New revelations from right-wing political commentator Tucker Carlson about President Donald Trump’s push to wage war on Iran earlier this year prompted the latest calls for Cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendment and force Trump out of office on the grounds that he is unable to fulfill the duties of the office—namely, to protect the security of the people of the United States.
“Days before the war began,” Carlson told Steve Inskeep of NPR on Thursday, the president explicitly said that the outcome of the conflict didn’t matter, because “in the end we all die, anyway.”
Carlson revealed that he visited Trump in the Oval Office of the White House in late February, after having gone to Tel Aviv and interviewed Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel.
Trump expressed annoyance at Carlson, an on-and-off ally of the president over the years who claimed in April that he had “regrets” about supporting him, for challenging Huckabee on the US relationship with Israel.
Carlson had pressed Huckabee on his comment that “it would be fine if Israel took” over huge swaths of the Middle East, including parts of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Türkiye.
The host of “The Tucker Carlson Show” said he told Trump he had come away from his two-hour discussion with Huckabee understanding that the unprovoked war the US and Israel was days away from started was not aimed at ending Iran’s nuclear program—which the president had claimed was taken out of commission in June 2025 by US strikes.
The Israeli threats against Iran, said Carlson, were actually aimed at ending Iran’s “regional power,” “diminishing the power” of the Gulf Cooperation Council, and ultimately “getting the US out of the Middle East because we constrain their ambitions” by maintaining a presence in countries in the region.
As the podcaster warned the president not to be manipulated by the Israeli government into taking military action against Iran, according to Carlson, “he looked at me and said, ‘Yes, you’re right, but in the end we all die, anyway, so it doesn’t matter.”
“That’s exactly what he said,” said Carlson. “I said to him, shocked, ‘’But what about our kids and our grandkids, and like, our country?’ And he goes, ‘Argh!’… That’s a verbatim exchange.”
“I was shocked by that,” he added. “Who lives or dies does matter, the future does matter.”
The president’s assertion that allowing Israel to push the US into war—something Secretary of State Marco Rubio also openly acknowledged had happened after the conflict began—could be disastrous for the US and lead to an untold number of American deaths, was called “extremely disturbing” by Drop Site News journalist Ryan Grim, who suggested Carlson’s revelation should prompt the use of the 25th Amendment.
Journalist Pedro L. Gonzalez expressed wariness at the thought of taking Carlson at his word regarding his exchange with Trump and his current opposition to the president, while Carlson said he believed the need for Cabinet members to push Trump out of office predated the interview.
He said that Trump’s threat of nuclear war in April, when he threatened to annihilate the “whole civilization” of Iran, “never to be brought back again,” was grounds for invoking the 25th Amendment, with a majority of his Cabinet members voting to remove him from office.
“He should have been bundled up and taken out,” said Carlson. “That’s a crime.”