Fox News host Tucker Carlson was fed up with former President Donald Trump by January 4, 2021, unsealed texts from the Dominion $1.8 billion defamation case reveal.
In a text to an unidentified person, Carlson shared that he “truly can’t wait” for a time he wouldn’t have to discuss Trump every night, saying he believed it to be “very, very close.”
Carlson also said, “I hate [Trump] passionately” and couldn’t “handle much more of this,” seemingly eluding to Trump’s assertions that the elections were stolen.
When Carlson sent those messages, Fox News was in the midst of a self-inflicted crisis. It had angered many of its viewers when it was the first network to call Arizona for Joe Biden.
Fox hosts and executives were worried upstarts like Newsmax would steal much of its viewers following the uproar from Trump supporters, who make up most of the network’s audience.
However, the resentment Carlson expressed privately was a far cry from what viewers were experiencing on screen from the veteran Fox News host.
In another text message, Carlson acknowledged the duplicity, suggesting all the Fox News hosts were “pretending… because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest.”
According to the texts, Carlson was referring to Trump’s four years in the White House, writing, “come on. There isn’t really an upside to Trump.”
Carlson’s revealing text messages were part of hundreds of pages of testimony, emails, and text messages from Fox News hosts and executives made public on Tuesday (March 7).
