Trump Loses a Decade-Long Conservative Ally as Iran War Splits MAGA

Tucker Carlson Criticizes Trump in Wall Street Journal Interview

“I Feel Betrayed” as War Fallout Spreads

The war with Iran is splitting MAGA, President Donald Trump’s core political base. Tucker Carlson, one of the most prominent voices on the American right, said he regrets backing Trump and criticized the president over the conflict.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal published April 25, Carlson said, “I don’t hate Trump. I just hate this war and the direction the U.S. government is taking. I feel betrayed.”

He also asked why the U.S. government “can’t act on behalf of its own citizens.” Carlson called it a generational problem rather than one that began with Trump, adding that Trump had merely shown the system was more powerful than he was.

Carlson said he broke with Trump on Feb. 28, when the Iran war began. He said he visited the White House three times and spoke with Trump day and night in an effort to stop the war, but failed.

“Unfortunately, Trump ended up proving his own claim that the people who run the government think only of themselves,” Carlson said. “That may be a way to run an authoritarian system, but it is not a way to run a liberal democracy.”

Carlson, a former anchor at CNN and Fox News, has long been regarded as one of the media figures closest to Trump. He launched his own podcast in 2023 and now has 6 million followers.

Carlson also played a role in shaping Trump’s second administration, including Vice President JD Vance’s selection, the Journal said. The newspaper described Carlson as “the most popular conservative commentator in America” and said he has become the face of the anti-war faction dividing the MAGA movement. It added that the friendship between the two men, who spent nearly a decade reshaping the modern conservative movement together, appears to have shattered.

On his podcast on April 20, Carlson said he expected to be troubled by the fact that he had supported a president at war. He also said he wanted to tell people, “I’m sorry for misleading you.”

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Carlson was a staunch Trump ally and gave speeches backing him. He supported Trump in part because of the president’s pledge not to start “new wars” overseas, including in the Middle East.

But the relationship began to fray after Trump’s second administration took office. Carlson criticized Trump over the airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities in June 2025. Trump responded by calling Carlson a “weirdo.” Carlson also criticized the U.S. overthrow by force of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January 2026.

The relationship appeared to improve when Carlson accompanied Trump to a January 2026 meeting with oil-industry executives. Trump pointed to Carlson at the time and said he was a “very famous conservative” and a “WASP,” an acronym for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant that refers to a traditional upper-class establishment group in the US.

But at about 10 p.m. on Feb. 27, the day before the attack on Iran, Carlson said he received a message reading, “We’re going,” meaning an attack was imminent. “I simply couldn’t believe this was really going to happen,” he said, recalling the moment.

As Carlson continued to criticize the Iran war, Trump attacked him on April 17, saying, “Tucker is a low-IQ person” and “overrated.”

Park Su-bin, Hankyung.com reporter waterbean@hankyung.com