Tucker Carlson, the rightwing broadcaster, wants to help build a new political party in the United States, he said in an interview – though he gave scant detail about the party, and did not indicate whether he was referring to a concrete project or merely musing.
In the same interview, Carlson dismissed the idea of running for office as part of that new party. “I don’t want to be a candidate,” he said.
Carlson, the former Fox News broadcaster turned podcast host, has made no secret of his frustration with the Trump administration and especially its war with Iran. In recent months he has expressed regret for formerly supporting Donald Trump, and just last week said that there was “no chance” he would support Republicans – or Democrats – in the midterm elections this November.
He escalated that line of thought in an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) published on Wednesday.
“I do know what really matters is war and finance,” he said, suggesting that pro-Israel donors had pressured Trump into attacking Iran. And “on those questions, the parties are in lockstep solidarity with each other. That’s not a democracy. That’s a one-party state posing as a democracy, and it needs to be broken, and there’s going to be a third party, and I’m going to do everything I can to bring that about.”
He added: “I’m going to help build a third party. There should be a good-faith effort to figure out what benefits the country. I mean, if you make $60,000 a year, you’re degraded. Your life expectancy has gone down, and the promise of your children’s lives is likely gone. […] I officially don’t care about Hamas. The US government should have, as its first priority, the welfare of its own people.”
Carlson, who has a habit of thinking out loud, did not elaborate. It is difficult to say if he was describing an actual project under way or just mooting the possibility. His remarks to CJR contradict an interview with the New York Times, in May, in which he said:“[T]here should be a party that is speaking for most people. Am I going to build it? Absolutely not.”
Despite frequent speculation that he might seek the Republican nomination for president, Carlson has consistently denied that he has any political aspirations. He has, however, exercised other forms of political influence, both through his broadcasting and through behind-the-scenes lobbying of a president, Trump, who was once the most important nightly viewer of Carlson’s show on Fox.
In the CJR interview, Carlson acknowledged having tried to personally talk Trump out of military intervention in Iran. Their relationship has since broken down: “I haven’t spoken to him since the regime-change war began. I’m not interested in talking to him.”
In recent years, Carlson has emerged as one of the key avatars of a nationalist- isolationist wing of the hard right that has often criticized Trump for failing to deliver on his campaign promises and for not breaking decisively enough from the Bush-era Republican party that championed the US invasion of Iraq.
The US relationship with Israel has been a particular target of ire, and Carlson has criticized Israel with a vehemence that some critics have accused of mainstreaming antisemitism and conspiracy theory. That faction of the right – sometimes referred to as “America First”, to distinguish it from Trump’s “make America great again” – has also expressed frustration that Trump’s hardline immigration policies are not sufficiently radical.
“I’m for less immigration,” Carlson told CJR. “In fact, I’m for ending all immigration today. I don’t know how you can justify immigration when half of all white-collar jobs are going away because of AI. What are people going to do for a living?”
A lifelong, if unusually conservative, Episcopalian, Carlson has also leaned increasingly into a rhetoric of Christian nationalism, often citing Bible passages and suggesting that political leaders have lost sight of Christian ethics. He has said that he was attacked a few years ago in his sleep by what he believes was a demon, and recently replaced an American flag in his podcast studio with a flag associated with Christian nationalists on the far right.
When Carlson’s interviewer at CJR asked if he was “strategically positioning [himself] as counterprogramming” to a Republican party dominated by Trump and ageing Fox News viewers, he disputed the notion that his thinking was that calculated.
“I’m not strategic in any way,” he said. “I make almost all decisions on the basis of smell and instinct.”
