For US President Donald Trump, some of the sharpest criticism he has faced in the early days of the Iran war has come from once-loyal media figures more accustomed to singing his praises.
Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly and Matt Walsh are among those to express discontent.
It has been noticed in the White House, which has been playing defence on social media and in interviews.
To be sure, these critics are the minority of the Make America Great Again-media sphere while Fox News’ biggest stars remain cheerleaders.
But their words illustrate conservative and populist media’s influence and how valuable it is to Trump when all runs as a well-oiled machine – and, by contrast, how much of a problem it can be if it fractures.
Much of the criticism has centred on Israel’s influence on Trump’s decision to go to war.
Israel’s war and what it means. pic.twitter.com/P9D7UGq40W — Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) March 2, 2026
Carlson, the anti-war former Fox News presenter who has built his own independent operation, told ABC News that the attack was “absolutely disgusting and evil”.
“It’s hard to say this but the United States didn’t make the decision here. Benjamin Netanyahu did,” Carlson said on his podcast, referring to the Israeli prime minister.
Kelly, another former Fox anchor gone indie, said about US casualties on her show that “no one should have to die” for another country.
“I don’t think those service members died for the United States,” Kelly said.
“I think they died for Iran or Israel.”
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s remarks prior to a Capitol Hill briefing were a flashpoint.
Rubio said that Trump had given the go-ahead for the operation knowing that Israel was prepared to strike and he feared retaliation from Iran against US bases in the region.
“We knew that if we didn’t pre-emptively go after them, before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties,” Rubio said.
Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson said that if Trump’s administration had not acted, lawmakers would have wondered why.
Walsh, a Daily Wire host, wrote on X that Rubio was “flat out telling us that we’re in a war with Iran because Israel forced our hand. This is basically the worst possible thing he could have said”.
Trump told journalist Rachael Bade in an interview that he did not believe that the opinions of Carlson and Kelly are shared by his base of supporters.
Republican former US representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who has fashioned herself as a media figure since bitterly breaking with Trump, said on Kelly’s podcast that she was furious over the US military action.
MAGA, Greene says, “was supposed to be America first, not Israel first”.
Trump is probably right to think that most of his supporters will return to the fold if they are unhappy with the Iran attack, said Jason Zengerle, author of Hated By All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unravelling of the Conservative Mind.
Given the consistency of his views on the topic, Carlson is probably the most important of Trump’s conservative critics, Zengerle said.
“If the war does go badly, I think it strengthens the hand of someone like Tucker,” he said.
“All of this is a debate about what happens after Trump is gone anyway.”
There have been cracks in Trump’s conservative media support prior to Iran, notably with the vast and sprawling narratives around the Jeffrey Epstein report.
“I think that MAGA gives him the benefit of the doubt, no question about it,” Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary during the early part of Trump’s first term, said on his podcast on Tuesday.
“I think he’s built up a ton of credibility with the base … Look, you’ve got PTSD from a lot of our former leaders between Iraq and Afghanistan in particular, who only know forever wars, and so I get it. But this president has proven now twice that he knows what he’s doing.”
