Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Thursday sharply criticized conservative commentator Tucker Carlson, accusing him of peddling a “dangerous” misinformation campaign after Carlson recently apologized for backing former President Donald Trump. Speaking on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” Sanders told host Andrew Ross Sorkin that while she couldn’t speak for Carlson, his claims were “simply not based in fact.”
“I don’t know what the shift brought to him, but the things that he is saying, the type of misinformation that he’s putting out on a daily basis, are not only wrong, but frankly they’re dangerous,” Sanders said. She expressed hope that Carlson would “have another about-shift at some point and start talking with real facts and stop misleading people around the country.”
Carlson, a former Fox News host who has built a massive online following, had been a staunch Trump supporter since 2016. But on his show Monday, he told his brother Buckley Carlson that he regretted his endorsement. “So I do think it’s like a moment to wrestle with our own consciences. You know, we’ll be tormented by it for a long time,” Carlson said. “I will be. And I want to say, I’m sorry for misleading people, and it was not intentional.”
The pivot appears tied to the U.S.-Israeli military campaign in Iran, which began on February 28. Carlson had long championed Trump’s “America First” isolationist stance, which promised an end to “forever wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, he argues that prominent conservatives who backed Trump ahead of the 2024 election are “implicated” in the Middle East conflict. “You and I and everyone else who supported him — you wrote speeches for him, I campaigned for him — I mean, we’re implicated in this for sure,” he told his brother. “It’s not enough to say, ‘Well, I changed my mind’ — or like, ‘Oh, this is bad — I’m out.’”
The rift between Carlson and the Huckabee family deepened after Carlson interviewed Sanders’s father, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, just days before the conflict erupted. During that interview, Carlson pressed Huckabee on his earlier remark that it would be “fine” if Israel claimed the entire Middle East as its own, citing biblical justification. When Carlson objected, Huckabee backtracked, saying Israel does not “want to take it over” and that his comment was “hyperbolic.”
Later, in an interview with NewsNation’s Leland Vittert, Ambassador Huckabee accused Carlson of being “offensive” for suggesting Trump was taking cues from Israel on foreign policy. “Look, it doesn’t matter what Tucker Carlson thinks about me,” Huckabee said. “It does matter what he thinks about President Trump and his administration, and President Trump’s leadership is the world leader and the head of both foreign policy and domestic policy.”
The episode underscores growing fractures within the MAGA coalition as the Trump administration faces scrutiny over its military strategy. Recent analysis from the Center for Strategic and International Studies has warned that the U.S. depleted key missile stockpiles during the Iran campaign, raising concerns about readiness in the Pacific theater. Meanwhile, other conservative figures have taken divergent paths: Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has promoted conspiracy theories about Trump, while Carlson’s apology has sparked debate among the president’s loyalists.
Sanders’s rebuke of Carlson reflects a broader effort by Trump allies to contain the fallout from his change of heart. As the 2024 election cycle heats up, the clash between the governor and the influential commentator signals that the battle over the direction of the conservative movement is far from over.
