Tucker Carlson and The Washington Post Distort Secretary Rubio’s Remarks

By: David Gerstman March 31, 2026

Speaking to reporters on Mar. 2, 2026, Secretary of State Marco Rubio carefully laid out the case why the United States went to war with Iran. He introduced his remarks by saying he would make the case “as clearly as possible.” He then exhorted them, “Perhaps you’ll report it that way.”

They didn’t.

In short, Rubio said that the U.S. had to strike Iran because it was amassing ballistic missiles. This would have given Iran the ability to pursue nuclear weapons without interference.

With respect to the timing – and just the timing – Rubio said that the United States expected Israel to strike Iran first and that “if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties …”

This line has been clipped, stripped of context, gone viral and been transformed into the U.S. rationale for the war. It wasn’t just misconstrued by social media influencers looking for clicks, but even by news organizations supposedly committed to accuracy. Outlets like Axios, The New York Times, and Reuters did exactly what Rubio warned against.

Tucker Carlson, the popular podcaster, played the excerpted line when he interviewed Joe Kent, the administration’s former counterterrorism advisor who resigned earlier this month. Kent claimed that he resigned in protest of the war against Iran. That video has been viewed at least 4.3 million times. Carlson played up Kent’s impressive service record and treated him as an unfairly maligned hero.

The Washington Post followed suit and published an interview with Kent, allowing him to promote his fabricated narrative that Israel dragged the U.S. into war with Iran. The article, reported by Dan Lamothe, was a sympathetic portrayal of Kent as a principled conservative opposed to war with Iran. It downplayed and even ignored Kent’s controversial record, failing to challenge his falsehoods.

For example, Lamothe omitted the Post’s own past reporting on Kent’s “associations to white supremacists and far-right extremist organizations.” The Post even allowed Kent to advance far-right conspiracy theories such as the baseless claim that Israel was behind the killing of Charlie Kirk.

In explaining Kent’s objection to the war with Iran, Lamothe wrote that Kent had “zeroed in on comments by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.” Referring to the Mar. 2 exchange with the press, Lamothe wrote, “the United States had begun the war in part because U.S. officials knew that Israel was about to attack anyway.” Then he noted, “Trump has disputed that, saying the decision to strike was his alone…”

However, Rubio’s statement was a lot longer. He said from the outset that the U.S. had decided to eliminate Iran’s ballistic missile threat. He explained that only the timing of the American attack was a function of Israeli actions, but that the decision to attack Iran had already been made.

Later, he reiterated, “But this operation needed to happen because Iran in about a year or a year and a half would cross the line of immunity, meaning they would have so many short-range missiles, so many drones, that no one could do anything about it because they could hold the whole world hostage.”

Despite Rubio’s clearly stated rationale for the U.S. initiating the war, his words about preempting Iran were cited repeatedly – in both news reports and social media – as a false narrative that the U.S. was fighting Israel’s war.

The Washington Post, instead of practicing journalism and questioning the credibility of Joe Kent, gave him a platform to spread his conspiracies unopposed. When it came to the clear rationale that Rubio gave, its reporter relied on a truncated statement by Secretary Rubio instead referring to its source. In other words, the deferential treatment Kent received from one of the premier newspapers in the country was little different from the treatment he got from Tucker Carlson.

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