“You’ve been talking on your show about whether Trump is the Antichrist,” Navarro said.

“I have not said that,” Carlson replied.

“On your show, the day after Easter, you noted he did not put his hand on the Bible during his swearing-in ceremony as president,” Navarro said. “You said, and I’m quoting, ‘Maybe he didn’t put his hand on the Bible because he affirmatively rejects what’s inside that book.’ And then on a recent show, you went further, saying, ‘Here’s a leader who’s mocking the gods of his ancestors, mocking the God of gods, and exalting himself above them. Could this be the Antichrist?’”

“I actually did not say, ‘Could this be the Antichrist?'” Carlson said. “I don’t know where that comes from, but I know that those words never left my lips because I’m not sure I fully understand what the Antichrist is.”

But a video from the episode Navarro pointed to shows him saying verbatim what Navarro read back to him. This denial has been making the rounds on social media ever since, to the tune of millions of views, with some conservative commentators, once big fans of Carlson, openly mocking him for it in the process.

“So what you heard there was direct evidence from Tucker’s show that, yes, he was wondering aloud about whether Donald Trump is the Antichrist, and then you heard him continue to deny it to Lulu, who did, by the way, a masterful job leading him into this boxed canyon there,” CNN commentator Scott Jennings argued. “But what’s amazing is that he has raised this, and they have profited off of it, they have promoted it, they have marketed it, and when confronted with it, immediately backs away from it. You heard the evidence.”

“Tucker’s become the No. 1 propagandist,” conservative podcaster Dave Rubin said this week. “He’s not even on the Right anymore. If you are on the Right, and you turn against Trump, the very people that used to hate you will love you, and Tucker’s experiencing that [with the New York Times interview]. With these lies, Tucker is intentionally trying to break the brains of his audience.”

And the bizarre comments didn’t just stop there. At one point, Carlson talked about Trump having the ability to be “spellbinding” to those around him due to “supernatural” capabilities.

“I think it probably literally is a spell,” he said. “And the effect is to weaken people around him and make them more compliant and more confused. And I’ve experienced this myself. You spend a day with Trump, and you’re in this kind of dreamland. It’s like smoking hash or something. It’s interesting, very interesting.

“There has to be a supernatural component to it. I’m not a theologian, but it’s real, and anyone who’s been around him can tell you it’s true.”

But despite these supernatural powers, Carlson also argues that Trump is completely controlled by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“Trump was more a hostage [to Israel] than a sovereign decision-maker,” he claimed, held hostage “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.”

So much for those superpowers.

What helped make this interview go viral for all the wrong reasons was Navarro’s meticulous preparation. Time and again, when respectfully confronting Carlson with his own words, he either denied saying it, as laid out above, or had no evidence or sources to back up the claim.

People in the White House “have been totally against [Vice President] JD Vance from the very beginning and have been working to undermine him,” Carlson said.

“Who do you mean specifically?” Navarro asked. “Because it was interesting in those conversations with [White House chief of staff] Susie Wiles, for example, where she was very much praising [Secretary of State] Marco Rubio and had less complimentary things to say about JD Vance. Is that to whom you’re referring?”

“‘I don’t know’ is the real answer,” Carlson said. “I don’t know.”

“You’re accusing people of treachery,” Navarro said.

“Well, I know there’s been a lot of treachery, for sure,” Carlson said. “And I know they were so mad about JD getting that job.”

“But within the White House?” Navarro asked.

“I don’t know the answer to that,” Carlson said. “I’ve never worked there. So if you don’t work there, you can say what you think you know, but it’s hard to really know.”

If you’re looking for the definition of gaslighting, this is it. 

It’s hard to believe that only a few short years ago, Carlson and Candace Owens were considered to be two of the most powerful conservative voices in broadcasting. Both have since decided to become its biggest conspiracy theorists instead, with both questioning, as a prominent example, the investigation into the murder of Charlie Kirk and what role Jews and Israel had in his execution last September.

“So it’s about 2,000 years ago in Jerusalem, and Jesus shows up, and he starts talking about the people in power, and he starts doing the worst thing that you can do, which is telling the truth about people, and they hate it, and they just go bonkers,” Tucker said just days after Kirk’s death. “They hate it, and they become obsessed with making him stop: ‘This guy’s got to stop talking. We’ve got to shut this guy up.’

“And I can just picture the scene in a lamp-lit room with a bunch of guys sitting around eating hummus, thinking about, ‘What do we do about this guy telling the truth about us? We must make him stop talking.’ And there’s always one guy with the bright idea, and I can just hear him say, ‘I’ve got an idea. Why don’t we just kill him? That’ll shut him up, that’ll fix the problem.'”

If that baseless accusation sounds utterly antisemitic, it’s because it is. For her part, Owens, for the past nine months, has accused widow Erika Kirk of playing a role in her own husband’s murder with zero evidence to back up her claim. 

In the end, Carlson has every right to publicly voice his disagreement and disdain for the Iran war. He has disavowed his support for Trump and even says he was “tormented” by his decision to back him as fervently for president as he did in 2024.

MARCO RUBIO ENDS HIS MEDIA DROUGHT

But now we’ve entered Crazytown.

It’s a mystery what happened to Carlson. But what isn’t ambiguous is what happens next: a fast trip down the road to irrelevance.