Tucker Carlson has called on President Donald Trump’s cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment and remove him from office.
Once a fervent MAGA supporter, Carlson said during an interview with NPR published Thursday morning that Trump, 80, should have been “removed from office immediately” after he threatened a “nuclear attack” on Iran.
“It’s enough for me to say he should be removed from office,” Carlson told NPR host Steve Inskeep.
The former Fox News host was likely referring to the president’s threat toward Iran in April, when he warned on Truth Social that “whole civilization will die tonight” if Tehran did not meet his demands. Since then, however, Trump has made threats of a similar vein, including during his speech at the United Nations on Thursday, where he said he could “annihilate” the Islamic Republic.
“He should have been removed from office by his own cabinet secretaries the moment he threatened a nuclear attack,” Carlson added, referring to invoking the 25th Amendment, which allows the vice president and a majority of the president’s cabinet to declare him unfit for duty.
Carlson, who was fired from Fox News after amplifying Trump’s 2020 election conspiracies on-air, publicly broke ranks with Trump after he and Israel launched a surprise war on Iran. The right-wing podcaster went so far as to apologize to his viewers for endorsing Trump, saying “we’ll be tormented by it for a long time… I want to say I’m sorry for misleading people.”
Since then, he has described Trump’s war in Iran as an “absolutely evil and disgusting” violation of his campaign pledge to end foreign conflicts abroad.
On Thursday, Carlson recounted to Inskeep what he said was his final conversation with Trump in the Oval Office before he started his deeply unpopular war.
“I said to Trump, you know, four days before the war started, ‘if you do this, you know, the United States will be kicked out of the Gulf,” Carlson recalled. “‘The American Empire will collapse…your legacy will be destroyed along with your party.’”
He then alleged that Trump replied: “Yes. You’re right, but in the end we all die anyway. So it doesn’t matter.”
A White House spokesperson did not reply to a request to confirm that this conversation took place.
Trump, for his part, has claimed Carlson has “lost his way.” In a Truth Social post in April, the president lumped his once-ally in with other MAGA rebels.
“I know why Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, and Alex Jones have all been fighting me for years,” he wrote. “Because they have one thing in common, Low IQs. They’re stupid people, they know it, their families know it, and everyone else knows it, too!”
