MILWAUKEE—Two days after the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, political commentator Tucker Carlson said, “It’s not crazy to think that there was something there; it was an effort to kill Trump, it wasn’t just a lone gunman.”
Trump’s assailant crawled onto a nearby rooftop Saturday night while Trump was on stage at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, 33 miles north of Pittsburgh. The shooter fired multiple shots, striking Trump in the right ear.
It remains unclear how the gunman, who was killed, was not seen and neutralized by the Secret Service or other authorities prior to opening fire.
“At some point we may find out what happened on Saturday,” Carlson says.
The Daily Signal caught up with Carlson behind the scenes of the Republican National Convention at The Heritage Foundation Policy Fest to ask about the implications of the assassination attempt on the election, and Trump’s selection of Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, for vice president.
Watch the interview below or read the lightly edited transcript:
Virginia Allen: Big news today—we learned that [Sen.] JD Vance is the pick for vice president. Did Trump make the right choice?
Tucker Carlson: We absolutely made the right choice. And I think, well, I love JD Vance. I know him pretty well personally, and I think he’s an outstanding person. He’s really smart, but he puts his intelligence to good use, which is to say the pursuit of wisdom. I mean, JD Vance is one of the only politicians I’ve ever met. He hasn’t been a politician in very long, but who thinks about what’s the right choice? What’s the moral choice? What’s the best choice for the country? So yeah, I’m thrilled.
But I would also say that Trump didn’t choose a long list of truly destructive people who hate what Trump believes and who, for reasons that they would have to explain, wanted to serve them anyway. What is that? If you didn’t agree with somebody, you probably wouldn’t want to be their running mate, right? But if you want to be the running mate anyway, that would suggest what?
Well, A, that you were incredibly dishonest, and B, that you’re probably working to subvert them. And there was, I’m not privy to Trump’s mind, but I did watch the process closely. And there were an awful lot of people who I personally consider loathsome. But even if I didn’t consider [them] loathsome, I know for a fact [they] dislike what Donald Trump believes, and they wanted to serve with him. And there was a lot of pressure, a lot of pressure brought to bear on the president to choose them, and he didn’t.
And so I consider his choice an act of courage. I’m grateful for it. I think it says something really good about where this administration will go. I’m saying confidently that he’ll be the president he deserves to be. I think he will be. And so I find it thrilling.
Allen: Tucker, the past 24 hours has been wild, the amount of news that has come out. How did the attempted assassination on former President Donald Trump change this election?
Carlson: Well, Trump won when that happened because he displayed physical courage. And if you live in a society where people are literally dating by remote virtually and working virtually, you can kind of lose touch with the physical reality of life.
But the unchanging truth is that leadership requires courage. And not just abstract courage, moral courage, but physical courage. Someone starts shooting a rifle like are you going to wet yourself and start crying and run away, or are you going to stand up and look at your people and raise your fist and say, fight?
And very few people are capable of doing that, and he is. And therefore he wins because that supersedes all this nonsense that we talk ourselves into. Believing is important. No, the guy got shot in the face. He stood up with blood streaming down the side of his head, blood on his hands, and said, fight. Totally defiant. That’s an act of undeniable courage that was not staged. You couldn’t stage that. And that man is the leader, and he wins.
And by the way, notice what happens to everyone in the crowd when a leader is strong, his people are calm, his courage gives them heart. That’s true for a father, and it’s true for a president. So yeah, he just won, and he deserves to win. That was the ultimate test
Allen: You had predicted about a year ago, that an assassination attempt on Trump was likely. How did we get here?
Carlson: Well, we got here. Disaster has many authors. So we got here for a bunch of different reasons. I think there’s been, I say this [as] someone who’s been in the media my whole life, 33 years, an extraordinary amount of recklessness and dishonesty in the American news media, which is loathesome.
The legacy media, the big companies that I spent my life working for have really dedicated themselves to lying in a very cruel and vicious way. People like Joe Scarborough did a lot, I think, to make assassination attempts like that possible. They’re comfortable with violence— Scarborough especially is comfortable with violence, but a lot of them are, I think, and so they should be ashamed they’re not, but they should be.
But I think more broadly, there’s a lot going on that is unseen. There’s a lot of evil all of a sudden in this country. I never noticed it before. I’m not saying it wasn’t here, but in the 55 years I’ve been here, I never— I haven’t seen it like I’ve seen it in the last year, people really being vicious, people espousing cruelty and killing, people telling you that abortion for its own sake or war for its own sake is a good thing. What is that? That’s evil. So there’s a lot of that. And this is, I would say, a manifestation of it.
Allen: You are seen as very controversial by the leftist media.
Carlson: Oh, you’re so controversial. Oh, you’re so controversial.
Allen: Did the assassination attempt on Trump make you regret anything that you’ve said?
Carlson: Well, I regret all kinds of things. I endorsed the Iraq war. I mean, talk about living in shame. Yeah, I regret a lot of things I’ve said, and all I want to do is apologize for those things and to say I was wrong, which I don’t enjoy saying I was wrong or apologizing, but it’s the only way forward. So yeah, I regret all kinds of things I’ve said, but I’m not controversial. That’s one of those words. When I was an editor, I banned that from my newsroom. It doesn’t mean anything. What it means is I don’t like you.
In point of fact, I think I’m the most moderate person I know. My parents got divorced—I hate change. I want everything to stay exactly the same. That’s the opposite of radical. I’m the opposite of radical. I like the status quo. I go to bed at 10 o’clock with my wife and three dogs. I’m not into anything radical at all. I’m the least radical person I’ve ever met. In fact, I’m not radical enough.
So no, if I’m a radical, I’m not the one getting rid of Easter and replacing with tranny day. You know what I mean? The person replacing Easter with tranny day is calling me radical. OK.
Allen: You’re conservative for a reason. In other words, you want to conserve things.
Carlson: Well, I’m just temperamentally that way. I mean, I like the country I grew up in a lot. I loved it. I love it still, but I’m very worried about it now. But no, I loved it.
If I could press a button and make it 1985 again with no internet, no threat of AI and all the rest, I mean, I would do that. I can’t do that. Of course, that’s a middle-aged man’s dream. But I’m only saying that—it’s kind of pathetic even to say that, but it’s true. But just to show that, if you think I’m radical, you don’t know what the word means.
Allen: Going back about five days, most of the conversation in the news was of course about President Joe Biden and his cognitive ability to serve another four years. Would a Harris administration be any different than a Biden administration?
Carlson: Well, I don’t know. I have fewer friends [in] the Democratic party that I once had. Not surprisingly so I’m not privy to much insight information, some, but my strong sense is they, no, they’ve given up. Trump is going to be president. They know that at this point.
It would just be too messy to stop that, stealing the election once again, like they did in 2020. It was just too hard. Everyone’s expecting it. I think it would not be worth it actually.
At some point, we may find out what happened on Saturday. A guy with a rifle wound up on a building that close with a ladder, and all these people saw it. And the Secret Service, what is that? It’s not crazy to think that there was something there. It was an effort to kill Trump, and it wasn’t just a lone gunman who was killed, that it was something else.
But I don’t think going forward, look, I think everyone has kind of accepted the fact that Trump’s going to win and it’ll be too hard to stop him from winning. That’s just my gut as of today.
And Kamala Harris, that’s not going to work. What they really want to do is subvert Trump with a running mate who agrees with the Democrats on the big issues, on the economy and foreign policy. And there are a whole bunch of those. And donors tried to force them in in the last 48 hours. They tried really, really hard. You can’t beat Trump clearly. You shoot ’em in the face and he gets more popular. I mean, really. S
o what we need to do is just rot it from within with some running mate who, let’s make Nikki Haley the running mate, or something like that, and they failed. So I’m pretty hopeful.
Allen: What’s your message going to be here at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee when you speak on the main stage?
Carlson: Oh, gosh. Well, I’ve never written a speech. I’ve given a lot of speeches over a thousand, and I’ve never written one. And so I won’t start. I’m not going to start this week. But my feeling about speeches is always the same, which is, it’s just like reporting a story. … You pay super close attention. You talk to as many people as you can. You listen carefully. You try to figure out what’s going on, and then you say a prayer and start talking. So that’s my plan.
Allen: You have a speaking tour coming up this fall, starting in September. Tell us a little bit about that.
Carlson: We’re going across the country. I can’t—I live in a beautiful place, and I hate to leave, so I make myself, but we’re doing 15 or 16, 16 I think, dates across the country for a month, coast to coast. And the inspiration for that was frustration with Facebook and other media monopolies that were censoring me. And I thought, well, the one thing you can’t censor is a live event. And so let’s just get big venues, big venues, and tell the truth. And that’s exactly what we’re going to do. And I’m psyched.
