Newsmax host Eric Bolling took a pointed swipe at his former Fox News colleague Tucker Carlson on Wednesday night over recent revelations that Carlson privately admitted to hating former President Donald Trump “passionately.”
After the Trump-boosting Newsmax star said he “just can’t get past this,” MAGA superfan Kari Lake agreed that Carlson’s secret Trump hate “sounds awful” before she expressed hope that the Fox host has since “had a change of heart.”
Despite portraying himself publicly as a Trump-sympathetic figure, text exchanges dug up by Dominion Voting Systems in its $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit found the Fox News star repeatedly trashing the ex-president. “I hate him passionately,” Carlson texted an unknown Fox staffer just two days before the Jan. 6 insurrection, adding: “There isn’t really an upside to Trump.”
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With other messages showing Carlson calling Trump a “destroyer” and “demonic force,” Bolling said he just couldn’t understand how his ex-colleague would pretend to like Trump publicly while blasting him in private.
“You know, this whole revelation of the emails that Tucker Carlson at Fox was texting or emailing to—or texting to some of his producers and whatnot,” Bolling said. “And one of them is really disturbing to me. It's ‘I hate him passionately’—that Tucker said about President Trump.”
He continued: “I mean, how, how do you, like, I think people are giving Tucker a pass on this, but I just can’t. I just can’t get past this, Kari. I can’t understand how a guy who can portray himself as a huge Trump fan on television, saying he hates him passionately, is very, very much looking forward to the day he didn’t have to cover Trump being in the White House every day.”
Lake, the election-denying former Arizona gubernatorial candidate vying to be Trump’s 2024 running mate, attempted to give Carlson the benefit of the doubt, especially since Carlson is currently presenting a whitewashed version of the Capitol riots.
“Well, from the way you describe it, it sounds awful,” she replied. “I have not read the emails, so I’m reluctant to comment and say anything that would disparage Tucker because I haven’t read all of the emails to even know what context that was in. But it sure on the surface sounds awful. And hopefully, he’s had a change of heart and realizes that President Trump is the greatest president we’ve ever known, and he is the man to turn this around.”
Adding that she’s “happy” with the “work he’s doing to get the word out” about the Jan. 6 insurrection because “we have a lot of people who are political prisoners sitting in jail,” Lake demurred when it came to attacking Carlson any further.
“But I just don’t know enough about the context of those emails,” she said. “I haven’t read them myself. So I’m reluctant to comment on that.”
Of course, it should be noted that the Dominion filings show that Fox News executives and stars were increasingly concerned about losing viewers to Newsmax following the 2020 election because disgruntled MAGA supporters were upset over Fox’s early Arizona call for President Joe Biden. Dominion alleges that Fox News knowingly allowed baseless election fraud conspiracies to air in order to claw back viewers who were ditching Fox for smaller right-wing competitors.
Furthermore, Bolling—who left Fox News in 2017 amid sexual misconduct allegations—broadcasts his primetime Newsmax program head-to-head against Carlson’s much higher-rated Fox show. In its never-ending quest to compete for Fox’s audience, Newsmax has also repeatedly taken shots at Carlson. In fact, one former Newsmax host claims he was fired for refusing to “go after” the Fox News host.
