Tucker Carlson Calls Trump a ‘Demonic Force,’ Confrontation Reveals

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Tucker Carlson called Donald Trump a “demonic force” in a text to his producer on Jan. 6. Carlson added that Trump is “a destroyer. But he’s not going to destroy us,” court filings show. The Fox hosts privately accepted Trump’s election loss but continued to float conspiracy theories, the texts show. Loading Something is loading.

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Fox News host Tucker Carlson called Donald Trump “a demonic force” in a text on Jan. 6, 2021, according to a court filing.

These and other internal conversations between Fox News hosts and executives were revealed in a 200-page filing Thursday by lawyers for Dominion Voting Systems as part of their defamation lawsuit against the network.

As chaos unfolded in the Capitol, Carlson texted her producer Alex Pfeiffer to say Trump was “a demonic force, a destroyer. But he’s not going to destroy us.”

The filing notes that a few weeks later, on January 26, Carlson hosted MyPillow CEO and Trump acolyte Mike Lindell on his show. Lindell floated election fraud theories on air after voicing them for Carlson’s staff in a pre-interview.

Internal text messages and emails show that while Fox News hosts privately accepted that Donald Trump had lost the election, the network continued to air pro-Trump conspiracy theories about election fraud. .

In the days following the 2020 presidential election, Carlson texted Pfeiffer to warn him that the network’s decision to be the first to call Arizona for Biden could cost them.

Carlson went on to say that Trump is good at “breaking things. He’s the world’s undisputed champion of that. He can easily destroy us if we play the wrong game.”

Because Fox News hosts and employees feared they alienated Trump voters in the Arizona call, they turned to the election fraud narrative to win them back, Dominion’s lawyers suggest in the filing.

In another text exchange, Carlson spoke critically of pro-Trump guests who promoted election fraud conspiracy theories on Fox News.

In separate texts, he told Pfieffer and Laura Ingraham that Sidney Powell, the pro-Trump lawyer who promoted outlandish election fraud conspiracy theories, was “a fucking nutcase” and “lying.”

“This is incredibly offensive to me. Our viewers are good people, and they believe this,” Carlson told Ingraham on Nov. 18, 2021, according to the filing.

Dominion’s lawsuit, which seeks $1.6 billion in damages, alleges that the network pushed a conspiracy theory that the election technology company helped the 2020 presidential election because it was driven by a financial motive to get more votes. many ratings.

A representative for Fox told Insider in an email that Dominion “misrepresented the record” and “cherry-picked quotes taken out of basic context.”

“There will be a lot of noise and confusion generated by Dominion and their exploitative private equity owners, but the core of this case remains about freedom of the press and freedom of speech, which are fundamental rights afforded by the Constitution and protected by New York Times v. Sullivan,” the Fox representative said.

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