After the shooting at the White House Correspondents Association dinner, which later led to a suspect being charged with trying to assassinate Donald Trump, far-right media entrepreneur and political influencer Tucker Carlson asked if it was “another staged incident.”
It was indicative of Carlson’s recent repudiation of Trump, where he apologized for ever asking people to vote for him.
What makes Carlson’s break with Trump notable is that he’s far from alone.
A widening slice of MAGA’s media ecosystem – once Trump’s loudest echo chamber—is now openly rebelling. Figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Alex Jones, Candace Owens, and Megyn Kelly have all publicly blasted Trump, mainly over his Iran war rhetoric and what they see as a betrayal of “America First” isolationism.
They’ve called Trump “mad,” “irresponsible,” and urged the use of the 25th amendment. Nick Fuentes, who doesn’t go to many bar mitzvahs, has declared MAGA “dead.” The result: a kind of MAGA intra-civil war that would have been unthinkable just a year ago,
But this is merely Carlson’s latest shift.
I’ve been following Carlson since the beginning of his career when he was a mainstream conservative writer – when I then liked him.
Carlson’s father was the prominent San Diegan Richard “Dick” Carlson, an award winning investigative journalist, broadcaster, diplomat, and media executive. He had been a KABC reporter, Voice of America director, ambassador to the Seychelles, and CEO of the hated-by-MAGA Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Long before he became an intentional lightning rod, Tucker Carlson was seen as a sharp, often contrarian conservative writer. He wrote pieces for The Weekly Standard and National Review with a tone that mixed skepticism and wit more than bombast. He wrote for mainstream publications such as Readers Digest, New York Magazine, and the Wall Street Journal. Politico’s John F. Harris said Carlson was “viewed … as an important voice of the intelligentsia.”
Carlson’s move into TV on “Crossfire” on CNN made him a recognizable pundit, still within the bounds of mainstream conservative debate. After stints at MSNBC and launching the short-lived but influential The Daily Caller, his trajectory shifted more sharply when he joined Fox News, where his prime-time show had a more populist, nationalist voice that increasingly blurred into grievance-drive and conspiratorial territory.
Carlson’s rhetoric grew more strident and polarizing in the Trump era, moving from establishment-adjacent conservatism to a style that critics argue embraces cultural alarmism and flirts with fringe narratives. It culminated in his post-Fox reinvention as an independent media figure untethered from traditional editorial constraints.
Carlson has been called an antisemite, which he denies. But he certainly fits the bill.
Daily Wire Editor Ben Shapiro blasted Carlson for “normalizing Nazism” and for being “the most virulent super-spreader of vile ideas in America.” The Republican Jewish Coalitions’ Matt Brooks said when it comes to Tucker Carlson, it “may start with claims of patriotism, but it always seems to end with antisemitism.” The watchdog group StopAntisemitism named Carlson their “Anti-Semite of the Year” in 2025.
Carlson has curiously blasted the orthodox Jewish Chabad-Lubavitch movement for strongly backing the U.S.-Israel war on Iran, suggesting massive Chabad influence. I am quite familiar with many Chabad houses run by wonderful families, and they are o-r-t-h-o-d-o-x.
So, are Chabad adherents actually siding with Israel against one of its biggest enemies whose leaders have called it a “cancerous tumor” and a “stinking corpse” that must be “wiped off the map”? As kids say: no duh!
Comedian Talia Reese recently parodied Carlson’s comments on Jewish organizations and Israel, calling him “Tuccus [Yiddish for buttocks] Carlson” and suggesting he would next target the Chabad-run children’s summer camp, “Camp Gan Israel.”
So has Carlson changed?
Maybe this isn’t conviction so much as calibration — less a break with Trump than a weather report. If the winds are shifting, he’s already leaning. And if there’s a post-Trump stage forming, Carlson isn’t leaving it— he’s checking the lighting, and maybe the mirror.
Copyright 2026 Joe Gandelman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, writes a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.