Trump loyalists are jumping off the sinking ship
Last Thursday, one of the loudest voices in American right-wing media sat down for an interview on a little-known political podcast in Canada, and said something that would have been unthinkable not long ago. Almost nobody noticed. The conversation came and went without headlines, outrage, and without much attention at all. It sat there for four days, buried beneath the endless chaos and manufactured crisis coming out of the Trump regime. Then this morning, the Associated Press picked it up, and within hours, Republicans, conservative media figures, and political operatives were scrambling to respond to what had been said. Because buried inside that otherwise forgettable interview was something few people expected to hear: Tucker Carlson declared he was leaving the party he spent years helping build.
Here is what he said, in his own words. “I would not support the Republican Party, there’s no chance. Not gonna support the Democratic Party. I don’t know what I’m going to do.” He went on: “How could I or any American voter support a political party that’s not loyal to the United States. That puts the interests of a foreign country above those of its own citizens. It’s not possible to vote for people like that, and I’m not going to.” And then came the line that got everyone’s attention: “I voted Republican my entire life, I worked at Fox News. I’ve been a consistent defender for 35 years of the Republican Party, but there’s no defending this because it’s immoral. I’m out. And if I’m out, then I think a lot of other people are out.”
We can’t pretend Tucker Carlson is some profile in courage. He isn’t a hero or a truth-teller. And he doesn’t get credit for finally noticing something the rest of us have been watching for years. He played a large role in getting us here. He campaigned for Donald Trump in 2024. Not just during the first term, when some could still claim ignorance about what Trump would become. Carlson endorsed him the second time around, after the insurrection, the indictments, classified documents, fraud conviction, and after the jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll. He knew exactly who Donald Trump was, because the whole world knew by then. And he chose to stand next to him anyway. He did not just quietly vote for him. He used his platform to persuade millions of other Americans to do the same.
And it goes deeper than that. During the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox News, Carlson’s own private text messages were released to the public. They showed us who he really was behind the camera. Around January 6th, while he was still defending Trump on air every single night, he wrote privately to colleagues that he hated Trump “passionately” and called him “demonic.” He admitted, in writing, that the election fraud claims were baseless. “We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest,” he wrote. “But come on. There really isn’t an upside to Trump.”
He knew. He always knew. And he said it anyway, night after night, to millions of people who trusted him, because it was profitable to pretend. The only thing that has changed between then and now is that pretending is no longer profitable.
Carlson is framing his departure as a matter of principle, specifically his opposition to the Iran war and what he describes as the Republican Party prioritizing Israel over the United States. He apologized to his audience in April, saying, “We’ll be tormented by it for a long time. I will be. And I want to say I’m sorry for misleading people. It was not intentional, that’s all I’ll say.” He called Trump’s threat to destroy Iranian civilian infrastructure “vile on every level” and “a war crime.” He suggested Trump might be the “Antichrist,” though he later denied using those exact words despite footage suggesting otherwise.
What we are watching is not an awakening. It is people jumping on lifeboats to save themselves. Tucker Carlson is not the first, and he will not be the last. More than thirty House Republicans have already announced they will not seek reelection. Marjorie Taylor Greene has posted publicly that she is “DONE with the America LAST Republican Party.” The influencers who helped brainwash a generation of young men into believing Trump was some kind of hero are walking it back, one by one, as the numbers turn against them.
This is exactly what happens when authoritarian coalitions begin to fail. We have seen this pattern before. When Mussolini’s own Grand Council of Fascism voted to remove him in July of 1943, it was not because those men had suddenly developed moral clarity about twenty years of fascism. It was because the war was being lost, and they wanted to survive what was coming. They had been complicit in everything. They had enabled the violence, the propaganda, the destruction of democratic institutions. And when it became clear that the project was collapsing, they turned on the man they had propped up for two decades, not to save their country, but to save themselves. The coalition does not fracture because the people inside it wake up to the evil. It fractures because the people inside it realize the evil is about to cost them personally.
And there is a real danger in what comes next. Carlson did not just leave the party. He left a door open. He said he would not support Democrats and that he did not know what he would do. He did not cross the aisle. He stepped away from the wreckage while keeping his options open. And the talk about his own political ambitions is ramping up. People who follow this closely have been watching him position himself for months, not as a commentator, but as a candidate. If Tucker Carlson runs for president, we need to understand what that actually means. He pushed the Great Replacement Theory to millions of viewers. He mainstreamed white nationalist talking points. He platformed Nick Fuentes and only expressed regret when it became politically inconvenient. He helped sow distrust in elections, vaccines, and in democratic institutions themselves. Long before Donald Trump became the face of the movement, Tucker Carlson was helping create the intellectual framework that made Trumpism possible. And unlike Trump, who stumbles through speeches and drifts from grievance to grievance, Carlson is articulate, strategic, and disciplined. He knows how to make extremism sound reasonable because that has been his job for twenty years. If Trump is the wrecking ball, Carlson is the architect who knows how to build something permanent on the rubble. A Carlson presidency would not be Trumpism falling apart. It would be Trumpism growing up.
But there is another side to this story, and for us, it matters. Movements like this rarely collapse all at once. They crack, splinter, and turn on each other. The people who once marched in lockstep start looking for exits, and the people who built their careers defending the movement start calculating how to survive what comes next. That is what makes moments like this important. Not because Tucker Carlson is suddenly on our side. He isn’t. Not because he deserves credit. He doesn’t. But because every public break weakens the illusion that this movement is united.
And that could matter a great deal in 2026. Elections are often decided at the margins. If even a small percentage of Republican voters decide to stay home, vote third party, or simply disengage because trusted voices are telling them the party has lost its way, that changes the landscape. It creates opportunities in races that might otherwise be out of reach. It gives us a wider path to taking back Congress and restoring some measure of accountability.
What happens after that is a different question. The same forces that could weaken Republicans in 2026 could produce something far more organized by 2028. If Carlson truly has political ambitions, he will not spend the next two years telling people to become Democrats. He will spend them trying to build something new. Something that carries forward the grievances, conspiracies, and the authoritarian instincts of Trumpism while packaging them in a more disciplined and articulate form. That is why we should not confuse today’s fracture with a final victory. It may help us in the short term. But in the long term, it may simply be the beginning of the next phase of the same movement.
And watching all of this unfold today made me think about something else. Not Tucker Carlson or the pundits and politicians suddenly looking for an exit. I found myself thinking about the people who got this right years ago.
I thought about those who have been here since the beginning. The ones who were called alarmists. The ones who were told they were overreacting. The ones who sat through uncomfortable Thanksgiving dinners and tense conversations with friends because they refused to pretend everything was normal when it clearly wasn’t. The ones who shared these posts knowing there would be consequences. Knowing they might lose friends and relationships. Knowing they would be mocked for saying what so many people were still afraid to admit.
I remember walking into my husband Pete’s office before I ever wrote my first post and telling him I needed to start using my voice again, this time to fight for our country. I didn’t have a plan. I didn’t know what it might cost our family. I just knew I couldn’t keep watching what was happening and stay silent. And so many of you made that same choice in your own lives, knowing that speaking out was not popular, and not always safe, and long before people like Tucker Carlson decided there was a benefit to speaking up. That is the difference.
So what do we do? We watch the cracks widen, and we pour everything we have into November. We do not waste time trying to convince the Tucker Carlsons of the world to support Democrats. We focus on the voters who already know this is wrong but did not vote in 2024. The ones who are burned out, disillusioned, and do not think their voice matters. Those are the people who decide elections, and those are the people who need to hear from us right now. And we remind every single person in our lives that the midterms are not a suggestion. They are mandatory because they are how we take this back.
And if today showed us anything, it is that the system is not dead yet. Because while Tucker Carlson was making headlines for abandoning the party he helped build, three federal judges were making a different kind of statement. Three rulings, all on the same Monday, all going against this administration.
In Washington, Judge Sparkle Sooknanan struck down the administration’s centralized voter database, a system that combined Social Security numbers with citizenship data and was already being used by states to wrongly purge American citizens from their voter rolls. She wrote that the government “knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.” Her ruling was seventy-five pages long. The Department of Justice has now sued thirty states trying to obtain their voter rolls for this system. They are zero for nine in court.
In Minnesota, Judge Patrick Schiltz quashed six grand jury subpoenas targeting Governor Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, and other officials. The subpoenas were served during Operation Metro Surge, designed to force these officials into cooperating with immigration enforcement. Schiltz called it “a blatantly unlawful and unethical use of the grand-jury process.” And here is the part that matters most: Judge Schiltz is a George W. Bush appointee and a former clerk for Justice Antonin Scalia. This was not a liberal judge. This was a conservative jurist looking at what this administration did and saying: this is not law. This is harassment.
And in Washington again, Judge Amy Berman Jackson blocked the administration’s SNAP restrictions, which had attempted to redefine what counts as food under federal law to prevent 42 million low-income Americans from purchasing certain items with their benefits. Twenty-three states had applied for waivers pushed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda. Jackson wrote that “Congress defined what ‘food’ is supposed to be, and it did not authorize the agency to amend or waive the definition it enacted.” That is three times the courts said the same thing in one day: you do not get to rewrite the law because it is inconvenient for your agenda.
That is the real story of today. Not that Tucker Carlson found his conscience, because he did not. The real story is that this regime is losing its grip on every front at once. The coalition is splintering from within. At the same time, the courts continue to stand between this administration and some of its most extreme abuses of power. And every single one of these cracks buys us time. Time to organize and to reach voters. Time to get to November. Even the people who helped build this machine now see that it cannot hold. And if they see it, the voters who follow them will begin to see it too. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.
I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather
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This commentary represents my personal opinions and analysis of matters of public concern, informed by publicly available information. Any references to individuals constitute opinion and commentary protected under the First Amendment.
Picture of the day: Back to my bird watching ways. I find so much joy in seeing new species. We met this friend on our walk today. Google is telling me it might be a juvenile Black-crowned Night-Heron. I think this might be my first time seeing one this young.
Sources:
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/5934820-tucker-carlson-breaks-with-gop/
https://www.newsweek.com/tucker-carlson-breaks-with-gop-im-out-trump-12105209
https://www.axios.com/2026/06/22/tucker-carlson-quits-republicans-maga-fractures
https://time.com/article/2026/04/22/trump-tucker-carlson-relationship-breakdown-iran-war-split/
https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/07/politics/tucker-carlson-trump-iran
https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/07/media/fox-news-dominion-lawsuit/index.html
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5805206-house-republicans-retiring-2026/
https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/5934681-trump-database-blocked-judge/
https://www.npr.org/2026/06/22/nx-s1-5866719/save-voter-data-trump-judge-unlawful
https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/minnesota-grand-jury-subpoenas-quashed-operation-metro-surge/
We in UK are in chaos. A charming nice man without an ability to control his rather vociferous party has had to resign. He is likely to be replaced by a very able man who has done great things as a mayor. We will have to wait and see.
USA must stop idolising television News readers and instead look to people who know their jobs from bottom up and will be able to govern knowledgeably and without needing to line their own pockets.
The republican ideal is to be as rich as possible as quickly as possible while stepping on people to get there. They don’t seem to mind about “The People” who voted them in.
Trump is now wading in and telling us the reason Keir Starmer failed is he didn’t help Trump with his Iranian war !! Well on that count I am extremely proud of Keir Starmer !
Thank you, Heather, for stating it plainly: Tucker Carlson is not to be trusted, ever. Most of us know that, but there will be others who will think, "Why not," if he decides to run for office. Some people never learn.