by Jonathan S. Tobin
The antisemitic podcaster’s joust with Mike Huckabee showed that his goal is to sabotage the administration. Will Trump and Vance finally denounce him?
Anyone who had watched Tucker Carlson’s podcast over the last 18 months knew that the former Fox News
host was both obsessed with Israel and had long since crossed over from
strident criticism of the Jewish state to flagrant and often manic
antisemitism. From the moment he hosted faux historian and Holocaust
denier Daryl Cooper in September 2024 to his equally fawning interview
with groyper neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes in October 2025, and on to the
present, Carlson’s popular program has increasingly become the home of
increasingly extreme anti-Israel and anti-Jewish conspiracy theories and
rhetoric.
But his interview with U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike
Huckabee, conducted at Ben-Gurion International Airport (so Carlson
would not have to actually spend any time in Israel), was the
CliffsNotes version of the previous year-and-a-half worth of videos he’s
produced. It consisted of Carlson spewing out scores of antisemitic
lies and myths about Jews and Israel, demanding that Huckabee, an
evangelical Christian, refute them. As JNS senior contributing writer
Ruthie Blum noted,
Huckabee did an excellent job of keeping his temper in the face of
Carlson’s infuriating mendacity and conspiracy-mongering, as well as
refuting many of them (while noting afterward that in the heat of the
moment, he understandably didn’t explode all of them).
While
Huckabee won the debate by any objective standard, Carlson wasn’t there
to engage in an exchange of ideas or get to the truth of any of the
“questions” he was asking. His goal was to undermine Huckabee and, by
extension, the pro-Israel policies of the administration the ambassador
represents. And it’s likely that, as bad as he looked in the video,
Carlson may think he’s succeeded in doing just that.
Smearing Huckabee
The
Jewish and Israeli media have been filled with reports about the
encounter, with numerous attempts to compile and debunk the long list of
untruths Carlson sought to popularize. The only angle of it that
interested most of the mainstream liberal corporate media in the United
States and elsewhere was a story generated by Carlson’s release of an
edited clip from the interview, which attempted to claim that Huckabee
favored Israel taking over all of the Middle East. Huckabee said nothing
of the kind; in fact, he made the point that whatever conclusions one
could draw from parts of the Bible, all Israel wants is for the Arab and
Muslim world to recognize the right of the Jewish people to live in
sovereignty and security over that portion of their ancestral homeland
where they currently reside.
But in a blatant example of the
horseshoe politics in which the far left and the far right—not to
mention the red-green alliance of Marxists and Islamists join
hands—liberal media outlets like The New York Times, Politico and the BBC
jumped on the distorted Carlson clip to attack the Trump administration
and Huckabee. Though none of those outlets claim to have much use for
an extremist right-winger like Carlson, they were happy to take his lead
if it meant allowing them to take a shot at the familiar object of
their hostility: Trump. The upshot of the story was that Carlson had
managed to gin up a controversy and to incite various Arab and Muslim
countries to condemn Huckabee and demand explanations from Washington.
Equally unsurprising was the way Al Jazeera—the massively influential internet and broadcast giant owned by the Qatari government that dominates media in the Muslim world—embraced
the story and claimed that Carlson deserves credit for exposing the way
Trump was undermining U.S. national interests by supporting Israel,
even if the truth is just the opposite.
That a notorious
supporter of the Islamist emirate like Carlson would be on the same page
as an outlet renowned for its reflexive and vicious anti-Americanism is
no surprise to those who have followed his recent career. And it puts
his astonishing claim to be the person who knows the meaning of “America
First” better than Trump in perspective.
More importantly, it
may force Trump and Carlson’s heretofore close friend and ally, Vice
President JD Vance, to finally draw a necessary conclusion about their
dealings with him.
Trump is fed up
Over the
course of the last month, I had heard from various informed sources that
while many people have been voicing outrage about Carlson still being
welcome in the White House despite his vile Jew-hatred, the inside story
was that Trump is deeply unhappy about his onetime ally’s behavior.
Administration staffers were telling Trump and Vance that Carlson’s war
on the tens of millions of evangelical Christians who are Zionists, and
as a result, making common cause with anti-Israel left-wing Democrats
like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, had the potential to cost the
GOP seats in the midterms later this year. As has now become public, the president has told him in no uncertain terms that he expected him to stop attacking Israel and the Jews.
Instead
of doing that, Carlson is doubling down on his anti-Israel crusade.
He’s also seeking to take down a Trump loyalist like Huckabee and, by
extension, derail the entire thrust of U.S. policies aimed at ensuring
that the Islamist regime in Iran cannot continue to threaten the region
with nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles and terrorism.
The
focus on his slanders and smears of the State of Israel, President Isaac
Herzog, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and traditional tropes of
antisemitism, such as those that claim that Jews today are not descended
from their ancestors in antiquity, is understandable. But serious
observers need to acknowledge that the only real fallout from his battle
with Huckabee is that Carlson is forcing Trump and Vance to make a
decision about their continued association with him.
In the past
year, Trump has brushed back Carlson’s attacks on his Iran policy by
terming the podcaster “kooky.” And as the grandparent of Jewish
children, the president said he didn’t like antisemites or want them in
his coalition.
Nevertheless, Carlson has managed to hang on
inside the Trump inner circle, maintaining his friendship with Donald
Trump Jr. and with Vance, even if at times that has seemed to be more in
the guise of the court jester of Mar-a-Lago than someone with any
influence on policy.
Does the GOP agree with Tucker?
Carlson
did, after all, get a prime-time speaking slot at the Republican
National Convention in 2024. More importantly, Vance took a stance of
neutrality about the debate over Carlson’s antisemitism last December at
a Turning Point USA gathering.
That Carlson has a large
audience of viewers and listeners can’t be denied. So, too, have fellow
Jew-haters like far-right commentator and podcaster Candace Owens, and
even Fuentes. The question is whether their followings are considerable
enough for the administration or Vance to think that they don’t wish to
alienate them, even if this association is damaging them with
evangelicals and working-class Republicans who put Trump back into the
White House in 2024.
Even as polls have shown a steep decline in
support for the Jewish state among Democrats and even among some
Republicans, and especially among young people, the vast majority of
Republicans remain pro-Israel. That is demonstrated by the fact that the
GOP caucuses in the House and Senate are almost unanimous in their
backing for Israel, with only libertarian outliers like Rep. Thomas
Massie (R-Ky.) or Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) being the exception, now that
the loony former Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Green has left Capitol
Hill, to the relief of her former colleagues.
It is possible to
imagine a scenario where the groypers take over Turning Point USA in the
wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination and use it to create a political
movement that will, as the progressives have done with the Democrats,
change the composition of the GOP congressional caucuses to reflect
their anti-Israel and antisemitic views. Indeed, some have estimated
that up to 40% of those young people now working for the administration
in Washington are influenced by Carlson, Owens and Fuentes. As the
Carrie Prejean Boller debacle showed this month, some of them have
wormed their way into Trump’s appointments to various federal
commissions. While that can’t be entirely ruled out as something that
might happen in the future, so far, there is little evidence that the
Republican Party is changing direction on Israel.
Just as crucial is the decision facing Vance.
He
may owe Carlson a lot—both for his crucial support for his Senate
primary campaign in 2022 and for helping to convince Trump to tap him as
his running mate only two years after he first won electoral office.
And, to date, he’s been stubbornly reluctant to cut him loose, despite
the increasing evidence of his extremism, antisemitism and determination
to undermine the administration he ostensibly supports.
Vance must decide
Still,
Vance, a rare intellectual in the world of politics, is not unaware
that this friendship is now costing him dearly in terms of his ability
to widen his base of support in advance of an expected presidential run
in 2028. The vice president may currently be the frontrunner for the GOP
nomination to succeed Trump by a wide margin. But he has to understand
that Carlson is an albatross that could hurt among Republicans and
eventually sink him in a general election.
Trump and Vance would
have preferred not to have been put in this position. All winning
electoral coalitions, whether led by Republicans or Democrats, are
inevitably diverse and include some people not in the mainstream for one
way or another. Part of the reason why Democrats lost in 2024 was the
way former President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris seemed
in thrall to woke left-wing extremists, though their party has concluded
that her defeat at the hands of Trump reportedly claimed that she lost because she was insufficiently anti-Israel to please the Democrats’ intersectional left-wing base.
As
for Carlson, his over-the-top antisemitism and willingness to attack
Trump administration policy have gotten to the point where it is more
than an embarrassment to Trump and Vance.
Simply put, their
association with him has become political poison. The notion of
continuing in their confidence at this point isn’t just offensive to
Jews and the majority of Americans who support Israel. It’s a clear
threat to their ability to govern effectively, as well as to hold onto
Congress and secure another GOP victory in 2028.
At some
point—and it can’t be too far into the future—they need to cut him off
and make it clear to the public that they have done so. If they don’t,
it will be a decision that will come back to haunt their party in 2026,
2028 and beyond.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of the Jewish News Syndicate, a senior contributor for The Federalist, a columnist for Newsweek and a contributor to many other publications. He covers the American political scene, foreign policy, the U.S.-Israel relationship, Middle East diplomacy, the Jewish world and the arts. He hosts the JNS “Think Twice” podcast, both the weekly video program and the “Jonathan Tobin Daily” program, which are available on all major audio platforms and YouTube. Previously, he was executive editor, then senior online editor and chief political blogger, for Commentary magazine. Before that, he was editor-in-chief of The Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia and editor of the Connecticut Jewish Ledger. He has won more than 60 awards for commentary, art criticism and other writing. He appears regularly on television, commenting on politics and foreign policy. Born in New York City, he studied history at Columbia University.
Source: https://www.jns.org/whats-the-real-point-of-tucker-carlsons-obsession-with-israel/
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