President Donald Trump is lashing out against popular conservative talk show host Tucker Carlson. The acrimony emanates from Carlson’s strong opposition to the White House’s indirect military support for Israel’s war against the Islamic Republic of Iran. Trump declared he invented “America First” and that he decides what it means while making his case for a potentially catastrophic war of aggression against Tehran.
During his meeting with the UK’s prime minister at the G7 summit on Monday, the president demeaned the influential pundit: “I don’t know what [Carlson] is saying. Let him go get a television network and say it so that people listen.” Trump also posted on Truth Social, “Somebody please explain to kooky Tucker Carlson that ‘IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON!’”
In an interview with The Atlantic magazine this weekend, Trump was asked about Carlson’s comments against the war. Trump responded, “Well, considering that I’m the one that developed ‘America First,’ and considering that the term wasn’t used until I came along, I think I’m the one that decides [what it means]. For those people who say they want peace – you can’t have peace if Iran has a nuclear weapon. So for all of those wonderful people who don’t want to do anything about Iran having a nuclear weapon – that’s not peace.”
Trump has arguably already entered the war by ordering US forces to shoot down incoming missiles and drones amidst Iran’s counter attacks against Israel. He has threatened to join the war directly, even urging all residents to flee the Iranian capital in a Truth Social post on Monday night.
“Iran should have signed the ‘deal’ I told them to sign. What a shame, and waste of human life. Simply stated, IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON. I said it over and over again! Everyone should immediately evacuate Tehran!” he wrote.
“America First” is a political slogan which has seen a phenomenal resurgence in the wake of Trump’s first presidential campaign. It has been used by politicians in both major parties and dates back more than a century as a rallying cry for neutrality during the First World War and as part of President Woodrow Wilson’s 1916 reelection campaign. The following year, Wilson betrayed his supporters by requesting a declaration of war from Congress, deploying an American Expeditionary Force to Europe, and imposing conscription.
This turnaround on his most important campaign pledge left a significant psychological impact on Americans, particularly after the war when millions felt they hadn’t achieved the lofty goals Wilson had elucidated in his Fourteen Points. Instead of a world “made safe for democracy,” much of Europe was marred by political violence, from near civil war in Germany to the Soviet invasion of Poland. And the United States was left holding an enormous bag of war debt and a hundred thousand caskets full of doughboys.
A generation later, during the Second World War, Wilson’s betrayal led to reasonable skepticism when another Democratic president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, running for an unprecedented third term promised that “your boys are not going to be sent into a foreign war.” By this point, FDR had already signed into law the first peacetime conscription in US history and was lobbying for repeal of the 1930s neutrality laws.
This anti-Roosevelt pin, produced during the 1940 campaign, reflects a popular sentiment that he was trying to pull the wool over Americans’ eyes just as his predecessor did. Unfortunately, when Republicans nominated former Democrat and committed internationalist Wendell Willkie as their nominee, non-interventionist sentiment lacked a candidate and voters were deprived a genuine alternative at the ballot box. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was reelected, and eleven months later the United States would enter the war (a consequence of FDR’s maneuvers to sabotage relations with Japan).
It’s a distinct possibility that Donald Trump could follow in the footsteps of Wilson and Roosevelt, and enter a major war he had explicitly promised to avoid. Despite his continued insistence otherwise, his own intelligence agencies confirmed this year that there is no evidence Tehran is building a nuclear weapon, nor has there been any suggestion that a political decision has been made to abrogate Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s fatwa against pursuing weapons of mass destruction.
On Friday, following Israel’s surprise bombing raids on Iranian nuclear facilities, residential areas, and military sites, Carlson released a newsletter denouncing US involvement in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war. It begins by quoting from Trump’s first inaugural address: “From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first. America first.”
The newsletter then reads, “Now that [Netanyahu] and his war-hungry government have executed their long-awaited assault, [Trump] faces a legacy-altering decision: to support or not to support?”
Carlson insists, “The United States should not at any level participate in a war with Iran. No funding, no American weapons, no troops on the ground. Regardless of what our ‘special ally’ says, a fight with the Iranians has nothing to offer the United States. It is not in our national interest.”
The newsletter continues with Carlson warning that the consequences of supporting Israel will include future blowback terrorism against “the West” and “thousands of immediate American deaths, all in the name of a foreign agenda.” He concluded that a preferable option would be to “drop Israel” and “let them fight their own wars.” Carlson emphasized that because of the massive US military and financial aid to Tel Aviv, Trump is already “complicit in the act of war.”
With US military assets converging on the Middle East to provide Trump with “options” should he decide to join Israel’s aggressive war, it remains to be seen whether the president will betray his ‘America First’ base on behalf of a foreign state, or resist the immense powers arrayed against him and side with the American people.
