California – For weeks, the fracture on the American right has not sounded like a quiet disagreement.
It has sounded more like a family argument spilling into the street, with once-loyal conservative figures from the West Coast to New York openly questioning whether President Donald Trump has left behind the movement he built.
Megyn Kelly has pressed him over Iran. Candace Owens has accused his administration of betraying “America First.” Former Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has broken sharply with him after years as one of his loudest defenders.
And now Tucker Carlson, once one of Trump’s most powerful media allies, has added a new and blunt judgment: Trump, in his view, is “incompetent.”
Carlson made the remark during a Thursday appearance on “The Megyn Kelly Show,” where the conversation turned from Trump’s sagging political numbers to the wider future of the country.
Kelly pointed to Trump’s poor approval ratings and Republican worries about the midterm elections, asking what comes next if the party is already staring at serious losses.
Carlson did not answer with a prediction. Instead, he warned against pretending that anyone can see clearly around the corner.
“We’re just not good at predicting the future,” he said, before noting that Trump “turns 80 next month.”
Then came the sharper turn.
“You know, and I hope he’s a great birthday. I don’t wish Trump ill, however, he will be gone relatively soon, and we’ll still have this country,” Carlson said.
“I don’t think things are going well and well, I think they could be a lot worse.”
That was the setup for the line that quickly traveled across political media. Carlson argued that Trump’s weakness, in his telling, may be less dangerous than the rise of leaders he sees as both more disciplined and more ruthless.
“Imagine other leaders who are both malicious and competent,” Carlson said.
“Trump is incompetent. Gavin Newsom is not incompetent. And he’s more malicious than Trump. I think he’s far less transparent than Trump.”
The comment was striking not only because Carlson criticized Trump, but because he did so while also trying to warn conservatives against swinging blindly toward another political danger.
His message was not that Trump is doing well. It was that, in Carlson’s view, Democrats could produce leaders who are more effective at pushing policies he opposes.
Still, the word “incompetent” marked another dramatic turn in a relationship that has grown colder recently. Carlson and Trump were once joined by a shared political language: borders, distrust of elites, hostility to permanent war and the promise that American interests would come first. That bond has weakened as the Iran conflict has become one of the deepest fault lines inside the MAGA world.
The break became harder to miss after Trump’s Easter social media message about Iran. Carlson denounced the post as “vile on every level,” saying Trump had no business using that kind of language on Easter morning and warning that mocking Islam could turn a geopolitical conflict into a religious one. “No president should mock Islam,” Carlson said at the time.
Trump did not let the criticism pass quietly.
He lashed out at Carlson and other conservative critics of his Iran policy, calling Carlson “a low IQ person” and “a fool,” while also dismissing figures such as Owens, Kelly and Alex Jones as troublemakers. The public attack made clear that Trump was no longer treating these voices as friendly critics inside the tent.
Carlson then pushed the dispute even further. In a newsletter connected to his media company, he suggested Trump may have faced intense pressure from Israel to continue the war with Iran.
The piece stopped short of directly proving blackmail, but argued that the pressure on Trump appeared severe enough to make him abandon promises that had helped define his campaign.
The same argument has echoed across other parts of the right.
Owens has criticized Trump over Iran and accused him of betraying the voters who believed his foreign policy would avoid another costly war. Kelly has also challenged the administration’s position, while Greene’s split with Trump has moved from policy disagreement into a personal and political feud.
Greene, once among the most visible MAGA loyalists in Congress, has accused Trump of turning against her after she criticized his handling of Iran and the Epstein files.
That is what makes Carlson’s latest interview more than a passing insult. It sits inside a broader conservative unraveling, one in which Trump’s old media guard is no longer moving in one direction. Some still defend him fiercely. Others now accuse him of breaking his own promises.
Carlson’s warning was messy, harsh and unmistakably political. He did not present Democrats as the answer. He did not express confidence in Trump. Instead, he described a country caught between bad choices, with a president he considers failing and rivals he considers more dangerous because they may know exactly what they are doing.
