Tulsi and Tucker Get Thrown Under the MAGA Bus

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, June 17, 2025

 

They say that politicians will always disappoint you. They’re even more likely to disappoint you if you reconstruct your entire identity around a contrived version of a politician that exists mostly in your own head.

 

That is the cautionary tale that Tulsi Gabbard has made of herself. When it comes to Israel’s war to neutralize the Iranian nuclear program, the president’s director of national intelligence is on an island.

 

According to the sources that spoke with CNN, a recent assessment that purportedly synthesized the U.S. intelligence community’s observations maintained that “not only was Iran not actively pursuing a nuclear weapon, it was also up to three years away from being able to produce and deliver one to a target of its choosing.” That conveniently comports with Gabbard’s own views. Iran “is not building a nuclear weapon, and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized a nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003,” she testified in March.

 

That assessment flies in the face of sworn testimony before Congress last week from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. “There are plenty of indications that they have been moving their way towards something that would look a lot like a nuclear weapon,” he said a little over 24 hours before Israel acted against Iran. The Israelis were operating on a similar assessment of Iran’s activities. In a Saturday briefing, Israel Defense Forces officials revealed “concrete intelligence” that Iran was “moving forward to a nuclear bomb.” These appraisals dovetail with the International Atomic Energy Agency’s reluctant declaration last week that Iran was not in compliance with its nuclear nonproliferation treaty obligations, which, the New York Times observed, was “the first time the U.N. watchdog has passed a resolution against the country in 20 years.”

 

In remarks to reporters aboard Air Force One on Tuesday morning, Trump seems increasingly frustrated with the degree to which his intelligence community purports to speak for the president — particularly when sources within it retail a version of reality that Trump himself doesn’t seem to recognize.

 

“I didn’t say I was looking for a cease-fire,” Trump replied when asked about indications that his administration sought direct negotiations between his envoy Steve Witkoff and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi — overtures that French President Emmanuel Macron made public. Instead, Trump clarified, what he sought was a “real end” to Iran’s uranium enrichment program in which the regime ends up “giving up entirely.” He later clarified his outlook: “I expect nothing less than their complete surrender.”

 

In regard to the dispute between Gabbard’s intelligence community and everyone else in relation to Iran’s race to a fissionable device, Trump sided definitively with everyone else. “I don’t care what she said,” the president said curtly of his own DNI. “I think they were very close to having them.”

 

Gabbard isn’t the only member of MAGA’s imaginative constructivist wing to find herself cast unceremoniously under the bus by the movement’s avatar. Gabbard wasn’t asking for that sort of treatment, but erstwhile Fox News host Tucker Carlson certainly was.

 

Carlson and his ideological allies joined Gabbard in the effort to seed a pliant press with dubious allegations against Iran’s critics — particularly those who promoted the wholly uncontroversial notion that, before last Thursday, Iran was a threshold nuclear state. Carlson himself predicted that a parade of horribles would flow from an Israeli attack on Iran. “Thousands of Americans” would die in its “first week,” he said, when each of America’s near-peer competitors rose up to join with Iran in its righteous war against the West. Thus, Israel would inaugurate a “world war” in which “we’d lose.”

 

We have two days left before we reach the eschaton Carlson predicted, so we should have some humility in that regard. But within the first five days of this operation, Israel has disabled Iran’s air defenses, all but neutralized its offensive ballistic missile capabilities, struck dozens of nuclear targets across Iran, decapitated its military and paramilitary forces, decimated its nuclear science community, and targeted the Iranian domestic terror apparatus to such a degree that the edifice of the Islamic republic itself is starting to look structurally unsound.

 

Carlson’s agitation has been even more detached from our shared reality than the one Gabbard’s acolytes promulgated. So, under the bus he went, too.

 

“Somebody please explain to kooky Tucker Carlson that IRAN CAN NEVER HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON,” the president posted on his social media venue. Trump has spent days bristling over Carlson’s increasingly caustic criticisms of his administration, America’s allies, and the U.S. citizens who believe an Iranian nuclear breakout is an unacceptable outcome. When confronted with some of those criticisms by a British reporter amid the G-7 summit, Trump said that he had not been privy to Carlson’s missives. “Let him go get a television network and say it so that people listen,” Trump said. That jab — low ratings — is about the most vicious swipe one former television presenter can take at another.

 

Perhaps these warring parties will repair their strained relationships, but it is not looking good. They overly invested in campaign trail rhetoric designed for the consumption of Republican primary voters for whom the biggest threat facing the country were their fellow citizens who were conscious of threats to U.S. security abroad — not those threats themselves. They looked forward to a world in which the planet placidly cooperated with America’s retreat from its hard-won hegemony. They discounted the extent to which Trump himself enjoyed the fruits of his own applications of U.S. military might abroad, to say nothing of his predecessors’ similar achievements. They constructed a reality that did not survive contact with the world as it is.

 

Cosseted as they were in their preferred unrealities, probably neither Carlson nor Gabbard saw their defenestration coming. It’s not the first time they’ve deceived themselves, and it won’t be the last.