Right-wing pundit Tucker Carlson is now having a sad about the most powerful military in the world being controlled by a doddering narcissist who couldn’t point to Iran on a map.

“You and I and everyone else who supported him, you wrote speeches for him, I campaigned for him, I mean, we’re implicated in this for sure,” Carlson said on his podcast on Monday, talking with his brother, Republican strategist Buckley Carlson.

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“It’s not enough to say, ‘I changed my mind.’ Or like, ‘Oh, this is bad, I’m out.’ It’s like, in very small ways, but in real ways, you and me and millions of people like us are the reason this is happening right now.”

“So I do think it’s like a moment to wrestle with our own consciences. 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. That’s all I’ll say.”

After everything Carlson did, for him to claim that he misled people unintentionally takes a lot of gall. It’s not like he got one or two facts wrong; he lied to his audience almost constantly over the past decade about Trump.

In general, it’s fine for people to change their minds. Average voters, everyday citizens who regret their votes for Donald Trump? They should be praised and welcomed back into the light.

But that’s not what’s going on here. Carlson doesn’t regret supporting Trump. He probably doesn’t actually regret lying to his millions of viewers about Trump to get them to support him as if he were a cult leader if he’s not yet willing to even admit that’s what he did.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Carlson wanted people to not just vote for Trump but to absolutely adore him. Remember how he would introduce Trump at his rallies?

“Dad comes home. He’s pissed. Dad is pissed,” Carlson said at an October 2024 rally in Duluth. “And when dad gets home, you know what he says? ‘You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl, and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now.’”

“‘I’m not going to lie. It’s going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me. And you earned this. You’re getting a vigorous spanking because you’ve been a bad girl. You’re only going to get better when you take responsibility for what you did. It has to be this way.’”

That’s not an even-tempered statement about who he was going to vote for. That’s not just an endorsement. That’s a call to arms for the most militant members of the Republican base, people who see the world through the same lens, where there are bad people who need to be punished in order to make everything good again, like it was when they were young.

The only way to get people to support Trump that fervently is to convince them that the other side is an existential threat. And since no one is going to believe that Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton or Kamala Harris are the essence of evil by calmly assessing the facts, Carlson resorted to lying. A lot.

A lot of those lies were intended to get people outraged about trans people so that they would vote for the candidate who spent a large part of the 2024 campaign season promising to repress trans rights.

For example, 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.

And Carlson’s lies weren’t just related to LGBTQ+ people. Perhaps most famously, Carlson repeatedly lied about the 2020 elections, saying when he was a Fox host that Trump actually won the election and that Biden had stolen it as part of a vast conspiracy (that left no evidence that could be shown in numerous court cases on the matter).

In private, Carlson was sending emails to Fox staffers saying Trump should concede the election, but on the air, he was saying that there were “legitimate concerns” about how votes were counted.

How is that not intentionally misleading people?

In 2023, Carlson said that the January 6 rioters were “right” to think that “the election they had just voted in had been unfairly conducted” and that “no honest person can deny it.”

He lied about numerous other issues, including claiming that officials were suppressing evidence that the COVID-19 vaccines were hurting people, and that Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) married her own brother. He even went on a propaganda tour of Russia, where he presented a sanitized view of life there that glossed over the country’s poverty rate.

Carlson has lied so much in his career that Media Matters declared him “Misinformer of the Year” in 2022. The next year, he was let go from Fox News.

Carlson believes that his audience is dumb, which is probably true. Many of them will probably believe that none of this was intentional.

But the rest of us can see that this is just Carlson jumping ship. He can see which way the wind is blowing. Trump is more unpopular than ever, and his unpopularity stems from his inability to make any good decisions. Carlson has been critical of Trump’s war on Iran, something that no one forced Trump to start, and is the sort of mistake that Trump will never learn from, so he’s likely to make similarly unpopular moves over the next few years.

Carlson is smart enough to recognize that Trump’s popularity is only going one way from here on out. So he’s jumping ship and distancing himself from Trump without actually taking responsibility for what he clearly did: intentionally mislead people to get them to support Trump.

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