Nicolle Wallace was taking Tucker Carlson’s Monday-night apology with a grain of salt, ripping into the conservative media pundit for coming up with too little, too late.
“I don’t know, I don’t know. I just don’t know,” Wallace said, opening Tuesday’s edition of “Deadline: White House” on MS NOW. “Like, what did he not know before 2024? What was not known? Donald Trump had already grabbed women between the legs, Donald Trump had already incited a deadly insurrection. Tucker Carlson had already concluded that Donald Trump was a ‘demonic force.’ So I don’t buy it. I don’t believe you, Tucker.”
The takedown came after Carlson had apologized and expressed tormented remorse for the hand he played in getting President Trump elected, admitting that his brand of journalism influenced voters at the polls.
Wallace played the clip, ending it with Carlson’s words below:
“I do think it’s a moment to wrestle with our own consciences,” Carlson said Monday in conversation with his brother Buckley. “We’ll be tormented by it for a long time — I will be. And I want to say I’m sorry for misleading people, it was not intentional. That’s all I’ll say.”
“That was Tucker Carlson, for any suckers who still watching him, apparently experiencing or at least projecting a brand new persona that embodies this regret and torment and self-loathing for helping Donald Trump three times,” Wallace said after rolling the clip. “Tucker helped him three times. Trump has run three times, and Tucker was there all the way.
“It is interesting, though, because a lot of people still watch him and listen to him, and other right-wing podcasters seem to follow him — people like Megyn Kelly,” Wallace admitted of the power Carlson’s remorse may have. “It’s another thing that Trump has to grapple with, it’s another symptom of the public displays of buyer’s remorse that we are now seeing from key members of Trump’s winning coalition and the waves of rebukes for Donald Trump as his MAGA base splinters and grapples with what is very much in the public: behavior so erratic, large majorities of Americans find him temperamentally unsuited for the job he has, as well as Trump’s failures to make good on his campaign promises — largely to keep America out of wars, or to release all the Epstein files, or to lower the price of anything. The list goes on and on.”
Calling in as a pundit to the “Deadline: White House” program, Media Matters President Angelo Carusone admitted to the fractures within MAGA and what Carlson’s remorse represents, but emphasized that the real reasons behind such regret “are actually unsettling and scary.”
Watch the full segment below:
