White House counterterror chief links Tucker Carlson to extremism

US President Donald Trump’s counterterrorism director has suggested that two of the president’s loudest critics – Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes – are considered potential left-wing threats by the White House.

The White House released its National Strategy for Counterterrorism last week, which labels “Narcoterrorists and Transnational Gangs, Legacy Islamist Terrorists, [and] Violent Left-Wing Extremists, including Anarchists and Anti-Fascists” as the three most pressing terror threats to the US.

The inclusion of “Violent Left-Wing Extremists” is no surprise, given that the strategy was released after three assassination attempts against Trump and the public execution of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk, and after Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum NPSM-7 identified “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity” as indicators of potential “violent and terroristic activities.”

The report makes no mention of right-wing terrorism. However, a comment by its author, Sebastian Gorka, which flew under the radar last week, suggests that some of the president’s former allies are now considered national security threats.

Speaking to Breitbart editor Alex Marlow on Friday, Gorka was asked whether he regards “right-wing extremism” as “a threat at all.”

“I’m not sure that Nick Fuentes or Tucker Carlson are conservatives,” Gorka replied. “If you are lauding Sharia law, if you are saying that there are Muslim states that seem to be better qualitatively than America in terms of freedom and prosperity, I’m not sure that means you’re part of the conservative movement. So if you remove those individuals and you understand that they’re not conservatives, what’s left?”

Gorka’s comment implies that, stripped of their “conservative” credentials, Fuentes and Carlson are the kind of left-wing extremists that the Trump administration will target.

Nick Fuentes is a hardline nationalist and opponent of Trump, whose inflammatory comments – “Jews are running society, Women need to shut the f**k up, and Blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part.” – saw him banned from every major social media platform in 2020. He has since been reinstated on X, and his daily livestreams sometimes draw hundreds of thousands of viewers.

Tucker Carlson is a former Fox News host and supporter of Trump, whose relationship with the president has soured in recent months over Trump’s apparent deference to Israel and the war on Iran.

What happened between Tucker Carlson and Trump?

Carlson was a vocal supporter and regular confidant of Trump during the president’s first term in office, and campaigned for his reelection in 2024. Carlson grew more critical of American support for Israel’s war in Gaza over the last two years, and publicly called on Trump not to take military action against Iran in June 2025, when Israel was waging its 12-Day War against the Islamic Republic.

Trump, who dismissed Carlson’s advice and ordered the bombing of Iranian nuclear sites, called Carlson “kooky,” but the two remained in regular contact.

However, the rift between the former Fox News host and the president reached its nadir when the US and Israel began striking Iran in late February, with Carlson calling the war “disgusting and evil,” and accusing Trump of doing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bidding by waging it.

Carlson hammered Trump for issuing a profane message to Iran on Easter Sunday, calling the president’s threat to target Iranian civilian infrastructure “vile on every level.”

“How dare you speak that way on Easter morning to the country?” Carlson said in a monologue on his podcast. “Who do you think you are? You’re tweeting out the f-word on Easter morning.”

Trump responded by declaring Carlson an enemy of the MAGA movement, describing him as a “flailing fool” who should “see a good psychiatrist.”

Who else has Trump fallen out with?

Trump has fallen out with several prominent right-wing media personalities over the war with Iran, including Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, and Alex Jones. In a lengthy social media post in April, he called these figures “nut jobs” and “troublemakers” who “think it is wonderful for Iran, the number one state sponsor of terror, to have a nuclear weapon.”

“They have one thing in common, low IQs,” he claimed. “They’re stupid people, they know it, their families know it, and everyone else knows it, too!”

Carlson, Owens, and Nick Fuentes were all included in a top-ten list of “anti-Semite and anti-Zionist” influencers published by Israel’s Ministry for Diaspora Affairs in April.

Gorka’s statement is not the first indication that Trump intends to turn the power of the state against some of his former supporters. The former head of the US National Counterterrorism Center, Joe Kent, is currently under FBI investigation for leaking classified information, after he resigned from his position in March and publicly denounced the war on Iran.