Scott Prosterman
Informed Comment / April 17, 2026
Oakland, Ca. – Republicans seem to have reached the Donner party stage now, cannibalizing one another, as is illustrated by Tucker Carlson attacking convicted felon Donald Trump for his violent and profane Easter message. The conflicts Carlson has with Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, however, hardly show that Carlson has suddenly started caring about the people bearing the brunt of Israeli violence in Gaza and the West Bank, or the Iranian people enduring the US-Israeli bombing campaign. What we have is Godzilla versus Predator on the far right. Anyone paying attention isn’t fooled by Carlson’s effort to position himself as an advocate for the oppressed. It’s all about political opportunism.
Carlson, before he was fired as a commentator at Fox Cable News, spread falsehoods about Dominion voting machines in service of the Big Lie that Trump won the 2020 presidential election and warned that immigrants would make the U.S. “poorer and dirtier.” He attacked the notion that American diversity is our strength, denounced wind turbines as “a scam,” and opined that “Iraq is a crappy place filled with, you know, semiliterate primitive monkeys.” More recently, Carlson unapologetically platformed white supremacist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes. Carlson preaching to Trump about how horrible it was for him to mock Islam by using the phrase “Praise to Allah” at the end of his Easter doomsday message illustrates the depth of his hypocrisy, given his own long history of Islamophia.
There is sometimes a grain of what Stephen Colbert has called “truthiness” in Carlson’s rants, even when he’s mostly dead wrong. After all, Secretary of State Pete Hegseth has invoked the name of Jesus to bless the violent US military campaigns in the Middle East. Hegseth has framed the war in Iran as a Christian Crusader’s “Holy War.” Their misplaced invocations of Jesus, and Trump’s attacks on Pope Leo reveal have offended many supporters.
This prompted Marjorie Taylor Greene to pile on the phony sanctimony saying, “Everyone in his administration that claims to be a Christian needs to fall on their knees and beg forgiveness from God and stop worshipping the President, and intervene in Trump’s madness. This is not making America great again, this is evil.” Carlson and Greene had been two of Trump’s most aggressive enablers.
Carlson called Trump a “slave” to Israel, and branded the war in Iran as the “single biggest mistake of any American president in his lifetime.” Though the latter is a valid characterization, that doesn’t mean that Carlson has had a revelation of moral clarity, and cares deeply about the people of Iran. No, it’s just another instance of political opportunism, and possibly Carlson positioning himself to run for president.
It is true that Trump was teased and baited by Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, to lure him into supporting Israel’s military ambitions in Iran. With his combative nature, Trump didn’t need much prompting to go along, despite his campaign promises of no wars. Nothing Trump does or says comes from a deep thought process. But the notion of Netanyahu “blackmailing” Trump is ludicrous. For someone to be blackmailed they he be possessed by sense of guilt or fear of reputation loss. Trump has no such capacity.
Rev. Franklin Graham recently anointed Trump, saying that the Divinity raised him up to serve the need in this troubled time. This phrase invokes creepy comparisons to the Persian Emperor Cyrus. Other evangelical Republicans have tried to portray Trump as a modern day King Cyrus since 2018. In the film The Trump Prophecy, produced that year by Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, Lance Wallneau argued, “I believe the 45th president is meant to be an Isaiah 45 Cyrus,” who will “restore the crumbling walls that separate us from cultural collapse.”
A sick irony is that the most deeply unspiritual man ever to be a US president has led the way to destroy the boundaries of church and state, not out of religious motivation, but because it benefits him politically. A related parallel is how Netanyahu and the Likud Party in Israel have also falsely anointed Trump as a valid spiritual messenger, including welcoming him to create a photo op at the sacred remaining wall of the 2nd Temple in Jerusalem – the Wailing Wall.
As I have in explained in these pages, Carlson has pointed to the hypocrisy of Christian Zionism and Trump’s spiritual corruption. But that doesn’t mean he really cares. Carlson alleges that under Trump’s sway, “high-profile Protestant leaders are preaching a religion that bears no resemblance to Christianity, and not what the gospels describe.” Carlson said that. A broken clock is right twice a day.
Scott Prosterman is a writer and communications consultant in the San Francisco Bay Area, and holds an M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Michigan
