"He's Weak": Tucker Carlson on How Trump Failed America

25:31And I haven't.

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28:18So in that period when you're arguing to anyone who will listen or anyone you bump into in the White House against the war with Iran. Do they say to you, we're doing this for Israel? Like, why are you so convinced that Israel has actually controlled this, not only influenced it, but controlled it? Well, because again, there's a ton of pressure from Israeli agents, the neocons, whatever you call them. We've watched it for four months. The United States, the president himself will say, no, no, we're doing this, and Israel will just immediately do the opposite and destroy the peace negotiations. I'm not even attacking Israel, by the way.

29:01They have a different view of what the end of this should look like. They have a different set of interests. They're a different country. They have a different goal. But this suggestion that you've made on Israel's goals, that the Israeli goal is chaos, it's dysfunction, what would be the natural, obvious, well-documented effects of this? Migrant crises in Europe, further destroying Europe. That's always been an Israeli goal, destroy Europe. Yes. Do you really mean that? Well, I don't know. Netanyahu means it. He said it. No one watches. See, the thing is, nobody watches. Where has he Where has he said his goal is to destroy Europe?

29:42Rome is the enemy. Rome, meaning Christian Europe. The prime minister of Israel has said this on camera. I would refer you to the internet. You should watch it. It's fascinating. Why would Rome - Don't you think he's talking, don't you think he's making a reference to history and the Romans destroying the temple rather than present day Rome in Europe? Why would, well, I don't know. Why would something that happened in 70 AD be relevant for a secular modern head of state? I don't understand that. Like, what is he saying? I mean, look, the worldview here is totally different. That same prime minister has said repeatedly that we are fighting Amalek.

30:20And people are so biblically illiterate, they don't know what he's referring to. He's referring to the Amalekites. And there are a couple of different stories in the Hebrew text and what we call the Old Testament that describe what he's talking about. And what he's talking about is the elimination, truly the genocide of a group commanded by God and described in great detail called the Amalekites. So this is not a Western view of war. The Western view of war is, you know, we punish the wrongdoers and most people have nothing to do with this so we don't kill them too. So Israeli leaders and many ordinary Israelis as well reject the idea that this is a genocide.

31:00I hear that that is your view. I will just say that the idea of fighting a war in a just way is not simply a Western idea. It's not only a Western Christian idea that there are limits to war and you only strike in self-defense. I'm a Muslim and I can tell you that actually if you read the Quran, that idea is there as well. So it's not a purely Western concept. Oh, I wouldn't claim that it is a purely Western concept. My point is it's the basis of Western civilization. And to the extent that other civilizations share that view, I applaud it, of course. And by the way, you say that the Israelis, some Israelis don't think it's genocide.

31:39Well, everybody else on the planet, so far as I can tell, looking at the facts, concludes it's genocide. I don't know if there's any other group on planet Earth who doesn't see this as genocide. Many governments don't see it that way. Your government doesn't. The British government doesn't. Well, your government and my government are paying for it. So of course, they're implicated in the genocide and they share the guilt of this genocide. It is happening. There's no excuse for it. We should do everything we can to stop it immediately. You know, the bigger picture of the use of force in this second Trump administration is that the president, quite apart from striking Iran with the help of Israel, has used force many times.

32:24Yes. Yemen, Venezuela, Nigeria, Syria, Iraq, Somalia. This has actually been a very frequent phenomenon of the last year and a half. And he's been comfortable with it. So this is the man that you worked really hard to get reelected. Yes. Perhaps you didn't pay attention to something that was always there. Oh, I paid close attention to it. That's why I was so involved. I knew that he was under enormous pressure to do the things that he has since done. I knew exactly who was pressuring him. And I was arguing the counter case and doing everything I could to make the counter case. Who pressured him to hit Nigeria or the targets in Syria or Iraq or Yemen?

33:14Who was pushing him on Venezuela? Was he pushed into all of these things? Well, of course. I mean, obviously. By the way, every president is pushed in different directions on all kinds of different topics, not just foreign policy and not just by the Israeli lobby or whatever. And again, the whole job is figuring out who to listen to, when to bow to the pressure, when to resist the pressure. Like that is the job. OK, so none of this is new. Every part of American Middle Eastern policy is driven by donors to both parties, of course. I mean, it's a lie to pretend otherwise. Some of that is just inevitable.

33:52You take money from people. You need money to run a campaign. I'm less judgy maybe than I sound. I understand how it works. You have to listen to everybody. By the way, people should listen to the Israeli lobby. They've got a perspective. You should listen to the Muslim lobby. I mean, it's a big country. Everyone gets a say. I get it. And ultimately, when you're looking at the potential of a third world war, which we are, I was obviously very distressed by what he did in Venezuela. I thought it was crazy. and embarrassing and immoral. You can't just roll in and arrest a president and say, I own your oil.

34:26Like, that's crazy. And I thought that, and I said that to some extent. But I didn't lose control of myself on camera because I felt like what really matters are the biggest things. And maybe my calculation was wrong. It wouldn't be the first time. But I just wanted to avoid this war because I knew that once we got into this, we wouldn't get out until we were gravely diminished, gravely diminished. I don't think that's good for us or for the world. What do you think it's going to do to the Republicans in the midterms? I mean, they're going to be spanked. Yeah, they're going to be punished for it, of course.

35:05But the question is, does that make the country better? No, I mean, not really. I don't see any political leader right now speaking for the majority of Americans. I mean, the American economy is so lopsided at the moment that younger people are legit struggling, at least by American standards. And I don't see any political leaders really thinking about how to fix that or moving their priorities from, you know, a whole suite of different foreign conflicts back to the United States and spending the time thinking about how do I elevate my people? How do I help the people who put me here? I just don't see that mindset.

35:41Is your third party idea a real one? You floated it. You've said you want to help build one. Yeah. What are you thinking? Well, I just want to be clear. I'm not running for any office ever, okay? You know, I'm not being coy or pretending, you know, and then I'm going to like announce for president. I'm not announcing for president. I'm running for president. That's a nightmare, and I'm not doing that. But I just want to help. I want the promise of democracy to be real, that like you vote for someone and that person makes a good faith effort to represent your interests. Like it's not complicated.

36:13Self-government is not that complicated. It's disappearing. But there are a lot of very ominous trends in the United States domestically that are just completely being ignored. And I would like someone to address them. And after Trump's performance over the past year, it's hard to believe that he's the guy who's gonna reform. I mean, he is closely allied with the leaders of both parties. And this whole partisanship thing, and this is true in the UK too, with respect, It's kind of a ruse, actually. Like they fight over these issues. They'll pick an issue, transgenderism, and they'll tell you that, you know, they just got completely different worldviews on transgenderism.

36:54And that's like the most important thing. But what that cloaks, what it hides, what is designed to obscure is the fact that on economics and foreign policy, the big questions that determine the fate of nations, they are aligned. I don't think that's true, Tucker. In the UK of the big parties on economic issues, There are very distinct differences. Then I shouldn't. I mean, I've made this mistake so many times. I have family there. I spend a lot of time there. And I imagine that I understand the system that I don't understand very well. So I should probably shut up about UK politics. OK, but tell me about the third party.

37:26Is it? Well, I'm wondering whether you're watching the rise of Nigel Farage, you know, someone you've you've talked to, you've had him on your show. Is that some kind of a model? And are you serious about a third party or are you just throwing it out there? Just, you know, I am. Yeah, I know Nigel very well. And I was just with him in London not long ago. But I will say, yes, I'm watching the rise of reform and with some amazement and delight. Not that I think reform is the answer necessarily, but an option is a good first step. And I do think that, you know, and there are meaningful differences between the Democratic and Republican parties to the extent that their voting bases do disagree in real ways.

38:07I'm saying that the people who run the parties are fundamentally aligned. And one of the ways you know that is because Trump brings us to war on February 28th without making the case to the American public, without convincing even the majority of Americans, this is a good idea. Like no one was for this from day one. So you would think, given this is a country with a long history of boisterous public protests, that there would be massive protests against the war. No, none, zero. Well, why is that? Where were the Democrats on this? Like they could mobilize a million people and put them on the National Mall in Washington, but they didn't because they're for it.

38:43That's why. Because Chuck Schumer is 100 % for this. There may be details he disagrees with, but basically he's wanted regime change on behalf of Israel in Iran for many years. So that's not acceptable. It's not acceptable to have a system where the average person has no representation. He's just one Democratic leader and there are others who have very different views on the war. Really? So name one. Much more like yours. I'm a Democratic leader. Zoran Mamdani? Who has a sincere - Zoran Mamdani? He's the mayor of New York, okay? He has no foreign policy portfolio. That is a prominent and arguably very influential position right now to hold as a Democratic politician.

39:22But let me go back to the Republican Party. He's a famous person with no power to affect foreign policy. So he's kind of, I'm sort of in that category, so I kind of know what that is. He doesn't have a vote on these questions, but the people who do are aligned. And that is not democracy. And it would be nice to have a democracy. We had one. I would like it again. That's it. The Republican Party, the fact that you've left it, does that mean you've given up on J.D. Vance leading the Republican Party, being the next presidential candidate, and it being a different Republican Party to what you see now?

39:58Well, I think if J.D. Vance were president, of course, he would not be at a war with Iran. It's impossible for me to imagine J.D. Vance standing up and saying we need to have two wars to defeat a phantom nuclear program. It's like too insane. You know, I think he has too much self-respect to say something like that. I don't think he believes it. I think J.D. Vance would have led the Republican Party into closer alignment with its own voters. But he was not the president. He's the vice president, and he doesn't have the authority. Yeah, but he could be the next presidential candidate. Yeah, I mean, we'll see.

40:31I mean, I, you know, I wish he had been elected president in 2024, but that didn't happen. I'm I love J.D. I've never been shy about that. I've taken a lot of abuse for saying that. I probably haven't helped him at all by saying that. I don't agree with him on everything, of course, but I think he's an honest, very smart, decent person that puts him above almost all politicians I've ever met. And so I'm on some basic level rooting for him. It's just hard to imagine how the Republican Party after this, after truly betraying its own voters, betrayed its own voters. It told them Washington is an inside game.

41:08A small number of people are getting very rich. They commit crimes with impunity. They're protected by the U.S. government. It's called the deep state. And we're going to uproot it. And then not only did they not uproot it, they attacked anyone who asked to see the Epstein files. Like what? You know, betrayal is the worst thing. So like if my neighbor leaves his wife and kids and runs off with a stripper, I disapprove of that. If my dad leaves me and my siblings and my mom and runs off with a stripper, I never get over that for the rest of my life because that's betrayal. And that's exactly what happened.

41:40Trump betrayed not just the country, but the people who vested their hopes in him. And that is low and wrong. And every culture, every people, every person recognized that intuitively, recognizes betrayal as the worst thing. That's why Judas is remembered, why his name lives in infamy for all eternity, because he not because he took the wrong side, but because he betrayed. So, yeah, that's what this is. It's betrayal. And I think it's very hard to get past that in the short term. Have you been in touch with J.D. Vance in recent months? What's the state of play between the two of you? No, I haven't.

42:16I mean, I haven't been to Washington. I, you know, I'd love to go see him. I can't. You know, I can't. Trump's all mad at me. They're all mad at me, calling me an anti-Semite or whatever. It's just so ludicrous. Look, I think at this point, it wouldn't be good for me to contact anybody. I'm seen as disloyal. First of all, loyalty goes two ways. Second, the loyalty that matters is the loyalty of our leaders to the country they represent. Okay? And they're disloyal. Trump has been disloyal to the United States, totally disloyal to the United States. He cheated on the United States with a foreign power.

42:53So I'm not the one who's been disloyal. So what are you going to do next? I don't know what I'm going to do. I don't know where I'm having lunch today, but I would say I am open to any alternative that serves or makes a good faith effort to serve the American people above and really probably to the exclusion of foreign interests and corporate interests. Like it's an orientation. Okay. That you don't makes a good parent loving your kids. It's not reading some book on it or knowing the instructions or some esoteric knowledge, you know, that makes a good parent. No, it's just the desire to help your kids.

43:35And that desire comes from love. And if you have leaders like that, they don't always make the right decisions. They're not perfect, but over time, their people will thrive. Just like a family presided over by parents who love their kids will thrive. So we don't have that. We have leaders who have contempt for us, who take us for granted, who use us, who lie to us, who really don't care about us at all. And we know that because when life expectancy declines, when people die younger, when the middle class disappears as it did 11 years ago and nobody says anything about it. So I'm just looking for an alternative to that.

44:09Like, that's not hard. We should be able to find that. It's a really bleak picture you paint of the United States right now. normal human picture. Look, you have successful systems. It happens in companies. It happens on sports teams. It happens in any human organization. Success breeds decadence, which spurs collapse. Like this is a very recognizable cycle. And the United States has been the most successful country in the history of the world. And so needless to say, just like in successful families, fourth generation affluence, you have an entire ruling class that is living testament to this.

44:41You know, it like this is what happens when you succeed over time you get flabby and you get decadent and you become contemptuous of the people you lead and you forget the qualities that made the organization successful in the first place and then you have a reset and hopefully it's a non-dramatic reset where people just kind of come to their senses and recall why they were successful in the first place and do those things like that's my hope i don't want revolution but we're going to get a revolution if this continues. And you have talked on your show about America heading towards civil war. Do you really believe that?

45:18Because that is a, I mean, not just bleak, it's also a really inflammatory thing to say. And I can't help thinking about political violence and the awful ways we've seen it in the U.S. within the last year. Do you, you know, when you say words like that to millions of viewers and listeners, how much do you weigh up, like, the responsibility that you have given your reach today? Well, the responsibility is 100 % on the people who are perpetrating political violence. I abhor all violence. I abhor the violence of war. I abhor the violence of abortion. I abhor the violence of euthanasia. So there's no chance I'm gonna take credit for political violence.

45:55I'm against it. What I'm saying is that if you convey to people that their vote does not matter, that there's no nonviolent way to be heard, they will, by definition, over time, resort to violence. I don't want that. Democracy was supposed to be the answer to revolution. We've never had a revolution in the United States, despite a couple of world wars, a civil war, a Great Depression, the anti-war movement in the 60s, civil rights movement. We've had a lot of drama in the United States, the murder of a couple of several presidents. We've never had a revolution in the United States. Why is that?

46:29Because democracy is the pressure relief valve that keeps people from storming the Bastille. We're nearly at the end, Tucker, and we started talking right at the beginning about your dad. I know your family's important to you. You've mentioned them. So I'm curious about one more thing, which is that I heard you on a recent episode talking about marriage, wives respecting husbands, authority resting with the man as the final decision maker. You are a father of daughters. And so I just wanted to understand what you believe, whether you think in their relationships, like their husbands should always be the final decision makers.

47:06well, obviously, I'm never going to talk about my children. It's an insane question that I'm going to ignore without being offended. But I can give you my views, which are these. In a happy marriage, everything is symbiotic. I don't really think anybody's in charge of a happy marriage at all. I think people, at least I know on my own, I've been married 35 years next month. I wouldn't say I have more power than my wife at all. And I think any happily married man feels that way. There's no one whose opinion I care more about. There's no one who's bidding I'm more anxious to do. If my wife wants something, I'll just do it, you know?

47:44And I think most men who love their wives feel that way. So, you know, it's certainly not a matter of bossing anyone around. But yeah, somebody has to be, ultimately has to make the decision. And women in general want the man to make the decision, as you well know. And men who won't make, well, no, I do know. and I do know. And the women who won't admit that are not telling the truth. And in fact, the thing that I have noticed that women dislike most is men who won't make decisions and they have contempt for them. And I've never met a woman who didn't feel that way. I've met a lot of women who pretend they don't feel that way.

48:19But in real life, I think that women see that as weakness, which it is, and they despise it. They have contempt for it. So I don't think we should lie about the way people are. Men and women are not the same. They're not even close to the same. They're incredibly different. Yeah. And that's not bad. I think it's a good thing. It's a source of endless wonder for me. I didn't grow up with any women at all. I had no mom. I had no sister. So like, I'm still learning. I find women the most interesting sort of thing about life is trying to understand women. And I really have tried my hardest. I probably got into about 60%, but it's like fascinating to me.

48:56But I do think we've pat like the pretending that men and women are the same, which has kind of been mandatory. Certainly it's like wrecked the UK, I can say, and I think really hurt the United States also. That's going to end. The rest of the world makes fun of it. It's too stupid. It's like the muddling of gender and biological sex. Well, just the whole thing. It's like in every part of our society, it's like there is an active effort to deny that there are any innate sex differences. And until you know that and grapple with it honestly, you can't have a happy relationship with a member of the opposite sex.

49:33And that's one of the reasons we don't have very many happy relationships between members of the opposite sex, because liars have told us that acknowledging innate sex differences, sex differences determined before birth, leads to the oppression of one of the sexes. And in fact, it's wound up resulting in the oppression of women in the United States, I'll speak for my country, by big companies. Our economic system has applied a lot of pressure on young women to choose like working at Citibank over having kids. And I think women should be able to choose whatever they want. If you want to work and not have kids, that's up to you.

50:07I don't believe in coercion. However, I do believe in honesty. And most people, men and women, find the deepest expression of joy in their lives in their families, in their spouse, and in their children. And if you lie to them and wind up denying them that greatest source of human joy. You are evil. And so I just want to say that out loud, that feminism is an op run by big business to lower the price of labor and to free up a massive and incredibly productive female workforce. And that's been bad for the country. I mean, I'll tell you why I asked this, because I was curious about your views. And it is really hard for young women figuring this out, having a family as most but not all want to do, and, you know, trying to reach your full potential in the workplace.

50:52And I know that my life chances have been fundamentally different from my mother's. And a lot of that is because of the feminist movement, right? She had aspirations to work outside the home. It just wasn't possible. There was more of a patriarchal system. There wasn't childcare, you know, it would have been frowned upon. And I've been really lucky to be able to have a marriage and children and contribute to my family's economic well-being. And I would say I do owe that to the feminist movement, that balance. Yeah. I mean, a lot of women feel that way. And by the way, congratulations. I'm all for happy endings and people getting what they want and people being content.

51:35I mean, I'm totally for that. So I would never in any way criticize your choices. But are women in the West happier than they were in 1972? And the answer is no. And the second fact we should grapple with is that, yes, there are all kinds of different views about how a family should be organized. And there are people who take the traditional side and we talk a lot about them. But there's another side to this that is an economic interest in convincing women that their loyalty belongs to a company and not a family. And I think there's gonna be a real change. I notice it now among young people. I have a bunch, as I've said, and I employ a bunch.

52:11And like, they're all getting married way younger than kids did when I was just out of college. and they all want to have kids way more than young people did in 1991 when I got married. So like, I do think people are starting to realize that the government doesn't care for you. You're an employer. They don't care about you. They told me at Fox, they love me. We love you. And then one morning they like fired me without notice. It's fine. I'm happy they did, but they didn't care about me. Of course not. Or my family, which is fine. I never thought they did. But if you tell young people like the company is dad and the company really loves you, you're lying to them.

52:48Don't do that. Right. It's been an intense six months in the news. This has been quite an intense conversation. Before I let you go, can you just cast your mind ahead 12 months to summer of next year? Donald Trump will still have 18 months left in the White House. Gosh, you know, my hope is that the Iran situation will be resolved. I just I would like people to come to their senses. I don't think Trump is as big a factor now. Trump is weak. It's obvious he couldn't restore peace. The strong leader restores peace. That's what strength looks like. It's order and peace. He hasn't been able to achieve that.

53:27So he's, I'm not sure how even really relevant he is, but I just hope all global leaders wake up to the fact that we're kind of on the precipice of something awful and walk it back. Tucker Carlson, thank you very much. Thanks for having me. I enjoyed it. Thanks for talking to me. On with the rest of your day this afternoon. What have you got planned? How are you going to decompress? Oh, decompress? I mean, my life's intense all the time. No, I've got a live show in a few hours, so I'm going to go write that.

54:01And before we go, a few notes here, in addition to those that you can read at Bloomberg.com forward slash Michel. We did approach the White House for comment on what Carlson said, accusing President Trump of being disloyal and controlled by a foreign power. A White House official said, Israel is one of our strongest allies. No country or leader pressures President Trump to do anything. He makes decisions based on what serves America's interests and will never allow our country to be taken advantage of. You'll also have heard Tucker Carlson suggesting that Benjamin Netanyahu has said, Rome is the enemy.

54:41This appears to be a reference to a video in which the Israeli prime minister is asked what book he is reading. And he names one called Jews vs. Rome. It's about Jewish revolts in ancient Rome. And Netanyahu adds the words, we lost that one, I think we have to win the next one. Carlson also references the story of Amalek in the Old Testament. This is a complex area because there is more than one biblical mention of that tribe, which attacked the Jews in ancient times. Netanyahu's office have said that where he has compared the present day to fighting Amalek, Malik, he means Hamas, rather than all Palestinians.

55:21The way Carlson talks about Israel has been criticized by the Anti-Defamation League, which says he regularly legitimizes the idea that Israel or Zionist actors exert hidden malevolent control over the US government. And similarly, the Nexus Project, which describes itself as a Jewish watchdog organization, has called Carlson one of the most important enablers of anti-Semitism in the United States today. And finally, on Senator Chuck Schumer, his position on the Iran war is detailed in my notes. He has spoken of confronting Iran's malign activities. But when the strikes began, he said vital questions on the administration's plans were not being answered.

56:06He also pushed for a Senate resolution that would have curtailed the president's war powers. That failed because senators largely voted along party lines and the Republicans have the numbers on Capitol Hill. And with that, my final note, which is on the team. The producers are Jessica Beck and Chris Martluth. The video producer is Andy Haywood. Our social media is by Alex Morgan and the music is composed by Bart Warshaw. The audio mixing was by Richard Ward. Our executive producer is Louisa Lewis. And at Bloomberg Weekend, our thanks to Brendan Francis Newnham and our executive editor, Catherine Bell.

56:47Until next time, goodbye.

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