and by refugees importing alien cultures.
When hundreds of refugees from Africa began crossing into Texas from Mexico during the first Trump administration, you warned that Africa’s high birthrates meant the new arrivals might soon “overwhelm our country and change it completely and forever.”
Amid the nation’s outrage over George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer, you called those who protested the murder “criminal mobs.”
When Kyle Rittenhouse murdered two protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, you asked rhetorically, “Are we really surprised that looting and arson accelerated to murder?” And: “How shocked are we that 17-year-olds with rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would?”
Are you troubled by any of this, Tucker? Are you apologetic? Ashamed?
And if not, why the hell not?
Why should anybody believe you when you say you’re now “tormented” and “sorry” for misleading people about Trump if you express no remorse for supporting his blatant lies about the 2020 election, for backing the rioters at the Capitol, for justifying the murders of protesters, and for poisoning America with your bigoted screeds?
Tucker, we know you’d like to be the Republican candidate for president in 2028 and you think distancing yourself from Trump on his idiotic war is the way to do it — especially with JD Vance as your likely opponent in the primaries.
Well, I have news for you, Tuck. You’re not fooling anyone with your newfound conversion. You’re the same intolerant, dogmatic, puerile fanatic you always were. And just as dangerous for this country and the world as ever.
Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org
Tucker Carlson's putdown of a political analyst has been mocked by The Bulwark, with Catherine Rampell noting the ex-Fox News anchor got the facts wrong.
Rampell, appearing in conversation with Tim Miller in a recent post from The Bulwark, responded to a clip of Carlson talking about a decade-old encounter between the pair. Carlson claimed Rampell's father sued a country club because they would not let him into the building.
Carlson said of Rampell, "There was a girl called Catherine Rampell, I think she worked for the Washington Post, but she was a Fox contributor. Not impressive. At all. I was sitting on the set with her during a commercial break once. She was a sort of liberal neocon type person, but not smart.
"We were talking, and I'm trying to be nice, and she's like, 'Where are you from? I grew up in Palm Beach. We moved there, and my dad sued the Bath and Tennis Club for discrimination because they wouldn't let him in.'
"And I'm listening to this, and I'm like, 'He sued a- your dad- and if I'm getting this wrong I want to apologize, but I remember this conversation like it was yesterday. 'Yeah, he sued because they wouldn't let us in.' It's not my job to tell you that these are private associations.
"What are you even talking about? That's repulsive to me. You should have the right to hang out with whoever you want to hang out with... The hatred behind that, the desire to destroy something you didn't build, was so evident. This girl's a hater, actually, that's what I realized talking to her."
Rampell responded, "He's wrong in some pretty telling ways. So, here is what actually happened and what I'm sure I relayed to him over a decade ago at this point. It was in the '90s that my father didn't sue country clubs. Tucker is actually right that freedom of association is allowed under the law.
"What happened was my dad waged a newspaper campaign against a bunch of these country clubs in the town because they were antisemitic and racist. Basically, what happened was it's not just that they didn't allow Jews, blacks, Asians, or Hispanics as members. Oh, they also didn't allow single women, by the way.
"They would not allow any of those racial or ethnic groups as guests. And we learned this or my family learned this because my brother was in preschool at the time and he was not invited to a birthday party, and we subsequently found out that the reason he was not invited is that the country club that Tucker is referring to, the Bath and Tennis Club, did not allow Jews in its doors, even four-year-old Jews, as it turns out."
Rampell further clarified Carlson's comments and her father's actions in a post to her X account, "Perhaps to no one’s surprise, Tucker Carlson just gave a full-throated defense of segregated country clubs.
"Out of the blue Tucker recently attacked me on his show by recounting a story I told him ~10 years ago. In his telling, my father sued a country club for not admitting him as a member. The actual story: In the ’90s, my father waged a newspaper campaign (not a lawsuit) against local country clubs because they were discriminatory.
"That’s the fight my dad waged — at significant personal and professional cost at the time — and I’m proud of him for it."
Veteran Democratic Party strategist Max Burns believes the movement's loss of both Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson is a sign that MAGA support could be slipping.
Burns wrote in The Hill, "MAGA voters have long believed in taking Trump 'seriously but not literally.' This is just another way of saying Trump might lie to other people to advance his own interests, but he would never lie to the supporters who power his political movement.
"At least some of those faithful Trump supporters are finally ready to admit that they’ve been conned, and there’s no way back to believing the fairy tale.
"Greene and Carlson’s awakenings are just the beginning of an exodus from the MAGA movement, which just a year ago seemed to be reaching new heights of power. After a decade of chaos and disruption, Trump’s transactional politics is finally catching up with him. It’s just a shame that it took so long."
Carlson has emerged as a vocal critic of Trump's MAGA movement, primarily over the Iran war. Carlson directly challenged GOP leaders during heated interviews, demanding they answer basic questions about Iran policy.
Carlson, a mainstay on Fox News from 2016 to 2023, recently said he regrets backing Trump over traditional conservative values, The Guardian reported. He said, "You know, we’ll be tormented by it for a long time – I will be. And I want to say I’m sorry for misleading people. It was not intentional, that’s all I’ll say."
Greene has distanced herself from the MAGA movement over Trump's Iran war, which she views as a fundamental betrayal of core MAGA principles. Greene spent millions campaigning for Trump specifically because he promised to end foreign wars.
Greene suddenly resigned from Congress late last year. Greene had publicly distanced herself from Trump over his Iran war policies, declaring opposition to the conflict and characterizing it as a betrayal of MAGA principles.
Her decision to leave Congress marked the culmination of growing ideological rifts within Trump's movement and her frustration with the direction of the Republican Party under Trump's leadership during his second term.
MAGA commentator Scott Jennings had a stinging response to former Fox News host Tucker Carlson's comments that he was regretful for supporting President Donald Trump.
CNN anchor Kasie Hunt asked Jennings to comment on Carlson's remarks that he would be "tormented" by his decisions to endorse Trump, which led to a heated exchange between the two during the live broadcast. Carlson had issued a public apology Monday for having supported Trump in the 2024 election, telling his millions of followers that he was “sorry for misleading people.”
Jennings shared his thoughts on the move.
"I mean, is his preferencethat Kamala Harris had becomethe president of the United States?" an indignant Jennings asked. "That will come as asurprise to, I'm sure, a lot ofpeople who used to view Tucker Carlson as a conservative andsomeone who, you know, hadcertain kinds of values. Andwhat's he sorry for? That we gota new engagement here that mightultimately lead to taking awaynuclear weapons?"
Hunt pushed back on Jennings' characterization of the war.
"We got into engagement, Scott? That is quite a way to put it," Hunt said. "We started a war with Iran."
"Is he nowclaiming he had no idea that Donald Trump held the positionthat he would never permit Iranto have nuclear weapons, ifthat's what he's saying today?" Jennings asked.
"He's kind of a moron," Jennings added. "I mean, Idon't know how else to put it,or he's willfullymisleading people. The presidentwas clear he'll never let themhave nuclear weapons. We justsaw on '60 Minutes' on Sundaynight, a broad agreement amongthe experts. They have 970pounds of enriched uranium,enough to make 10 or 11 nuclearbombs. This is not acceptable to the president. He had thatposition back in 2024. He hadthat position back in the firstterm. He has that position todayto say now that you're sorry,that you elected a presidentthat wanted to take away nuclearweapons from this terroristregime. I don't get it."
Reactions were mounting Thursday after President Donald Trump dropped a lengthy, angry post calling out his former allies, whom he referred to as "losers."
Trump took to his Truth Social platform to rage at multiple MAGA voices: Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens and Alex Jones. The president's move revealed even more ideological fractures amid the already divided MAGA coalition.
"I know why Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, and Alex Jones have all been fighting me for years, especially by the fact that they think it is wonderful for Iran, the Number One State Sponsor of Terror, to have a Nuclear Weapon — Because they have one thing in common, Low IQs," Trump wrote. "They’re stupid people, they know it, their families know it, and everyone else knows it, too! Look at their past, look at their record. They don’t have what it takes, and they never did!"
The internet was stunned by the president's comments, including conservative followers. Some sided with Trump and continued to support him, while others noted just how much the conservative party had ruptured.
"All of the lying must be exposed. Call them all out! Go Go Go!! God bless President and Mrs. Trump. We, the People, love you both so much! Amen," Tiffany Virili, Trump Media & Technology Group Corp. admin and MAGA supporter, wrote on Truth Social.
"They are SCUM! Grifters! Traitors! WE STAND WITH PRESIDENT TRUMP!!!!!!" Eric Reimer, an attorney, veteran and MAGA follower, wrote on Truth Social.
"That is a big fissure in the trump camp," tennis champion Martina Navratilova wrote on X.
"Absolutely insane. When will the Republican Doormat Congress find their courage?" Democratic congressional candidate and Army veteran Fred Wellman wrote on X.
"'I don't have any friends left!!!!'" Canadian radio personality and political commentator Dean Blundell wrote on X.
A former Fox News host who now solo broadcasts to millions of right-wing followers has caused a MAGA meltdown by, according to some, insinuating that Donald Trump is the anti-Christ.
Long known as a friend and ally of the president, Tucker Carlson has lately upset MAGA for his criticisms, often related to the Iran war. But he may have taken things too far this time, according to other Trump allies.
"Could there be a spiritual component to this?" he asked. "Could it be something bigger?"
He further asked, "Is it possible what you're watching is a very stealthy yet incredibly effective attack on... belief in Jesus?"
Carlson then added, "Is it possible that the president sees this in bigger terms? Sees this as the fulfillment of something? An elevation of some higher office beyond president of the United States?"
Those words hit MAGA the wrong way.
Conservative activist Ian Miles Cheong wrote, "Tucker Carlson suggests that Donald Trump is the Antichrist. Everyone in the admin should be forced to respond to this. Anyone who does not condemn Tucker in the harshest terms should be fired on the spot. Top officials need to be asked on video what their thoughts are on this."
Another Trump ally, Laura Loomer, wrote, "By riling people up with lies about how President Trump is the anti-Christ, Tucker Carlson appears to be trying to incite someone to physically harm President Trump. How can anyone who claims to be loyal to the President continue making excuses for Tucker? I hate Tucker Carlson."
"In 2021, Tucker Carlson called Donald Trump: 'A demonic force, a destroyer. But he’s not going to destroy us.' Then in 2024, Tucker campaigned for Trump’s presidency, including speaking at his rallies. Now, in 2026, he’s calling Trump the Antichrist. This is not a healthy person."
Tucker Carlson suggests that Donald Trump is the Antichrist
Everyone in the admin should be forced to respond to this
Anyone who does not condemn Tucker in the harshest terms should be fired on the spot
Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson alleged that the CIA has been intercepting his private communications and is preparing a criminal referral to the Department of Justice, claiming he faces potential charges under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) for communicating with Iranian contacts before the war began.
"The CIA has been reading my texts," Carlson stated. "They have intercepted my private communications with contacts in Iran in the period leading up to the beginning of the current conflict. And on the basis of those texts—texts!—they are preparing to accuse me of being an unregistered foreign agent under FARA."
Carlson denied any wrongdoing, insisting he has never worked for, taken money from, or advocated on behalf of any foreign government. He characterized his communications as routine journalism, stating: "I am an American journalist who has done what American journalists have always done, which is talk to people all over the world in an effort to understand what's happening."
The commentator framed the alleged investigation as part of a broader pattern, warning that criminalizing journalistic contact with overseas sources sets a dangerous precedent. "If they can do this to me, they can do it to anyone. Any reporter, any commentator, anyone who has a phone and uses it to talk to sources overseas could be targeted in exactly the same way," he said.
Carlson also referenced a 2021 incident when his private texts were leaked to media outlets, characterizing it as "clearly an intelligence operation." He argued the current situation represents an escalation from leaking to building criminal cases based on private conversations.
