By Jonathan S. Tobin
(JNS) — 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, 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.
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 media was a 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 all Israel wants is for Muslim world to recognize the right of Jewish people to live in sovereignty.
But in a blatant example of the horseshoe politics liberal media outlets jumped on the distorted Carlson clip to attack the Trump administration and Huckabee. The upshot of the story was that Carlson had managed to incite various Muslim countries to condemn Huckabee.
More importantly, the interview 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 Carlson.
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 had the potential to cost the GOP seats in the midterms later this year. As has now become public, the president has told Carlson 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 derail the U.S. policies aimed at ensuring that Iran cannot continue to develop nuclear weapons.
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.
That Carlson has a large audience of viewers and listeners can’t be denied. 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.
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.