Eighteen months ago, at a campaign rally for Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson gleefully portrayed the Republican nominee as a “dad” poised to tell America, “you’ve been a bad girl,” who is going to get a “vigorous spanking.” Last week on his podcast, he said he will be forever “tormented” by the part he played in helping Trump regain the presidency, adding, “I’m sorry for misleading people.” Carlson—the shapeshifting conservative commentator now pontificating to 17.5 million X followers—generated much mainstream media coverage with his public break with Trump. But the coverage often stopped at the apology, suggesting that his days of misleading people were over.
But in Carlson’s podcast conversation with his brother Buckley, a former Trump speechwriter, what he said after the apology shows he is as creepy and manipulative and misleading as ever. “Was this always the plan?” Tucker asked Buckley, sounding exactly like the cutting impression of him by Saturday Night Live’s Jeremy Culhane. Before getting an answer, Tucker acknowledged, “You don’t want to be a conspiracy nut.” But then the brothers proceed to sketch out a bizarre web of conspiracies.
Buckley confusingly pointed to the two failed assassination attempts of Trump during the 2024 campaign: “You could get really deep about it and say, ‘What was Butler [Pennsylvania]?’ Like, how was it that he—And Ryan Routh [who was recently sentenced to life in prison]. I mean, he was subject to two legitimate assassination attempts. Have we ever gotten to the bottom?” Tucker answered with the great certainty of a conspiracy nut: “I don’t know the answer, but I know that those investigations have been stymied.
Fact.” Buckley concurred, “Stymied from the very top from people who actually would have the power to get to the bottom of it.” “And the motive,” chimed in Tucker, implicitly acknowledging Trump would have no reason to block an investigation into his own attempted murder, without explanation why they are suggesting he did. From there, Buckley wove in another conspiracy thread, highlighting “the enormous amount of money [Trump] got from Miriam Adelson,” the Israel-born scientist-turned-multibillionaire-casino-and-media-mogul after her marriage to the late Sheldon Adelson. While she resides in Las Vegas, she holds dual citizenship and reportedly spends more time in Israel, where she owns the country’s largest newspaper.
“Why would someone who has obvious and demonstrated allegiance to a foreign power give Donald Trump $250 million while he’s running for president [actually, it was $100 million to Adelson’s pro-Trump political action committee]? I mean, how is that defensible? It’s really not. … Like, what did they get in return for that amount of investment?
And it’s clear.” No, it’s not clear. The day before this podcast, Adelson’s Israel Hayom newspaper ran a column criticizing both Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, concluding that “after 925 days of fighting since October 7, Israel has failed to achieve a decisive result on any front,” with Hamas and Hezbollah still kicking and Iran potentially “stronger than before.” The columnist, Yoav Limor, chided Trump for being “tired of wars” and “looking for a quick and elegant exit before being dragged back into them,” while Netanyahu “failed” to resist when Trump demanded a ceasefire with Lebanon.
Limor deemed Netanyahu’s acquiescence “a public humiliation and a severe blow to Israeli power and deterrence.” Moreover, we have no evidence that Trump attacked Iran in the first place because of Adelson’s money or any direct lobbying. The basic logic of the insinuation is inherently flawed. Trump is never going to be on the ballot again and doesn’t need any more campaign contributions.
He doesn’t have to make her, or anyone else who has supported him, happy. Tucker somewhat recognized the reality of Trump’s penchant for throwing his own backers under the bus, but argued that the president makes exceptions. “Given his behavior and his demonstrated disloyalty and viciousness to previous supporters, why wouldn’t he display the same lack of loyalty to Miriam Adelson?” Tucker rhetorically asked.
Then he answered, “The only people he’s been loyal to are the neocons and his donors.” This is wrong. While Trump is involved in all sorts of unethical pay-to-play activities with donors, his signature tariff and immigration policies have disrupted the global economy and labor markets, which squeeze many of his corporate-class backers. In September, the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute gathered Fortune 500 CEOs to discuss the state of the economy.
Two-thirds of business leaders said Trump tariffs hurt their businesses, and more than 75 percent criticized Trump for trying to strong-arm the Federal Reserve into changing its interest rate policies. And the neocons, as indicated by the Limor column, are increasingly unhappy that Trump has pulled back from further military action against Iran and Le