In the woodlands of rural Maine, a rebellion against Donald Trump’s administration is gathering strength, splitting the president’s Maga movement and triggering unease in Washington.
“It’s a moment to wrestle with our own consciences,” Tucker Carlson said in an episode of his podcast as he launched another incendiary attack on Trump last week. “We’ll be tormented by it for a long time. I will be. And I want to say I’m sorry for misleading people.”
The former Fox News host, a conservative media giant, has broken sharply with Trump over the war with Iran. From his studio in a barn in America’s north-east, the 56-year-old has kept up a barrage of attacks on the man he campaigned to re-elect in 2024, condemning the president as “disgusting and evil”.
“We’re implicated in this for sure,” Carlson told his brother, Buckley, a former Trump speechwriter. “It’s not enough to say, well, I changed my mind… You and me and millions of people like us are the reason this is happening.”
Buckley went even further, calling for Trump to be removed from office. “We do have remedies for an out-of-control, megalomaniacal, destructive president,” he said. “The 25th amendment is there for a reason.”
Carlson’s public mea culpa deepens the emerging rift within Trump’s Maga movement over the Iran war. As the conflict drags on, threatening global economic catastrophe, a string of conservative media stars have joined Carlson in condemning the president, accusing him of betraying the “America First” doctrine that won him re-election in 2024.
The president, they allege, has been consumed by the neoconservative deep state in Washington that he vowed to destroy. The criticism has tapped into growing anger on the political right at the perceived influence of Israel, fuelling antisemitic conspiracy theories.
Earlier this month, Carlson suggested that Trump was a “slave” to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In last week’s podcast, the Carlson brothers cast the decision to go to war as the latest step in a plot by Zionist or globalist forces bent on undermining America.
“It can’t be a confluence of random events,” Buckley said. “It is clearly by design. It has been a long-term plan.”
The dissent was initially dismissed as mere attention-seeking by rightwing podcasters, but concern has set in among many GOP operatives that a fundamental schism is under way as the Maga media establishment looks to life after Trump. “Tucker is off the reservation but he’s not stupid,” one Republican consultant said. “These podcasters are looking at where young conservative voters are. That will define what Maga becomes when Trump leaves the stage.”
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Carlson was previously the most popular primetime host on Fox News. His evening show was compulsory viewing among American conservatives and his support was pivotal to Trump’s first election victory in 2016.
But he was fired after Fox News paid $787.5m to settle a lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems, after the network amplified Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen. In emails and text messages revealed during the case, Carlson privately attacked Trump and several colleagues. “I hate him passionately,” Carlson said.
The two men smoothed over the rift as Trump mounted his political comeback in 2024. Days after Trump dodged an assassin’s bullet at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, Carlson appeared onstage at the Republican national convention in Milwaukee to thank “divine intervention” for sparing the then former president. To a standing ovation, Carlson hailed Trump as a “wonderful person” and the “funniest person I’ve met in my life”.
Since Trump took back the White House, however, Carlson has pivoted again. His podcast has become a platform for critics of the president from right and left. An interview with the antisemitic white supremacist Nick Fuentes in October sparked a bitter row among conservatives about the influence of Israel, which escalated as Trump was drawn back into war with Iran this year.
Joe Kent, Trump’s former counterterrorism chief – who resigned in protest against the war last month, claiming the president was “deceived” by Netanyahu – gave his first interview to Carlson.
Trump has hit back at Carlson and his other conservative critics, dismissing them as “fools”. “Tucker is a Low IQ person – always easy to beat, and highly overrated,” the president said in a social media post.
But Trump’s allies are uneasy at the mounting criticism from influential media figures on the right. Laura Loomer, the far-right activist and staunch Trump loyalist, last week accused Carlson of “trying to hand our country over to the Democrats”.
Carlson’s attacks on Trump have revived speculation about his own presidential ambitions. The podcaster was a popular choice for Trump’s running mate among Maga supporters in 2024, before Trump picked the young Ohio senator JD Vance.
With Vance hobbled by Trump’s sinking approval rating and Republicans on course for a crushing defeat in November’s midterm elections, however, many observers believe the inheritor of Maga lies outside the administration.
The growing rift among conservatives has prompted suggestions that Carlson could challenge the vice president for the Republican nomination in 2028 at the head of a new “America First” movement.
Others are sceptical. To secure the GOP nomination, Carlson would need the endorsement of Trump, which now looks impossible. There are also doubts about whether Carlson would relinquish his comfortable lifestyle and role as GOP kingmaker for the rigours of the campaign trail.
“I’m not even sure he wants it [the presidency],” said one Maga operative close to the White House. “He certainly doesn’t want to do what’s required to campaign – to get up on that stage night after night for two years, to kiss the asses of the people writing the cheques.”
Photograph by Olivier Touron/AFP via Getty Images