Berk Kutay Gokmen
03 May 2026•Update: 03 May 2026
Political commentator and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson said US President Donald Trump was a hostage of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Iran war.
Carlson told The New York Times in an interview released Saturday that in the war against Iran, “Trump was more a hostage than a sovereign decision-maker,” claiming that the US president “was doing this against his will.”
When asked to clarify whom Trump is being held hostage by, Carlson replied, “By Benjamin Netanyahu and by his many advocates in the United States. And we know that not simply because Trump started the war on Feb. 28, but because he couldn’t get out of it.”
Carlson said that within hours of Trump announcing a ceasefire with Iran on April 8, “Israel publicly, in a way that was designed to get the attention of everyone, including the Iranians, starts killing civilians in Lebanon.”
He argued that the point of this was to “end any talk of a negotiated settlement, to keep this going until Iran was destroyed and chaotic, which is the Israeli goal.”
“Trump said, I want a negotiated settlement. Israel stopped the settlement. Trump refused to even criticize Netanyahu in public. Are you joking? That’s slavery. That is total control of one man by another,” said Carlson.
Carlson previously had been one of Trump’s most prominent media allies. At the 2024 Republican National Convention, he said Trump’s survival of an assassination attempt during the presidential campaign amounted to “divine intervention,” suggesting God preserved him for a purpose.
