Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host, said President Donald Trump should be removed from office under the 25th Amendment over his threats of nuclear war against Iran, in an interview with NPR’s Steve Inskeep published Thursday, September 24, 2026.
“It’s enough for me to say he should be removed from office,” Carlson said. “He should have been removed from office by his own Cabinet secretaries the moment he threatened a nuclear attack.”
Asked directly whether he meant the 25th Amendment, Carlson said: “That’s correct. He should have been bundled up and taken out. That’s a crime. There’s no greater crime than that.”
In the same interview, Carlson dismissed impeachment over Trump’s handling of the Iran war as toothless, saying Trump “is not going to be punished for it.” He said consequences would more likely come through corruption charges. He has previously described Trump as “flamboyantly corrupt.”
What Carlson Told Vanity Fair
Carlson also says the order to keep government files on sex offender Jeffrey Epstein sealed came from Trump himself. He made the claim in a Vanity Fair profile of Vice President JD Vance published September 16, written by Vanity Fair’s Chris Whipple. The accusation shifts the fight over the files from foot-dragging to an accusation of suppression at the top.
“My position from the beginning with Trump, I said it to Trump, was, ‘I don’t understand why you would ever keep any of this stuff secret,’” Carlson told Whipple. “And I got like a bunch of different answers.”
“I don’t feel any need to cover for Epstein. So I said, ‘You shouldn’t either.’ In the end, it came from Trump directly,” Carlson said. Pressed by Whipple on what exactly had come directly from the president, he said: “The order to cover it up came from Trump.”
Carlson said he then asked the president to explain himself. “I asked him why. And he gave me this long, very emotional explanation that this was all a plot against him, like Russiagate,” he said.
Carlson said he pressed Trump to open the archive in the summer of 2025, as frustration built among Trump’s base over an unkept campaign promise. A onetime MAGA ally, Carlson appeared alongside Trump and Vance during the 2024 campaign. Several issues have since split the two men, among them the president’s decision to embark on a war with Iran.
White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis responded with a statement defending the president. “Just as President Trump has said, he’s been totally exonerated on anything relating to Epstein,” she said. Thousands of pages of documents released, cooperation with a House Oversight Committee subpoena request, the signing of the transparency act and calls for more investigations into Epstein’s Democratic friends were all achievements Bis credited to Trump.
No one before him has done more for Epstein’s victims, she said. As for the substance of the conversation Carlson describes, the White House pointed reporters to a lengthy Truth Social post Trump wrote in April. In it, the president said Carlson had not finished college, described him as a broken man since his firing from Fox News and suggested he see a psychiatrist.
From Campaign Promise to Law
A June 2024 Fox News interview had Trump promising to declassify the Epstein files once he returned to office, and Vance had also pushed for release inside the administration. Pressure from the public and from lawmakers mounted in the months that followed, and Trump ultimately reversed course, signing the Epstein Files Transparency Act into law on November 19, 2025.
Millions of documents followed from the law, among them a major Justice Department release on January 30, 2026. The fight has not ended. The department still draws criticism for the scale of its redactions and for the millions of records not yet unsealed.
Epstein’s contacts ran from Wall Street and politics to philanthropy, academia, royalty and the media, and he was a sex offender. He died in federal custody in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. The trove the Justice Department has put out under the law names Trump thousands of times. No criminal wrongdoing has been alleged against Trump in connection with Epstein, and being named in the files does not imply any.
The same circles took in both Trump and Epstein during the 1990s and 2000s, though Trump insists he broke off the relationship years before Epstein came under investigation. A woman suing under a pseudonym accused Trump of raping her in 1994, when she was 13, at Epstein’s Manhattan residence, then later dropped the suit voluntarily. Trump denied the allegation.
Warnings From the Right
Trump’s own coalition produced the accusation, which came neither from Democrats nor from longtime critics, and Carlson still commands a following among the voters who put Trump back in office.
Former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose break with Trump began over his refusal to release the Epstein files, spoke at the 2026 Texas Tribune Festival on Thursday. Of Trump supporters who can’t hold him accountable and make him keep his promises, she said: “They’re liars, and they’re hypocrites and they’re in a cult.”
The files remain a live problem for the administration and the party. At a February 26, 2026, news conference, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer launched a Democratic oversight effort on the handling of the files. Both Vance and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles have seemed to acknowledge the records could still be dragging on the party politically by 2028.
Retired conservative federal Judge J. Michael Luttig, an appointee of George H.W. Bush, has become a prominent critic of the president, and he appeared on MS NOW host Nicolle Wallace’s show on Monday, September 21. “The walls are closing in on him, and he is desperate at this point,” Luttig said.
Luttig cited what he sees as mounting resistance to Trump, plus a cost-of-living crisis and an Iran war with no end in sight. He and others had seen this day coming for six years, he said, and more acutely over the past 19 or 20 months. He likened the president to a trapped wild animal, argued Trump is being hemmed in by the country itself and said it should worry Americans and the wider world. Luttig advised then-Vice President Mike Pence in 2021 as Trump sought to overturn his 2020 election loss. He predicted the desperation would persist through the midterm elections and the certification of the new Congress in January.
The White House Press Fight
Trump moved to bar CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House, an escalation against the press unfolding as the Epstein fight sharpened. He banned the three outlets on September 18, and the Secret Service deactivated their reporters’ press badges the next morning. The outlets sued the administration in federal court in Washington on September 21, on First and Fifth Amendment grounds. The five-network presidential television pool suspended its coverage in protest.
On September 24, U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly issued a temporary restraining order requiring the White House to restore their credentials. CNN and MS NOW journalists were back on White House grounds Thursday, September 24, but both said their reporters were denied access to Xi Jinping’s state dinner arrival. MS NOW’s Laura Barrón-López, whose credentials the judge had reinstated, was refused entry to the portico arrival ceremony. The four other networks in the video pool were still declining to participate, and no major American network aired live coverage of the visit.
