Tucker Carlson unloaded on the Republican party on a recent podcast, claiming the GOP had lost the Trump movement’s original “America First” message, the latest sign of the conservative commentator’s distance from the rest of the right amid backlash to his recent interview with Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes.
“On the Republican Party, which is almost to the point where it’s just useless, and I’m going to have to oppose it because I hate them too much, because they’re such betrayers,” Carlson told podcaster Shawn Ryan in a Monday episode where he ranted about how the party had ceased solving quality-of-life issues.
“They’re corrupt,” Carlson continued of the GOP donor and political class. “They don’t care that much or enough or at all about you. And they have an obligation to. So that’s the debate underway.”
In the interview, Carlson revisited the recent controversy over his Fuentes interview and claimed the white nationalist was mostly making an economic argument to his followers, not an identity one, comparing the commentator to Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist who recently won the New York City mayoral race by focusing on affordability issues.
“That’s the actual Fuentes message. I’m not an expert on Fuentes, OK, I interviewed him,” Carlson said. “But from what I could tell, he is angry because he feels that the conservative establishment, [podcaster] Ben Shapiro, all the way up to some idiot Republican senator, all of them are telling the same lie.”
Carlson has faced continued backlash for his Fuentes interview, which has caused division inside prominent right-wing think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and prompted criticism from fellow commentators including Ben Shapiro, though Trump has defended Carlson.
Despite Carlson’s framing of the interview with Fuentes as having an economic message, Fuentes in fact reiterated many of his core white and Christian nationalist views, complaining about “organized Jewry” and the importance of being “pro-white.”
The Carlson controversy is just one of multiple ongoing rifts in the larger Republican Party.
Separately, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene announced last week she will resign from Congress, following the former staunch Trump ally’s public falling out with the president over releasing the Epstein files and doing more to lower healthcare costs.
Greene reportedly isn’t the only Republican who wants to leave Congress.
“More explosive early resignations are coming,” an unnamed senior House Republican told Punchbowl News. “It’s a tinder box. Morale has never been lower.”
“This entire White House team has treated ALL members like garbage,” the lawmaker added. “And [House Speaker] Mike Johnson has let it happen because he wanted it to happen. That is the sentiment of nearly all — appropriators, authorizers, hawks, doves, rank and file.”
