The Iran war in the age of memes and online battlefields
The White House’s ‘memeification’ of war on social media softens impact of war, according to psychologists.
Tucker Carlson called President Donald Trump a “slave” to Israel and said his handling of their war on Iran is “awful to watch” as the feud between the two continues to escalate.
“I’ve always liked Trump and still feel sorry for him, as I do for all slaves,” the former Fox News host told Newsmax on April 10. He added that Trump “can’t make his own decisions” and that the president is “hemmed in by other forces.”
Carlson doubled down on his interpretation of the president when asked whether he thinks Trump is a “slave to Benjamin Netanyahu” in an interview on the BBC’s “Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg” on April 12.
“I don’t think it is as simple as ‘he is under the control of Netanyahu,’ but you could certainly summarize it that way and you wouldn’t be totally inaccurate,” Carlson said, clarifying he blamed Israel for the U.S. entering the war. “We know this because the single biggest mistake Trump – or any American president in my lifetime – has made was going to war with Iran in an effort to change its regime.”
When Kuenssberg pointed to past presidents who “said no to Benjamin Netanyahu” Tucker agreed and said: “They did and I wish our president had, but he didn’t.”
“The Israeli government, this is documented and I saw it personally, steered the United States into a war that hurts the United States and the world,” Carlson added.
USA TODAY has reached out to the White House for a response.
The comments come days after Trump called Carlson and other MAGA-aligned critics of the war “low IQ,” irrelevant and publicity hungry in an April 9 social media post.
“Nobody’s talking about them, and their views are the opposite of MAGA − Or I wouldn’t have won the Presidential Election in a LANDSLIDE,” Trump wrote, adding, “MAGA agrees with me.” He said of Carlson in the post that “he was a broken man when he got fired from Fox, and he’s never been the same.”
The Iran war has prompted strong pushback from some prominent Trump-aligned media figures, with the president’s dramatic threats against the country intensifying the debate on the right.
Carlson called Trump’s expletive-laden Easter Sunday threat against Iranian civilian infrastructure “a war crime” and “a moral crime” in the April 6 episode of “The Tucker Carlson Show.” Former GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene called for Trump to be removed from office after the president threatened that “a whole civilization will die tonight” in an April 7 social media post.
Conservative critics have said that the war goes against the anti-interventionist “America First” promises that brought Trump back to the White House. Some argued that Trump ran for president as a critic of past Middle East conflicts, and his non-interventionist approach became central to the MAGA movement. Podcaster Joe Rogan, who endorsed Trump, said the Iran war has people feeling “betrayed” by a president who “ran on no more wars.”
Polls show the Iran war is broadly unpopular; however, most Republicans approve of how Trump is handling the conflict. A CNN survey released April 1 found that while just 33% of Americans approve of how Trump is handling Iran, 73% of Republicans approve.