“Daily Show” host Jon Stewart on Thursday bluntly summed up his reaction to former Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s fiery clash with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) over Iran.
“We’re in such a bizarro world, you’ve got me nodding my head to Tucker Carlson videos,” said Stewart as he chuckled on his “Weekly Show” podcast.
“You got Tucker Carlson going, ‘Why are we going to war with Iran again?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, you tell him, brother!’ Like, that’s how fucking upside down we find ourselves in this moment.”
Stewart famously clashed with Carlson on live TV during a 2004 episode of CNN’s “Crossfire” with Paul Begala, a moment that saw the “Daily Show” host call Carlson a “dick.”
In 2021, Stewart jokingly addressed his past words for Carlson as the former Fox News host faced criticism for insinuating that pregnant service members were a “mockery” to the U.S. military.
“I called Tucker Carlson a dick on National television. It’s high time I apologize…to dicks. Never should have lumped you in with that terrible terrible person,” Stewart wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
His latest remarks arrive just days after Carlson — who has opposed U.S. involvement in Israel’s war with Iran — grilled Cruz over why he didn’t know the population of Iran, questioning how the Texas senator didn’t know such a figure of a country he seeks to “topple.”
President Donald Trump — who has attacked Carlson over his takes on the war — has since declared that he’ll take two weeks to mull whether the U.S. should strike Iran and has publicly dismissed Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s Senate testimony that Iran wasn’t building a nuclear weapon.
On “The Weekly Show,” Stewart suggested that the moment he found himself cheering on Carlson was based on “one distinct premise”: the “utter incompetence” of the Trump administration’s decisions.
“We are being led by someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing and out of DOGE has a skeleton staff of utility infielders that are just out there with eight different jobs each, and nobody has any follow through and wherewithal to get things done,” Stewart said.
“And if anything does get done, it will be a happy accident, not because of the judicious plan that was put into place by a fifth-level Jedi chess master. That’s bullshit. And the chaos right now on the world stage is a direct function of that incompetence.”