Political commentator Tucker Carlson suggested during a recent interview that President Donald Trump could be harboring a nihilistic spiritual despair that is affecting his policy decisions. Speaking with NPR's Steve Inskeep in an interview that aired Thursday, Carlson said he believes Trump might have been offering a serious glimpse into his own spiritual self-assessment when he repeatedly joked last year that he would not make it to Heaven.
Asked why Trump would make such a statement, Carlson said, "Because I think he I think he feels that way. I think he feels that. He fears it." "I will also say that Trump drops a lot of kind of self-aware comments parenthetically," Carlson continued.
He said talking with Trump in person is overwhelming and disorienting — an experience he likened to "being hit with a wave of warm water." "It's something that he does on purpose. It's a tactic, but it's also a tic. It's something that he just does, because that's who he is. And one of the things that he does is, he throws these lines out that kind of stick with you later," Carlson said.
He added that Trump has repeatedly made offhand remarks to him about his own insecurity, which Carlson later came to believe were genuine. "He tells the truth about how he feels in the middle of this kind of roiling bouillabaisse of words, and ideas, and grunts, and inarticulately expressed concepts.
He'll sort of throw out this thing that he's thinking about, and I felt that his public declaration — 'I'm not getting into Heaven' — was real," he said. Carlson, once an outspoken Trump supporter who fell out with him over the Iran war, said earlier in the interview that he was alarmed when the president dismissed his concerns about the conflict by