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OAN Staff Katherine Mosack
8:44 AM – Thursday, March 5, 2026
President Donald Trump has said that conservative commentator Tucker Carlson “has lost his way” after the former Fox News host criticized his administration’s ongoing conflict with Iran as “disgusting and evil.”
On Thursday, five days after the U.S. and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury with strikes on Tehran, ABC News’ Chief Washington correspondent Jonathan Karl said on X that he had a “lengthy conversation” with the president, who “hit back” at Carlson.
“Tucker has lost his way,” Trump said, according to Karl.
“I knew that a long time ago, and he’s not MAGA,” he said, referring to the “Make America Great Again” slogan. “MAGA is saving our country. MAGA is making our country great again. MAGA is America first, and Tucker is none of those things. And Tucker is really not smart enough to understand that.”
Carlson, now a podcaster, told Karl on Saturday, the day the attacks began, that they were “absolutely disgusting and evil.”
The commentator has long been a popular voice in the conservative movement, from visiting the Trump White House several times to speaking at the Republican National Convention and Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest. However, he has been outspoken in his criticisms of the Trump administration on issues such as the war in Ukraine and the administration’s handling of the Epstein Files.
According to The New York Times, Carlson met with Trump in the Oval Office three times in the last month to argue against attacking Tehran, arguing that Israel’s impulse to strike Iran was the only reason the White House was considering the operation.
The president said he understood the risks of striking Iran, but suggested he had “no choice but to join a strike that Israel would launch,” according to Carlson and the Times.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke to reporters on Monday to outline the objectives of Operation Epic Fury and clarify why the U.S. might have had “no choice” in the event that Israel attacked Iran.
“It was abundantly clear that if Iran came under attack by anyone — the United States or Israel or anyone — they were going to respond and respond against the United States,” the secretary explained. He added that this turned out to be true, as “within an hour of the initial attack on the leadership compound, the missile forces in the south and in the north, for that matter, had already been activated to launch.”
Iran indeed retaliated on U.S. military facilities in Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The regime also targeted the U.S. Embassy in Saudi Arabia and the U.S. Consulate in Dubai.
“If we stood and waited for that attack to come first, before we hit them, we would suffer much higher casualties, and so the president made the very wise decision,” he continued, decisively. “We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”
🚨 JUST IN: Secretary Marco Rubio is on Capitol Hill to brief members of Congress on the Iran strikes
And he’s CLEARING UP confusion around Operation Epic Fury, making three key points:
1. “The United States is conducting an operation to eliminate the threat of Iran’s short… pic.twitter.com/PTbz8APRDa
— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) March 2, 2026
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