A day after Tucker Carlson spent his opening monologue criticizing California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the Fox News host was surprised to hear that the Democrat used to “get along great” with Donald Trump when he was president and would praise him often—at least, according to Trump.
Newsom, often a villain in the eyes of Fox News opinion hosts, contributors and guests, was mentioned warmly by the former president when responding to Carlson’s question about potential Democratic presidential candidates should Joe Biden not end up running for re-election. (Biden has said that he intends on doing so.)
“You have a very ambitious guy in California, but he’s done a terrible job with the state,” Trump said of the governor, who was elected in 2018, won a recall election in September 2021, and secured a second term last fall.
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“I used to get along great with him, you know, when I was president. Got along really good,” Trump said to a wide-eyed Carlson. “He was always very nice to me. Said the greatest things. He would say things like, ‘He’s doing a great job.’”
“About you?” Carlson asked in disbelief.
“About me. That’s why I could never hit him because he was so nice to me. Just laying in wait, right? But he was very nice to me—relatively speaking. Some of them weren’t. We did a good job for the governors. But they talk about him.”
Trump’s comments came in his first interview since being arraigned in Manhattan last Tuesday on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. He also made a familiar claim when he insisted that at his arraignment, courthouse workers were so upset by his situation that they were not only “crying,” but apologized to him.
Interestingly, the Mar-a-Lago interview was conducted by Tucker Carlson and not Sean Hannity, a one-time informal Trump adviser whose face-to-face and telephone conversations on the air with the ex-president have occurred much more frequently than Carlson's.
During their conversation, neither Carlson nor Trump made any overt reference to the Fox News host’s opinion of the twice-impeached former president, as texted to an unnamed staffer in a Jan. 2021 message: “I hate him passionately.”
That revealing remark was included in documents released last month as part of Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News. Carlson’s characterization of Trump during the Jan. 6 insurrection as a “demonic force” also has garnered headlines for the Fox News staple, who has gone to bat numerous times for those who participated in the deadly riot during his weeknight broadcasts and in a Fox Nation documentary.
That those texts went public may have actually served to bring the pair closer. Carlson “doesn’t hate me, or at least, not anymore!” Trump posted on Truth Social last month.
For his part, Carlson has gushed over Trump in recent weeks, declaring his “love” for him during a radio interview and calling Trump’s appearance at an Ohio McDonalds “unbelievable.”
