An Apr. 12 USA Today headline declares, “Tucker Carlson calls Donald Trump ‘slave’ to Israel amid Iran war.” The article, by James Powel and Zac Anderson, quotes Tucker Carlson extensively, who claims that he feels “sorry for [Trump], as I do for all slaves,” that the president “can’t make his own decisions,” and that he is a “slave to [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu.”
The article consists of 534 words, 267 of which, exactly half, are dedicated to quoting the notable conspiracy theorist Carlson. The rest of the article covers how some other past supporters of the president also object to the war.
Tucker Carlson, by his own telling, is “not a conservative at all on foreign policy” (Photo by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
As if the narrative wasn’t blatant enough, even one of the links takes readers to another piece by Anderson, claiming that “conservatives” object to the war. The other article also cites Carlson, as well as former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and private military contractor Erik Prince, as examples of these anti-war conservatives.
Carlson was a poor choice. Nearly ten years ago, he stated, “I’m not much of an economic conservative, and I’m not conservative at all on foreign policy.” Neither Greene nor Prince is particularly representative of the conservative movement. Greene, for example, has taken positions contrary to conservative sacred cows, such as expanding healthcare provisions and anti-Zionism, had no political background beyond moderating a Facebook group before running for office, and has been denounced by the gatekeeping conservative journal, National Review. Another bizarre choice by the authors was citing Joe Rogan, a former supporter of socialist Senator Bernie Sanders. The article ends with a poll suggesting the president’s unfavorable rating among Republicans is due to his handling of the war.
It is difficult to decide whether this is lazy journalism or activism masquerading as reporting. First, the writers conflate far-right figures with everyday conservatives. Second, they find the shrillest but least thoughtful critics of the war within the MAGA orbit, a curious move since there are plenty of intelligent critics. Third, they cite personalities with repugnant views, without disclosing these beliefs to their readers. And last, and most problematic, they quote Carlson without verifying his remarks.
Let us begin with the last point. The lowest hanging fruit would have been providing contrary evidence to the claim that Trump is a “slave” of Netanyahu. They could have cited Netanyahu, who recently rebuked these criticisms, saying, “Can anyone tell Trump what to do?” It is also worth adding that Trump coerced Israel to end the Twelve-Day War, profanely lashing out at Netanyahu, shaming him publicly in this quest. Last week, Trump pressured Israel into agreeing to negotiate with the Lebanese government and reducing its attacks in Lebanon, culminating in a 10-day ceasefire announced on Apr. 16, 2026 (the ceasefire was announced after the USA Today report was published).
While platforming his views, USA Today fails to give its audience a sense of Carlson’s credibility, or lack thereof. The political firebrand Carlson has promoted the “white replacement [conspiracy] theory,” which suggests that Jews are actively trying to replace America’s white population through mass migration. He has also called Nazi apologist Darryl Cooper “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.”
The paper similarly fails with the other sources. Greene previously stated that Jews used a spacer laser to cause wildfires in California. There is little evidence to believe that Rogan is himself a Jew hater, but his judgment on the matter is at best questionable. The podcaster regularly hosts Jew-haters such as Dave Smith and Cooper on his show and once estimated that there are between 500 million and a billion Jews in the world. (There are approximately 16 million).
The trope of the manipulative Jew forcing America into wars is not new. In 1990, paleoconservative, presidential adviser and notorious Jew-hater Patrick Buchanan opposed the U.S. effort to purge the Iraqi military from Kuwait, arguing that America was doing so to appease Israel. On the widely watched McLaughlin Group, he said, “it will be American kids with names like McAllister, Murphy, Gonzales, and Leroy Brown,” generic gentile names, who would fight that war, in contrast with the advocates of the war, whom he identified as Norman Podhoretz, Henry Kissinger, Richard Perle, and A.M. Rosenthal, all Jews. Then, unlike today, the mainstream press did not indulge him.
Quality journalism requires curiosity, skepticism, and an appreciation for nuance. A good journalist would have cited thoughtful critics of the war, not Carlson, a racist kook whom only 17 percent of Americans and 34 percent of self-proclaimed conservatives view positively. Even the “influencer” argument fails, considering that 90 percent of Republicans support the war, belying Carlson’s reach.
In contrast, a stenographer would have typed out Carlson’s remarks and left it at that.
But Powel and Anderson took it even further by including only voices from the minority who agree with Carlson, rather than any that might challenge his statements.
We must then consider a third possibility: that the authors are more interested in being activists than journalists. They do not cite respectable critics because such personalities would not blame Jews for a decision made by the president of the United States.
Jew hatred has been rampant since Oct. 7, 2023, and anti-Jewish tropes are becoming mainstream. Instead of shunning and challenging the hateful ramblings of the likes of Buchanan, as the mainstream media did in the 1990s, today these outlets are effectively adopting the bigoted conspiracy theories of the likes of Carlson as their own.