Tucker Carlson argues Trump betrayed his voters by prioritizing a foreign country over his own campaign promises
Tucker Carlson delivers a solo commentary on why he believes Republicans are heading for a midterm wipeout.
Summary
Tucker Carlson presents a detailed argument that Donald Trump has betrayed the voters who elected him by abandoning virtually every major campaign promise he made. Carlson identifies the core of Trump's appeal as his opposition to the "deep state" and his pledge to put American citizens first — and argues that within days of taking office, Trump reversed course entirely.
The most significant claim is that Trump's administration has subordinated American domestic priorities — drug deaths, energy costs, border enforcement — to the interests of Israel, going so far as to use the Department of Justice primarily to prosecute critics of the Israeli government rather than drug dealers, cartel members, or the Sackler family. Carlson also argues that Trump, who campaigned on avoiding nuclear war and ending the Russia-Ukraine conflict, is now actively threatening nuclear strikes and deepening U.S. involvement in both that war and a regime-change war against Iran.
Carlson further argues that the Trump administration has adopted the very identity-politics framework Trump ran against — selectively protecting one group (targeting critics of Israeli government policy) while abandoning the principle of equal rights for all citizens that animated Trump's 2016 and 2024 campaigns.
Carlson acknowledges his own role, noting he gave a speech at the 2024 Republican National Convention endorsing Trump on the specific grounds that Trump would not start foreign wars — and states he now regrets that endorsement.
Carlson concludes that the coming Republican midterm losses are not simply a historical pattern but a direct consequence of this betrayal.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Republicans Heading for Midterm Wipeout
Tucker Carlson: Things are not looking good for Republicans. The midterm elections are less than two months away, first Tuesday of November. And the polling suggests, to the extent you can believe the polling, that Republicans are definitely going to lose the House of Representatives — which they hold by a tiny margin — but also that it now looks likely they will lose the United States Senate. Again, it's impossible to know what the future holds, but if you had to bet on it, if you were trying to make a fortune on Polymarket, you would probably bet that Democrats walk away in less than two months with both houses of Congress, with control of the legislative branch.
So what does that mean, and what's likely to happen after? Well, again, we don't know. You can imagine all kinds of things, but some things seem more likely than others. Democrats probably will initiate some kind of proceeding against the president and against people who work for him — maybe an impeachment against him. Certainly, a lot of people who work at the White House are going to get subpoenas. There may be criminal actions, or an attempt to initiate criminal actions. There's going to be an explosion of partisan fighting in Washington because the party that just took the House and Senate is going to be under pressure from its voters to do something once they get there. People voted Democrat because they're mad at Trump, and so they're going to expect their representatives to punish Trump in some way. You can just imagine that the second two years of the second Trump administration will be, at least on domestic matters, pretty absorbed by political fighting.
So how does the president respond to that? Well, again, we can't know, but if we had to guess, he'll likely respond like previous presidents have responded — and that's by turning his attention outside the country. Of course, he's already totally absorbed in what's happening outside our country because we're now fighting two wars against near-peer adversaries, Russia and Iran, and we're not succeeding in either war. So you can imagine President Trump, in frustration or out of a kind of natural desire to exert power, doubling down in both of those conflicts — many ground troops, for example, just guessing here, in Iran, accelerating rather than pulling back.
Because the one thing you know, no matter how much Democrats say they hate Donald Trump, is that they will not try to restrain his unconstitutional power — the power he's assumed to declare war without approval from Congress. The president now possesses the power to commit troops wherever he wants, despite the fact the Constitution prohibits that. Lots of presidents have used that power, therefore it exists, and probably always will, and they're not going to do anything about it — because ultimately they agree with him. They may hate Trump, but they're neocons just like he is. So they support what he's doing in Iran. Maybe they don't think he's doing a good job of it, but the idea of a regime change war against Iran — the Democratic leadership is for that. Chuck Schumer has said he's for that.
So it seems probable, at least, that if Trump gets impeached, we will have an acceleration in the war against Iran and maybe in the war against Russia. And at that point we'll all be so caught up in that disaster that we probably won't have a chance to think about why power changed hands so dramatically in the midterms. And you'll hear people say, "Well, that always happens — the president's party tends to lose seats in the midterm elections." And of course that's true. It seems even more true in the second term. So this is just conventional. This is what happens.
But that's not exactly right. That's not the only reason. People don't vote against the president's party just because they always have in the past. President Trump won a larger share of the popular vote than any Republican president in a long time. He came into office more popular than a Republican president had been — certainly much more popular than he was in the first term. And now he's deeply unpopular. So something changed. And it's worth pausing just for a minute to think through what that is.
The Word Is Betrayal
Why is it that Trump, who a year and a half ago was popular and probably could have done a lot of different things, is now looking at a total wipeout and likely impeachment? And if you had to sum it up in one word, that word would be betrayal. It's not just that Trump was elected president and didn't do a very good job. We just saw that with the last president — we elected the guy and, oops, turns out he has dementia. No, this is a different thing. This is the process of electing a president on the basis of promises he'll do one thing, and then watching him do exactly the opposite on purpose — not forced to. There was no reason that Trump had to sell out his voters. There was no economic reason. There was no strategic reason. He just decided to.
Now, why he decided to is a whole separate conversation that historians, one hopes, will get to the bottom of at some point. But whatever the motive, we know that that's exactly what he did. He ran on one thing and did the opposite of that thing. And that is, once again, betrayal. And betrayal is always the worst thing. In marriage, betrayal is called cheating. In business, betrayal is called embezzlement. And it's always a bitter experience to find out someone you thought was your ally is in fact your enemy, is working against your interest. You thought you were working in concert — we're in this together — and then you find out that the person is actually working against you. That's called treachery. And it's unforgivable. That's why no one for 2,000 years has named his child Judas, because treachery is abominable to all people at all times. There's something inherently disgusting about it. And that's exactly what we're looking at as we approach the halfway mark in Trump's second term as president.
So rather than just assert that, we thought it'd be interesting to spend a few minutes going back and looking at the promises that the current president made right before he was elected. Part of this is exculpatory for those of us who voted for Trump and who did so with sincerity — not in the hope of getting rich or getting a cabinet position, not donors to the campaign, merely cheerleaders for it. We have to answer the question: why did you do that? Why did you think this guy, with a trail of bankruptcies and personal betrayals, why did you think he would be true to his word in this case? And that's a fair question. But part of the answer is because the things he was saying were just so spot-on. They were such precise descriptions of the problems — the actual problems, not Hamas or Islamic Jihad, but the real problems that Americans face. Donald Trump was able to capture and distill them very, very well.
And just two years later, it's hard to remember any of that. It's hard to remember that this guy — who now runs an administration whose whole purpose seems to be to squelch criticism of Israel and sniff out anti-semitism, America's biggest problem, or whatever they think they're doing, which has nothing to do with any real problem that most Americans face — it's hard to remember that this guy not so long ago seemed to have his finger very much on the pulse. Like he knew what was wrong with the country and he said so again and again and again.
So again, it is kind of a way of explaining the behavior of those of us who voted for Trump and saying we didn't know. But it's also just interesting because it really reveals the totality of the 180 this guy took in less than two years.
Trump's Campaign Promise: Destroy the Deep State
Let's start at the beginning. This is a clip from midway through 2023. This is the point at which Trump is in the middle of all these legal dramas — they're trying to send him to prison for the rest of his life — and he's decided he's going to run for president, and here's why. We're starting with this clip because it really sums up the reason that people voted for Donald Trump. Donald Trump was, above all else, the enemy of something called the deep state. Watch this.
Donald Trump: "The stakes of this election could not be more clear. Either we surrender to the demonic forces abolishing and demolishing — and happily doing so — our country, or we defeat them in a landslide on November 5th, 2024. Either the deep state destroys America, or we destroy the deep state. And that's the way it's got to be."
Tucker Carlson: The reason that's so compelling is because it's the grand thesis of the entire Trump project. And it's true. America's problems are systemic problems — meaning the system itself doesn't function as designed, or at least as intended. And everything else we're dealing with is a result of that fact.
On the most basic level, this is a democratic system. The people own the country. They elect leaders to speak for them in Washington. And they have a legitimate expectation of seeing the country molded to their desires, since they are the shareholders. That's the whole point of the system — to reflect the view of the public in legislation in Washington and in the actions of the executive branch. And that hasn't been true for a long time now.
A lot of us have been slow on the uptake here. It's taken us a while to figure that out because of this sideshow called partisan politics, where you have these two parties that are fundamentally in agreement on the things that really matter — economics and foreign policy — but fight about a sliver of issues in the middle. And they fight in such a ferocious way that bystanders, the rest of us, think this is really real. These people hate each other. If only they would just get along. If only Tip O'Neill could have a drink with Ronald Reagan at the end of the day, the system might work. But that, of course, is an inversion of the truth. The problem isn't that the leaders of the two parties don't agree on anything. The problem is that they agree on everything that matters, and the rest of us weren't cut in on the joke.
And the effect — and by the way, this is very obvious to the rest of the world. Talk to anybody who watches American politics closely from abroad, a sophisticated foreign observer, starting with Putin, who's made this point many times. What do you think of Putin? Not stupid. They all know this. It's obvious. As people used to ruefully say in Washington, no matter who you vote for, you get John McCain. And that's kind of true. When was the last time we had a president who really disagreed with John McCain on foreign policy or economics? When was the last time we had a president who wasn't embroiled in some kind of financial corruption, as John McCain was during the savings and loan scandal in the '80s? Can't really remember. So you always get a neocon president who believes in monopoly capitalism and somehow gets rich in the process. That's not a two-party system. That's a one-party system. That is the deep state.
So when Trump said "deep state," that's very different from saying those dastardly Democrats, that senile president and his wine-mom running mate — they're bad. Well, yeah, okay, they're bad. But that doesn't begin to touch the scale of the badness. What's actually bad is the fact that Mitch McConnell's wife was working for the Chinese government and he's a Republican. So they're all in this together. We're excluded. And Trump seemed to understand that. He said it. He named it.
The Epstein Files and the Promise of Declassification
Now, the downstream effect of a system like this is, of course, by definition, the end of democracy. The people don't rule. And academic studies — not that you need them, but we happen to have them, so why not cite them — show that the public, the non-donating members of the public, also known as voters, have no effect at all over time on the actions and the direction of the US government. So the people do not rule. Democracy is not real on the most basic level.
It's a republic, not a democracy — stop. Yes, it's a republic in the sense that we do not have direct democracy. It hasn't existed since Athens. That's not the point. The point is we have a form of democracy. The people own the country. They're citizens. They're not employees. But the system does not reflect that reality. Therefore, it's not a reality.
So that's the first problem. The second problem is you don't have rule of law when you have an oligarchy, because there are always people who are exempt from the rules. And in our system, this reaches its most obvious manifestation in identity politics. Everyone's an American — 340 million of us are Americans. But certain Americans get to use words the rest of us don't use, get to break laws the rest of us have to abide by. There are separate books. Not all of us are judged by the same set of standards. And that is inherently immoral. It's obviously unfair. It makes a mockery of the idea of citizenship. And it's corrosive of the social fabric. If you think your neighbor is getting a special deal, by definition, you hate your neighbor. If you want to make your children hate each other, favor one over the other — and they will never get along. Long after you're dead, they'll hate each other. And that's exactly what our leaders have done to us.
And why wouldn't they? Because they themselves are the beneficiaries of a separate set of books, of a special deal. And that, of course, is the whole point of the Epstein story. It's not that he touched kids. Yes, that's indescribably awful — that's the worst crime. But it's not the crime that destroys America most quickly. The crime that destroys America is the realization that the rest of us recently came to: that no matter what Jeffrey Epstein and his friends did, they got away with it. It was a completely separate standard for them. They were in a class now known as the Epstein class that didn't have to abide by the normal rules.
And so people watching this could not escape the very human reaction: well, why am I playing along then? Why am I paying taxes? Why am I obeying the law? I'm all in. We're doing this for your elderly grandmother or for your grandchildren not yet born. I'm obeying rules that I don't like — they're inconvenient and expensive — because everyone else is doing it. We're all in this together, guys. But we're not. And that's what we've learned. We were never all in it together. Not as long as the country was run by an oligarchy. Of course, by definition, there is no rule of law if certain people don't have to follow the law, or even if the standards, the customs, the mores don't apply to certain people.
So this is the core problem. Trump recognized it. Now, how do you fix it? Well, one of the ways you fix it is by letting everybody know what's been going on. And there's a level on which it's really hard to know what the truth about anything is. But a good first step is declassification. The only reason this system has been allowed to grow to the extent that it has — a $7 trillion annual budget for a system that does not represent or serve the citizens of this country — the only reason that's been allowed to happen is because most people have no idea what the government is actually doing. And they don't know because what the government is actually doing is classified. And they've been allowed to skate for many decades, certainly since the beginning of the Cold War, on the idea that you can't know for national security reasons. Sources and methods. And that is why, after all these many decades, we really don't know very much — certainly not the whole story — about pivotal moments in American or world history.
9/11 — the anniversary is this week. Here's what we do know. We know that in the days before 9/11, there was a massive spike in options trading — people betting against airlines, specifically the two airlines involved in 9/11, and betting that the share price of certain defense contractors would rise. So what does that tell you? It tells you that some people had foreknowledge of 9/11 and hoped to profit from it. Were those members of al-Qaeda? Well, no, they weren't. How do we know they weren't? Because the FBI told us they weren't. Well, how would the FBI know that? Because the FBI found the identities of the people who were betting against the airlines and for the defense contractors — which is to say, the FBI discovered the identities of people who had foreknowledge of the most damaging and deadliest terror attack in American history. More than 3,000 people murdered. And there were individuals who knew it was coming and sought to get rich from that knowledge. And the FBI has their identities.
How do you know that? Because it's in the 9/11 report — the one that was pre-written before the investigation — and that was 25 years ago this week, and we still don't know who those people were. Now, why would the government — what conceivable reason would the government have to hide that from us? It's kind of hard to accept the propaganda around 9/11 until we get an answer to that question.
But it's not just 9/11. It's everything. It's the Kennedy assassination, 63 years later. It's the Bobby Kennedy assassination. The MLK assassination. And yes, it's the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein. So this is all a preamble to this next clip from Donald Trump. This is an interview he did during the campaign with Lex Fridman, who's a well-known and good interviewer — he asks simple, straightforward questions and waits patiently for the answers. And he asked Trump directly: are you going to declassify the Epstein files? Here's what Trump said.
Lex Fridman: "It's just very strange for a lot of people that the list of clients that went to the island has not been made public."
Donald Trump: "Yeah, it's very interesting, isn't it? Probably will be, by the way. Probably."
Lex Fridman: "So if you're able to, you'll —"
Donald Trump: "Yeah, I'd certainly take a look at it. Now, Kennedy's interesting because it's so many years ago. You know, they do that for danger too, because you know, it endangers certain people, et cetera, et cetera. So Kennedy is very different from the Epstein thing. But yeah, I'd be inclined to do the Epstein. I'd have no problem with it. I'd have no problem with it."
Tucker Carlson: Well, of course, he's had a huge problem with it. And to this day, they haven't released a huge cache of Epstein files. Don't let them lie to you — they haven't. And those they did release were released because Congress passed a law demanding their release. But they have not released all the Epstein files. And if you look at the dates of the emails and documents in the first tranche of Epstein files, you will notice a trough — a dip. And that dip bookends 9/11. So apparently, from the analysis that we have seen and believe to be real, the files that the US government has not released pertaining to Epstein are from around 9/11. There are references — a number of tanalizingly interesting references — to 9/11 in the files that we do have. But during the period before, during, and immediately after 9/11, we don't have the files. So why is that? No one will even answer the question.
So there's a promise. Who knows how many people voted for Trump on the basis of his promise to release the Epstein files. But the promise to make public what your government is doing in your name, with your money? Yes. A huge motivator for many people. Not simply because they're curious about who actually killed Kennedy or his brother, or about what Epstein was doing, or how he got rich, or the wildest references to pizza. What was that? Pizza and grape soda. Jeffrey Epstein doesn't look like a guy who ate a lot of pizza or consumed a lot of grape soda. How many billionaires drink grape soda? Zero. Not one billionaire has ever had a sip of grape soda. That's what we call an urban phenomenon. So no, they were not drinking grape soda. And Jeffrey Epstein didn't eat a lot of pizza.
And those were text messages and emails to people who are still around. You can Google them. How many of them have been hauled into the DOJ just to answer simple questions like, "What were you talking about? You prescribed Epstein an erectile dysfunction drug and then said, 'Let's meet for pizza and grape soda.' What was that? Because it sounds like something kind of creepy, maybe illegal. Sounds like you were speaking in code." How many of those people have been called into the DOJ? Zero. Because they're not the criminals. All of a sudden, people who express thought crimes about Israel are the criminals. And the DOJ basically just exists to hunt anyone who disapproves of the actions of the government of Israel. That's basically what the DOJ does at this point. And they'll tell you that, by the way — shaking down American universities not for discrimination against American students, but if you think Israel is an apartheid state, or "from the river to the sea" is an expression of your views, then you're in trouble. So that's what DOJ does. But they've spent no time trying to answer obvious questions about information in the Epstein files that they have released.
The Promise to End the Drug Crisis
Now, why not release the JFK documents? You heard Trump say it right there — it's been a long time. You can't say the release of those files endangers someone. Well, they haven't released all the JFK files. That's a fact. They can tell you they have, but that's a lie. The CIA still possesses unreleased documents about the Kennedy assassination. And it seems like there are many indications those documents pertain to the behavior of a foreign country. Maybe that's why. We don't know, because they haven't been released.
And you heard Trump sort of lay the predicate for what we're seeing now in that interview with Lex Fridman. He said, "Well, the Kennedy assassination documents wouldn't endanger anybody — it's been too long. The Epstein may endanger people." How could someone be endangered by the full release of all documents pertaining to Jeffrey Epstein? How does that put people in danger? Unless he was working for foreign and/or domestic intelligence agencies. If Jeffrey Epstein was a contract employee of the US government, or the Israeli government, or the French government, we don't have a right to know that? Why? Because that might implicate those governments. That's why.
And while we're at it — why haven't the people who paid for all of this, the people who sent hundreds of millions of dollars to Jeffrey Epstein for financial consulting services or for who knows what reason, who allowed him to buy his island and his ranch in New Mexico and his house off Fifth Avenue — why haven't those people been hauled in for interviews? Not indicted necessarily, but just: "Mr. So-and-so, why don't you come on down to Washington and we'll just talk and answer some obvious questions." That's never happened. Of course you know why — because there's a separate set of standards for the kind of people who would fund Jeffrey Epstein's house off Fifth Avenue.
And now we're getting back to the core rationale for the Trump run in the first place, which was the people versus the deep state. And now we're seeing that the candidate, once he became president, sided not with the people but with the deep state. And again, it raises the question: why? There was no reason to do that. "Oh, they're so scary and powerful." Really? You're the president of the United States. And to some extent, power is what you exert. You don't have power until you use it. "Oh, they'll kill you." Well, first of all, who cares? If you're afraid of death, you shouldn't be president. But second, why not give a televised address saying, "I was threatened by this person, that person. I've ordered them arrested." That's what actual leaders do. Leaders have done that many times through history, and future generations treat them kindly because they're doing the right thing in the face of risk — prevailing over threats, in this case threats to our nation. But Trump chose not to do that.
And it's a shame, because if he'd actually taken on the deep state, then he might have done some of the things that he could do as president — things he has the power to do, that he promised to do on the campaign. Now, we're going to play you the first one, because it is in the end the most important, and that's to do something about the scourge of drugs — not just illegal, but also prescription drugs in this country.
Now, why is that the most important thing? The death toll. Now, if you bring this up to anyone in or around the administration, they'll say, "Well, the death toll from the drug crisis has gone down." Well, yeah, it's gone down for several years — in fact, it started going down under Biden. But do you know how many people died of just drug overdoses last year, 2025, the first full year of the Trump administration? 70,000. Now, you can watch Fox News all day and they will give you some number, always made up, about the number of Americans killed in Iranian terror attacks. It's not 70,000. This is 70,000 Americans — mostly young people — last year, of drugs. And that's just the ones who died of illegal drug overdoses. That's not the ones who died from Xanax. A lot did. It's not the ones whose brains were scrambled permanently, whose lives were totally wrecked for life. If you're watching this, you know some of those people. 70,000. And Trump promised to fix that. Watch.
Donald Trump: "Every drug dealer on average kills 500 people. That's not mentioning all of the families that are destroyed forever. They're destroyed forever. And we have to do something about it, because we are becoming — and we are — a drug-infested nation. We have to do something. And if you did that meaningfully, you will in one week stop the drug problem. Nobody's going to be selling drugs. I don't know if the country is ready for it, but they should."
Tucker Carlson: "I don't know if the country is ready for it." There's probably not a person over 50 in this country you could find who doesn't know someone personally who's been destroyed by drugs or died. So yeah, the country is way past ready for it. And that's not that hard. Maybe the first thing you would do is get your Department of Justice to go after not just the drug dealers, but the nonprofits — the people who actually don't pay taxes, who you're subsidizing, who are passing out drug paraphernalia to addicts in our cities. And not just needles, which is bad enough — you can say, "Well, they don't get AIDS that way." Okay. How about meth pipes? What's the justification for giving a fresh meth pipe to a meth addict? By the way, you can make a meth pipe out of anything. It's not a hypodermic needle. You don't need a factory in China to make one. You're passing out meth pipes to meth addicts because you want them to do meth.
And there has not been one indictment of one of them. Cities across the country, to this day, right now, are allowing nonprofits working with the city to pass out drug paraphernalia to drug addicts, and the effects are obvious going to the center of any American city. Is this okay, that we live like this? People are dying in the street. That's compassion? It's a stain upon the country. It should sting the conscience of every American, and it's fixable. Other countries don't have this problem because they don't tolerate it. The Trump administration could have fixed this immediately: "We're going to indict you if you give drug paraphernalia to drug addicts, if you abet addiction and death, because you're an accessory to murder when you do that." And we don't have to put up with this. That's not fascism. That's compassion.
But instead, once again, the entire machinery of the Department of Justice has been leveraged in the war against anti-semitism — which was not one of his campaign pledges, whatever that is. And by anti-semitism, they mean not hatred of Jews or hurting Jews, which is awful and shouldn't be allowed, but criticism of the secular government of a foreign country that has done more than any other foreign country in a long time to hurt the United States. So that's what they're actually doing.
It would have been nice if he'd stuck with that campaign promise. But he hasn't. And there are a lot of domestic campaign promises that aren't that hard. That's the easiest one — don't put up with this and it'll get better. But they are putting up with it. Almost like they want it.
The Sacklers are still free. They're still billionaires. How many people did Purdue Pharma kill in this country? An entire region of the country — the legacy region, the region with the highest percentage of people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War — was the one hurt most. Appalachia, south of New England. And yet the people who did that and profited from it still have their name on an art museum in Washington. They're still billionaires. And nobody went to jail — really, when they knowingly sent an addictive drug to poor people. But there hasn't been much attempt to do anything about that, to rectify that. One of the gravest injustices of our lifetime. Zero, actually.
The Promise to Cut Energy Costs
But two other domestic promises that people might have liked to see action on. Here's the most obvious: "I will lower energy costs." And this is bitter to watch, but watch it anyway.
Donald Trump: "That's why I have declared that a top priority for my administration will be to cut the cost of energy in half within the first 12 months of taking office. So we'll cut it in half. I think we'll be able to do better than that. We're going to be cutting it in half, guys. That'll help you a little bit, won't it? And I think we'll do that very quickly. That includes heating, air conditioning, electricity, and gasoline."
Tucker Carlson: Yeah. Well, that didn't happen. Kind of just the opposite. Diesel's going to six bucks in days — that's a historic high. Diesel is a fuel, a heavier version of gasoline, used to transport basically everything you eat or buy in the country. It's what fuels our trucking fleets. Diesel fuel affects the price of everything. And it is almost at six bucks — in California, our biggest state, 40 million people, it's almost $8. Diesel was $4.96 the day Trump took office. It's now almost $8 in California.
So this is not something, to be fair to Trump, that he wanted. It's something he feared. Trump does understand commodity prices. He cares about them. He follows them. You can get them right in your iPhone. You know exactly what they are. Brent crude today. What's gold trading at? Everybody can find out instantly what commodity prices are. And of course, when it comes to fuel, you find out every week when you fill up.
So Trump didn't want this. And he knew that the war with Iran, the ongoing war with Russia — both of those wars are responsible for the spike in energy prices, not just in this country but globally. And he knew that going into a regime change war with Iran would spike energy prices. He said that privately, including to me. So it's not like he didn't know this was going to happen. But for whatever reason — and again, historians will maybe untangle this mystery — he chose following Israel into this war over lowering energy costs for his own population. And so that was inevitable. This was always going to happen once he decided to follow a foreign country into an unwinnable regime change war.
So maybe the lesson here is: don't do that. And of course this gets to the core of everything. It gets to the reason that Trump betrayed his voters — because he followed not their wishes, but the wishes of a foreign government. That's just a fact. You wish that wasn't true, because it's the kind of thing that when you say it out loud inspires a massive, hateful response, and who wants that? But it is undeniably true. That's not the fault of people who point it out. That's the fault of the people who did it.
The Promise to Avoid Foreign Wars
And so Trump's distinguishing quality as a candidate, as a president in his first term, was not his pledge to lower energy prices — everybody promises to do that. Get rid of drugs — of course, that's been tried, though not very hard. No. What made Trump different was he was going to avoid foreign entanglements. He wasn't going to have another neocon war. And there was already a neocon war in progress — the war between the United States and Russia, which we mistakenly, misleadingly sometimes refer to as the Ukraine war. It's never been a Ukraine war. It's a war between NATO — which is our coalition, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization that we run and fund — and Russia. In other words, it's a war between the US and Russia. And that war, which began in the winter of 2022, was inspired by the Biden administration, which wanted it. The United States, in the most passive-aggressive possible way, pushed Russia into this war so that the United States could defeat or weaken Russia. No one's ever defined what exactly that means. The whole project is insane, but that's what happened.
And Trump knew exactly what was going on at the time and said so. He said repeatedly in interviews and in private: the main thing that we should worry about is Russia joining forces — being pushed into an alliance — with China. Because that would leave us facing off against a coalition of the world's largest country, that would be Russia, with the world's largest population, that would be China, the world's largest economy, also China, the world's deepest military-industrial capacity and resource base, that would be Russia — against us. And we can't win. If Russia and China get together, we're done. Trump said that many times, and it's true, and it's proven to be true.
And no, we can't win. So Trump knew that, and that's why he promised repeatedly on the campaign trail: when I am president, I will bring that war to a close. Watch.
Donald Trump: "Before I even arrive at the Oval Office, shortly after I win the presidency, I will have the war between Russia and Ukraine settled. I'll do it in 24 hours. It's not tough to do. That's easy compared to a lot of things."
Tucker Carlson: He's right. It actually is easy compared to a lot of things. Now, you'll often hear the foreign policy establishment, the experts, people in DC, the State Department say, "No, it's very, very complicated." Well, it's actually not that complicated, because Ukraine as a nation no longer exists. American policymakers have basically destroyed the entire population of the country. More than a million people have died, now being sent to the front in handcuffs to certain death. Apparently that's part of the reason we're doing this. It gets very dark very fast when you start to think about it.
But Ukraine itself could never prosecute a war against Russia, because for one thing, Russia has more than 100 million more people. So the whole thing is absurd. There is no war between Russia and Ukraine. And in practical terms, the United States through its intelligence agencies provides the targeting information for Ukrainian missiles and drones. So the war would end tomorrow if the US were actually to withdraw that support. And Trump could do that with one phone call: "Hey, Director of Central Intelligence. Hey, NSA Director — anyone caught running the war for the Ukrainians will be fired and brought up on charges." And that would end the war. And yes, Russia would wind up with a chunk of eastern Ukraine. That's going to happen no matter what. And it might be better for Ukraine to stop sending its next generation — in fact, middle-aged men and people with Down syndrome — into the meat grinder. That's the only option. And Trump could do that, but he hasn't. Not for two years now.
Why? Well, it's really simple. Because the same people who pushed Trump into war with Iran are pushing him to continue the war against Russia, against Putin. Now, why is that? That's a really interesting question that someone ought to write a book about. Why would the same people who pushed the US into war with Iran be pushing the United States to war with Russia? We're not even going to speculate. We're just going to say as a statement of fact that it's exactly the same group.
So Trump is clearly unable to resist that push. And so we are much more deeply involved in a war with Russia — much more deeply than we were two years ago. There have been assassination attempts on Vladimir Putin, on the president of the country that the United States is embedded against. Again, there's no Ukrainian army, there's no Ukrainian initiative without help from the United States. So from the Russian perspective, the US government is trying to assassinate Vladimir Putin. Is that wise? Even if you think Putin is the worst person ever to live, is that wise — to try and assassinate the leader of a nation that possesses the world's largest nuclear arsenal? Probably not a good idea.
As Trump himself repeatedly said on the campaign trail, you are, in so doing, pushing the world toward a nuclear war from which no one escapes. Everybody dies. That's the end of the world. And anyone, as Trump often said during the campaign and for years before the campaign, anyone who doubts that doesn't know what nuclear weapons do. Trump, as the only American authorized to use said weapons, has been briefed on their destructive power and knows a lot about it and has talked about it in public a lot, with heartfelt horror. Don't ever use these weapons. They're, as he would say, horrible — because they are horrible. And it was entirely sincere, apparently, in saying that. Here's one example. Watch this.
Donald Trump: "I am worried about nuclear, because to be honest with you, we have incompetent people dealing on it. You're going to end up in World War III. You're going to have a nuclear holocaust if we're not careful. These people have no idea. Our people have no idea what they're doing. And I will keep you out of World War III. I'm the only one that's going to be able to do it."
Tucker Carlson: Yeah. So how'd that turn out? And by the way, that seemed completely real. Trump didn't just say that in that speech — he said it again and again and again in speeches, in interviews, at dinners, in private and in public. Trump said — and why would he pretend otherwise? — "I am afraid of a nuclear exchange. That is the worst thing. A nuclear weapon that hits New York would destroy Miami. They're that powerful." He said that. And so it's with total bewilderment that two years later you look around and see the world on the brink — and that's not an exaggeration — of a nuclear exchange. And the world is on the brink of a nuclear exchange because of the actions of Donald Trump and the Trump administration. It causes pain to say that out loud. It is shocking to say that out loud. It is true.
In Truth Social post after Truth Social post, in public statement after public statement, including three days ago, Trump has threatened nuclear war. The guy who told us two years ago, "Nuclear war is the worst thing. World War III is the one thing I'm going to avoid. The people running everything are lunatics. They want a war. I don't." That guy is now threatening to unleash nuclear weapons against the country that he started a voluntary war with — a country that doesn't possess them. An offensive use of nuclear weapons.
And not just in his Truth Social posts. The US government is changing — and has announced that it's changing — its nuclear doctrine, not to constrain its ability to use nuclear weapons, but to free it up to use nuclear weapons. Like, "We're losing this war. Let's just nuke them now." Leaving aside the morality of that, which is diseased and completely indefensible — though many on the right are defending it, people who seemed totally sane just the other day, like Victor Davis Hanson, all of a sudden talking about the glories of Hiroshima. Hiroshima is a moral crime. That's not a defense of Pearl Harbor or the Imperial Japanese government, but to incinerate non-combatants with a nuclear weapon is by definition evil. There's no defending that. And anyone who defends that has immediately disqualified himself from leadership of any kind.
But it's worse than that. Not only is Trump threatening nuclear war openly — and no one seems to even notice this — and not only is his remaining coalition, the bitter-enders, Ben Shapiro or whoever else still believes in Trump or is trying to use Trump for their own ends, not only are they ratifying it, defending it, echoing it — "Yeah, I think we need a nuclear strike" — but the US government is changing its internal doctrines to make it easier to use nuclear weapons, and then suggesting, in meetings in the Pentagon and PowerPoint presentations, the use of nuclear weapons against Iran.
So even if you thought that was morally defensible, even if you agreed with Ben Shapiro that sometimes you just got to nuke people, you just got to melt their children — what do you think happens next? One country just lobs a nuclear weapon into another country and that's just it, we win at that point, whatever that means? No, of course not. That one action leads inexorably — and there's no other interpretation, this is a dead certain fact — inexorably to a nuclear exchange. And that's the end.
Not only is this the opposite of what Trump promised, this is by definition insanity. Anyone who suggests the offensive use of nuclear weapons ought to be in prison immediately. You are not allowed to destroy the world. You did not build it. You are not allowed to threaten the murder of billions of people and remain free. If there was ever a crime, it's that. That is a crime. And anyone who gets us closer to committing that crime should be in jail for the safety of the rest of us.
But no one seems to notice. Those of us who supported Trump, who believed what he was saying, wake every morning in a kind of mixture of shock, amazement, and disgust. Is this really happening? Did he change completely? Did he never mean what he said? Like, what am I misremembering? I believed it completely.
Carlson's Own Endorsement — and His Regret
Here's a portion of the speech I gave on the night Trump was nominated in Milwaukee two years ago at the Republican National Convention. Against my better judgment — I've never endorsed or campaigned for anybody, and never will again — but so important is this topic, don't further destroy the country with pointless foreign wars, and so sincere was Trump's opposition to that, that I thought: this is the one issue that really matters. And I believe this guy. They're trying to put him in prison. They shot him in the ear in Butler because he's against these wars. He must be for real. And I believed it so much I said this. Watch.
Tucker Carlson: (from convention speech) "I do think the entire point — from the famous escalator ride nine years ago until today — of Donald Trump's public life has been to remind us of one fact, which is that a leader's duty is to his people, to his country, and to no other. That's the point. That's the only point. And another word for this is democracy. And so I think the entire Trump project — paradoxically attacked as an enemy of democracy — is to return democracy to the United States. Hey, let's pay attention to what people actually want. And the lack of interest in that question in Washington is something that ultimately drove me out of the city after 35 years. Lawmakers stepping over the prostrate bodies of their fellow citizens dying on drugs to go cast votes to send money to some foreign country. The one thing that was really clear about Donald Trump two years ago is that he wouldn't ignore the suffering of his own people and instead turn his attention and funnel our money to some foreign country for a pointless war that can only hurt us and that kills innocents. That's the one thing we knew."
Tucker Carlson: And I believed it so completely I endorsed it. I checked that today. Did I really say that? Why did I say that? Because I really believed it. Why did I really believe it? Because he said it again and again and again for 10 years. And then in an instant it changed. And that instant came quickly. That instant actually was January 28th, 2025 — about a week after he became president. That was the day that Donald Trump publicly announced that the first visitor to the White House, the first foreign head of state to visit Washington in his term, would be Benjamin Netanyahu.
It didn't take long. In fact, it took exactly four days. Trump was inaugurated on January 20th. And on February 4th, Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, was at the White House. And what was he doing there? Just there to say hi, like he's friends with Trump? He was not friends with Trump. Trump despised him. Trump was still mad from four years before, when Netanyahu was the first foreign head of state to call Joe Biden and congratulate him on winning a victory that Trump claimed was not a victory but instead a theft. And Trump held a grudge and said so very often in public and in private. He was mad at Benjamin Netanyahu.
And yet eight days after becoming president, Netanyahu is the first person to visit the White House — eight days in, when there's a long slate of things to do, of problems to fix, of concerns to think about. There's a huge country of 340 million people to uplift and improve. But no, Benjamin Netanyahu came first. Here's the first press conference between the two. This is again February 4th, 2025.
Donald Trump: "BB, I want to say it's an honor to have you with us. Over the past four years, the US and the Israeli alliance has been tested more than any time in history. But the bonds of friendship and affection between the American and Israeli people have endured for generations and they are absolutely unbreakable. They are unbreakable. And I'm also pleased to announce that this afternoon the United States withdrew from the anti-semitic UN Human Rights Council and ended all of the support for the UN Relief and Works Agency, which funneled money to Hamas and which was very disloyal to humanity. Today I also took action to restore a maximum pressure policy on the Iranian regime, and we will once again enforce the most aggressive possible sanctions."
Benjamin Netanyahu: "I've said this before, I'll say it again — you are the greatest friend Israel has ever had in the White House."
Tucker Carlson: Oh man. You knew there was trouble coming. Because honestly, Israel's had some pretty great friends in the White House. In fact, they've all been friends. But to be the greatest friend they've ever had. And then you watch the new president say it's an unbreakable bond — this connection between Israel and the United States. How can the US have an unbreakable bond with a foreign country? The only unbreakable bond that a president has is with his own citizens, with his country, his people. That's who elected him. That's who gave him the plane. All of his authority, all of his power, his place in history comes from his people. That's our system. But no, the only unbreakable bond was with Israel.
And right there on February 4th, days after getting there, the president describes his real plan, which is to get tough with Iran. Iran — didn't you just tell us the other day that we weren't having a war with Iran? So a lot of us at that point felt sick. We'd seen this movie before. It was obvious, very obvious, that this wasn't a snap decision that Trump had made. That at some point over the preceding months, he decided to take a completely different course from the one he described in public. That there was another agenda that he was not describing in public, and that it was going to be hard to stop it.
And so there were really only two responses. One was to try and stop it — to do everything you could to bring the public's attention to this. This could happen. We could wind up in a regime change war with Iran. We said that repeatedly and were attacked for it. "Oh, you're panicking, you're crazy. We're not going to have a regime change war with Iran. We're just taking out their nuclear program. Not a big deal." Of course, as every president has promised to do since the beginning of time. But it was clear what was coming that day, February 4th.
Immigration Enforcement and Its Priorities
But a lot of us thought, well, maybe we can stop that. That's so crazy it couldn't possibly happen. And in the meantime, there's one campaign promise we know he's going to make good on, because he's been running on this since 2015, since he came down the escalator. This country has a border. Its integrity should be enforced. Its laws are real. You can't just show up here illegally and get benefits. You have to leave and come here legally. We've got tens of millions of illegal aliens living in this country. And Trump was elected, if on no other issue, on the promise to fix that — to make people go home. And if you want to come here, go to the embassy in your country and apply like everybody else. Because if you don't have to obey our laws, then why do the rest of us have to obey our laws? Why should foreign nationals who give the finger to our legal code get a pass while you make a mistake on your tax form or on your federal gun purchasing form and go to jail? That's not sustainable. That's not a real country. You've got to fix that.
So we thought, okay, this Iran thing is nuts — it's so nuts it probably can't happen. The US isn't capable of fighting a war against Iran. And despite all the talk about the greatest military in the world, anyone who really pays close attention knows we can't do this, actually. So in the meantime, at least we've got immigration enforcement — not to be mean to immigrants or shoot people in the street, but just to enforce the law, which is a baseline requirement not just of a country but of civilization itself.
And so it was a little confusing when the Trump administration began to enforce immigration law. Because the first high-profile immigration case was not against illegal aliens. It was against legal immigrants. It was against people with green cards. It's hard to get a green card. Actually, if you've ever known someone who's tried to get one in the United States, it's not easy. It can be very tough. In fact, people who are married to American citizens, legitimately married, sometimes can't get green cards. So the very first high-profile immigration case was against people with green cards who were here legally, with jobs or as students. Why, you wondered when you first saw this, are they going after people who — I mean, maybe you could make a case for that, but after you do something about the tens of millions of people who are here totally illegally, not to mention the criminal aliens who are here actually committing a lot of crimes? And what about the Haitian dog eaters? They were eating dogs and some cats — obviously not as great a concern, but still, it's the principle of the thing. What about all those people? Nope.
The first big immigration story was this. And we're going to let you watch the new Secretary of State explain why people were rounded up and forced to leave. Watch this.
Marco Rubio: "And if you tell us when you apply for your visa — and by the way, I intend to come to your country as a student and rile up all kinds of anti-Jewish, anti-semitic activities, I intend to shut down your universities — if you told us all these things when you applied for a visa, we would deny your visa. I hope we would. If you actually end up doing that once you're in this country on such a visa, we will revoke it. And if you end up having a green card — not citizenship, but a green card — as a result of that visa while you're here in those activities, we're going to kick you out. It's as simple as that. This is not about free speech. This is about people that don't have a right to be in the United States to begin with."
Tucker Carlson: Well, it's not about free speech, probably, actually, because these aren't American citizens. It's about how American law is enforced. It's about priorities. When you've got tens of millions of people here illegally, a lot of them — some of them anyway — members of murderous drug cartels, when you've got Haitian dog eaters, you go after people with green cards for anti-Jewish, anti-semitic activity. Okay. What does that mean exactly? Were these people who were arrested for hate crimes against Jewish people? No, they weren't. They were people who complained about the official policies of a foreign government — Israel. It was people who weighed in on an ancient and contentious dispute in a nation 6,000 miles away.
Now, no matter what side of that you're on — and at this point, given all we know about how Israel has treated Palestinians in the occupied territories, in the West Bank and Gaza, it's pretty hard to be on Israel's side. I don't think any decent person, knowing what has actually happened, could take Israel's side in that. Doesn't seem possible. Maybe. But it doesn't matter what side you're on as a matter of US government policy. If the first big immigration bust is not of drug cartels or even dog eaters, but of people who criticize a foreign nation, and then the Secretary of State himself gets up and gives a self-righteous press conference calling criticism of a foreign government a hate crime — you know that you have descended to the lowest level of identity politics.
What's identity politics? Identity politics is the policy of giving special rights to people on the basis of how they were born. Now, one of the main things that Donald Trump ran against was identity politics, because identity politics invalidates the concept of citizenship. No, we're not all equal. Actually, no, we don't all live under the same law. No, we don't all have to follow the same rules. Some groups, by virtue of how they were born, have a whole separate set of rules. And most people, regardless of party, would acknowledge if asked that that's immoral, and it's also not sustainable. You can't have a country where there's no working majority of any group, in which certain groups get a leg up over other groups with the help of the government, because that will fall apart. In fact, it will fall apart in a recognizable way — it will devolve into conflict, group against group.
And there are all kinds of conservatives who made a powerful and cogent and true case against identity politics for the entire span of the Biden administration, because the Biden administration overall was an egregious offender in this category. Certain groups had more rights than others under Joe Biden, and certain groups were singled out for non-stop abuse. White men — they were the problem, remember that. And people hated that. And not just right-wingers. Any normal person hates that. This country can't work unless every person has identical rights — not just under the law, but under God, has rights as a human being. That's why we have a human rights commission, which may be dopey or ineffective, but the idea of human rights is real because human rights themselves are real, and they're the basis of our founding documents.
So the second you spend all of your energy, the second you use the entire weight of federal law to protect one group to the exclusion of other groups, that's the end.
Ted Cruz and the Republican Party's Direction
So here was the guy who ran against that doing it.
Ted Cruz: "I came into Congress 13 years ago with the stated intention of being the leading defender of Israel in the United States Senate. And I've worked every day to do that. AIPAC — a lot of times AIPAC, I wish, were much more effective."
Tucker Carlson: So that's Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. Now why are we playing that? A couple of reasons. Ted Cruz is the opposite of Donald Trump — not simply because they ran against each other famously in 2016, but because they have completely different worldviews. Ted Cruz is kind of the end stage of a conventional Republican: completely disconnected from his own voters, wedded to slogans minted when he was in grade school — "peace through strength," or whatever, some Reagan-era slogan that may have some truth in it but isn't really relevant to the problems we face right now — and who at the end of the day is personally corrupt, which Ted Cruz is, and is an undisguised tool of his donors. But more than anything, Ted Cruz — and you just heard him say it, in probably the most famous thing Ted Cruz has ever said — Ted Cruz is a tool of a foreign power. Not in a stealthy way. Ted Cruz will just say, "I was elected to the United States Senate from Texas, our second biggest state, to serve Israel." Like, that was the whole reason I did it — was to serve a foreign country.
Now, if Ted Cruz had said that, or any senator had said that, about any other country — "I got elected to this body to make sure Malaysia had a best friend, that Madagascar never had a stronger advocate than me, that China got full representation in the legislative branch of the US government" — people would look askance. There'd probably be an arrest warrant issued for you if you said something like that. And probably deservedly so. But Ted Cruz just said it out loud: "I'm here to serve Israel." And he has done his best — limited by his natural limitations, but he's tried hard to serve Israel. And that's why there's probably never been a pointless war that Ted Cruz hasn't endorsed.
Ted Cruz is exactly the guy Trump ran against in name in 2016 and in spirit in 2024. And yet, fast forward two years — is anything you just heard Ted Cruz say, is anything Ted Cruz says every day on Twitter, materially different from the policies of the Trump administration?
"Oh, that's not fair," you say. Really? Okay, then. Tonight, right now, as we speak, is the beginning of the midterm Republican convention — an event in Texas held for the next two days by the Republican Party to gin up support and enthusiasm and of course money for the midterm election efforts of the Republican Party. And the speaker list is absolutely fascinating. It's online and you should take a look at it. But on that speaker list, guess who? Ted Cruz. How many people, how many Republican primary voters in this last election, 2024, would have imagined that less than two years into his term, Donald Trump would be asking Ted Cruz to speak at his convention — that Ted Cruz would be the voice of the Trump administration and the Republican Party?
Because in addition to his many other titles, Donald Trump is the head of the Republican Party. And of course he has veto power over the speaker's list. He can have anyone he wants or no one at all. And he chose Ted Cruz. And why wouldn't he? They no longer disagree on anything.
Why Republicans Will Get Crushed
So to sum up: if you think Ted Cruz is the future of the Republican Party, if you think Ted Cruz is the future of the United States, then go ahead and vote for that party. But if you find the idea of putting a foreign country before your own country, the citizens of another nation before your own people — if you find that repugnant, immoral, if you think it should be illegal — then you're probably not going to vote for it. And so maybe that's why, in the end, the Republican Party is going to get spanked pretty hard in the midterm elections. Not just because Trump is loud and obnoxious and people object to the way he presents things, but because the ideas that undergird these policies are disgusting and wrong, and they're going to be repudiated at the ballot box.
Hard to know if we'll get something better. Probably not. It's not an endorsement of Democrats. Hardly. It's an expression of pain at the betrayal that all of us have experienced. So keep that in mind the day after the election. Thank you.