Longtime Trump supporter Tucker Carlson told President Donald Trump, “You have failed,” during the Wednesday edition of The Tucker Carlson Show. In his rant, Carlson said the president has abandoned everyday Americans and has contempt for them, Mediaite reported.
“You certainly hate them because they are a reminder of how you have failed,” Carlson said. “You have not done a good job running this country. You don’t even care to try. You’d rather run the world or the empire. You don’t want to improve Baltimore. You don’t care about Gary, Indiana. Rural America makes you sick… Normal leaders would ask themselves, ‘Why are people mad? What are they dissatisfied with? How can I help them? They’re clearly in pain.’”
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“They’ve never looked inward once in 10 years,” he continued. “And now they’ve reached the point of maximum frustration, where the biggest thing they’ve ever done, which is try to regime-change the Iranian government, and it hasn’t worked. That’s the biggest thing they’ve ever done. They staked everything on that. And you should just know that at this point, now that that’s not working out, they will not be mad at themselves. They’re gonna be mad at you for not liking it or appreciating it or for talking about it at all. Or for holding on to your outdated expectations about what life in this country was like then and should be now.”
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On April 21, Carlson apologized for endorsing Trump, saying, “You know, we’ll be tormented by it for a long time. I will be, and I want to say I’m sorry for misleading people. It was not intentional…. It’s not enough to say, ‘Well, I changed my mind,’ … You and me and millions of people like us for the reason this is happening right now.”
Many interpreted his remorse as a way to maintain his own brand while distancing himself from the increasingly unpopular president and his failing administration.
Tucker Carlson has a long, weird anti-gay fixation
Tucker Carlson has a long history of anti-LGBTQ+ behavior, including a weird fixation on former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s sex life.
In September 2025, Carlson said he wanted to ask Buttigieg some “very specific questions about gay sex” because he thinks Buttigieg is a “fake gay.” Buttigieg replied by saying, “First of all, I do not think I want to discuss anything with Tucker Carlson. But I cannot think of anything I would want to discuss less with Tucker Carlson than that.”
In a July 2024 episode of Carlson’s show — hosted on X, the social media platform owned by transphobic right-wing billionaire Elon Musk — Carlson called Buttigieg “supposedly gay” and said that one of his show’s gay producers told him that Buttigieg “is not gay.” “Gays all keep close track of that stuff,” Carlson said, offering no real proof of his absurd claim.
“My producer goes, ‘It’s totally a pose. He was dating women just a few years ago. It’s totally fake. He’s not gay at all,’” Carlson said. He added that he once said this previously on the air, and “people got all offended. I thought it was kind of hilarious.”
Carlson has previously described Buttigieg as effeminate and told viewers that Buttigieg “breastfeeds” his adopted twin babies. Buttigieg responded by saying, “I guess he just doesn’t understand the concept of bottle-feeding.”
Carlson called supporting LGBTQ+ rights “child sacrifice” as he discussed a hockey team posting a Pride message in 2023. He accused doctors of trying to “castrate, sterilize, and mutilate minors” as he whipped up rage against a Tennessee hospital that provided care for trans kids and teens. He said that trans people are “Satanic” and the “natural enemies” of Christians in the wake of a shooting at a Christian school.
Carlson’s 1991 Trinity College yearbook lists him as a member of the “Dan White Society” and the “Jesse Helms Foundation.” White is the person who assassinated Harvey Milk, the groundbreaking out politician who urged gay people to “come out.” Helms, the late Republican senator from North Carolina, was notoriously racist and viciously anti-gay.
In 1990, Carlson wrote in his college newspaper that homosexuality was“unnatural and unhealthy.” In 2007, Carlson went on MSNBC Live to brag about the time he beat up a gay man in a bathroom.
In his 2023 book Network of Lies, journalist Brian Stelter said that Carlson was dismissed from Fox News in April of that year because “Carlson’s escalating toxicity, which included an undercurrent of white supremacy and a penchant for demeaning women and minorities, led Lachlan Murdoch, the then chief executive of Fox Corp, to [fire Carlson],” The Guardian reported.
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