The New York Times released a nearly two-hour interview with Tucker Carlson on Saturday, recorded by Lulu Garcia-Navarro at his cabin in Maine for the paper's podcast "The Interview." Carlson covered his break with Trump over the Iran war, his close friendship with VP JD Vance, his attacks on Marco Rubio, his regret over interviewing Nick Fuentes, and his theory that Trump might legalize cannabis to "lower testosterone levels." He also denied saying Trump could be the Antichrist. The Times then played a clip of him saying exactly that. Trump publicly called him "low IQ" and "not MAGA."

Watch the interview here:

1. He's Not MAGA, He's A Loser Trying To Latch On (Trump, hawkish wing)

Carlson is a former ally who turned on the war, the party, and the president, and the president is done pretending otherwise.

Trump is outraged. In a Truth Social post, Trump named Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, and Alex Jones together: "I know why Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, and Alex Jones have all been fighting me for years... Because they have one thing in common, Low IQs." He concluded: "They're not 'MAGA,' they're losers, just trying to latch on to MAGA."

The president repeated the line in print. In a separate New York Post interview, Trump called Carlson "a fool and irrelevant to his decision-making," adding: "Tucker's a low IQ person that has absolutely no idea what's going on." The framing matters: Trump is not engaging with the antiwar argument, he is reading Carlson out of the movement.

The interview itself confirmed Carlson is no longer inside the tent. Carlson took swings at Marco Rubio in the NYT interview, accusing Rubio's camp of "nonstop treachery" against Vance and saying White House figures wanted Rubio as VP from day one. Whatever you make of the substance, that is not the language of someone with a White House badge.

2. One of Us Had To Say It (America First antiwar wing)

The Iran war is unpopular with the MAGA base, and Carlson is one of the only figures with the audience to make that case at scale.

The break with Trump on Iran is not just Carlson's. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (who resigned from Congress in January) said the same thing in late February. Massie wrote: "This is not 'America First.'" Greene said: "We voted for America First and ZERO wars." Carlson's contribution is platform, not novelty — he has one of the largest audiences in conservative media after Trump himself.

He has been blunt about what the strikes were. Carlson called the original Feb. 28 air operation against Iran "absolutely disgusting and evil" — the same language the antiwar left used, but coming from inside MAGA media. To his audience, he is doing exactly what he was hired to do: tell them when the leadership has betrayed the platform they voted for.

On the substance, his interview emphasized economic opportunity for young Americans. Carlson told the Times the most important issue for young people long-term is "access to economic opportunity," not foreign wars. That is the original 2016 America First message: stop spending blood and treasure abroad and rebuild at home. From this view, Carlson hasn't drifted — Trump did.

3. He Was Caught Lying (Garcia-Navarro and the receipts)

The interview's news wasn't the politics, it was a man flatly denying his own broadcast and getting the recording played back at him.

Carlson outright denied calling Trump the Antichrist. Pressed by Garcia-Navarro on whether he had ever raised the suggestion, Carlson said: "Those words never left my lips." When she read back the line he had said on his own show — "Here's a leader mocking the gods of his ancestors... Could this be the Antichrist?" — Carlson held the line: "I actually did not say 'could this be the Antichrist.'"

The Times then played the clip. A video of Carlson saying exactly that was released alongside the interview. Carlson's response: "Then my apologies to you, if there's a video of me saying that." The full sequence — denial, doubled-down denial, audio rolling, retreat — is the most-circulated moment from the entire two hours.

Other moments did not help. Carlson described Trump's effect on people as "literally... a spell" and floated that Trump might legalize cannabis to "lower testosterone levels" and make people "more passive." He said he regretted interviewing white-nationalist commentator Nick Fuentes — "totally not worth it" — then said Sen. Ted Cruz and U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee were "far worse" than Fuentes, calling Cruz "just so repulsive." The cumulative impression is of a commentator improvising in real time.

4. He's Building A Conspiracy (Michelle Goldberg, NYT critics)

The bigger story isn't an awkward gotcha, it's that Carlson is slowly building a monumental conspiracy.

The "apology" is doing something other than apologizing. Carlson recently posted a long conversation with his brother Buckley, a former Trump speechwriter, in which Tucker said sorry for misleading people. NYT columnist Michelle Goldberg's read: rather than honestly reckoning with their role in America's derangement, the brothers are developing a new conspiracy theory to explain it away — one in which Trump has been "compromised — maybe even blackmailed and physically threatened — by Zionist or globalist forces."

The framing turns recent history into a single hidden hand. In the brothers' conversation, Buckley described the George Floyd protests, mass migration, and the Iran war as "clearly... a long-term plan," not a confluence of events. Goldberg called this a direct echo of "the stab-in-the-back myth that blamed Jews for Germany's defeat after World War I."

Rationalizing your own bad bets becomes dangerous when it requires a villain. As Goldberg put it: "This need that some MAGA apostates feel to rationalize their previous poor judgment can be harmless, if irritating. It's dangerous only when they insist on creating a scapegoat." The Maine interview, on this read, is the same project at scale: never quite reckoning with the years Carlson spent boosting Trump, just relocating the blame to a vaguer enemy with familiar anti-semetic coding.

Where This Lands

The strongest case for Carlson is that he is doing something almost no one else with his audience will do — breaking with the president of his own movement over a war his audience opposes — and that the antiwar message itself is real, popular, and consistent with what MAGA was originally sold as. The strongest case against is that the interview kept making the case for the prosecution: a flat denial caught on tape, a weird cannabis-testosterone theory, and a deeper apology that critics read as scapegoating.

Sources