Tucker Carlson Says He Was Detained in Israel

Conservative commentator Tucker Carlson—perhaps the right’s most prominent Israel critic—says he was detained by Israeli authorities in Tel Aviv on Wednesday. 

Carlson told the Daily Mail that while attempting to leave Ben Gurion International Airport, he and his staff had their passports taken, and his executive producer was interrogated after his sit-down with U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee.  

“Men who identified themselves as airport security took our passports, hauled our executive producer into a side room and then demanded to know what we spoke to Ambassador Huckabee about,” Carlson told the Daily Mail. “It was bizarre. We’re now out of the country.”

The Daily Mail also reported that two sources familiar with the matter said the Israeli government initially didn’t plan on letting Carlson into the country. 

A spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Israel denied Carlson’s claims and said he “received the same passport control questions” as other visitors to Israel. This comes the same day as reports that Trump asked Carlson and others to “turn down the temperature” on their criticism of Israel. 

This rift hinges on what some in the MAGA movement see as unfair U.S. fealty to Israel. In September, Carlson said, “Bibi Netanyahu is running around the Middle East telling people ‘I control the United States.’ I’m an American. It’s too humiliating. I can’t handle that. And I shouldn’t have to put up with that.”

President Trump’s sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., on Wednesday kicked off their family’s cryptocurrency venture, World Liberty Financial, with an inaugural forum at their father’s Mar-a-Lago estate. 

Eric Trump boasted on X that the forum is “uniting visionaries from Crypto, Wall Street, tech and beyond to shape the future of finance—free from outdated banks, centralized control, and cancel culture.” In short, it was an opportunity for the Trump family to make more money off of the presidency in defiance of any ethical concerns. Eric’s brother, Donald Trump Jr., retweeted his post.

Speakers at the forum included financial executives Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon, NASDAQ CEO Adenda Friedman, Canadian investor Kevin O’Leary of Shark Tank fame, Nicki Minaj, FIFA President Gianni Infantino, and numerous others. The brothers spoke to CNBC from the forum on Wednesday, thumbing their noses at critics who say the Trump family is profiting off people seeking to cozy up to the White House and creating multiple conflicts of interest. 

“The great irony here is they didn’t give us much of a choice,” Eric said.  

“They created this monster,” Donald Jr. interjected. Eric claimed that the Trumps were “canceled” by major financial institutions for political reasons, forcing them to turn to cryptocurrency and decentralized finance. 

President Trump sued JPMorgan Chase and its CEO Jamie Dimon last month, accusing the bank of dropping him, his family, and his various businesses after the Capitol insurrection of January 6, which they deny. Last year, Trump sued Capital One with the same accusations. 

Last May, The New York Times discovered that the sovereign wealth fund of the United Arab Emirates paid $2 billion to purchase a stablecoin called USD1 from World Liberty Financial, a blatant attempt by a foreign government to line the pockets of the president and his family. The deal was brokered by Zach Witkoff, who happens to be the son of Steve Witkoff, the U.S. special envoy to the Middle East. 

Two weeks later, Trump allowed the UAE to import a large amount of AI chips from the United States, with many of them going to a company owned by the man who controls the UAE’s fund, Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan. CNBC asked the Trump brothers about this in the interview, and the pair denied doing anything wrong, with Donald Jr. dismissively saying, “We’ve been dealing with the conflict of interest stuff for years.” 

In reality, Wednesday’s forum was a new chance for similar lucrative deals for the Trumps from people with connections and interests that may not be known to the public. The World Liberty Financial X page even announced new partnerships and deals on Wednesday, some involving other Trump businesses. All of this indicates that the Trump presidency is a big financial windfall for the Trump family, ethics and conflicts of interest be damned.

Donald Trump’s celebration of Black History Month began with him rattling off the names of every Black person in his circle.

In an extraordinarily on-the-nose, unscripted White House address, the president listed more than a dozen names of prominent Black Americans for no clear reason other than to curry favor with his predominantly nonwhite audience, leveraging the legacies and prestige of the name-dropped pals in order to bolster his own credibility.

“Mike Tyson, boy I tell ya, Mike has been loyal to me. Whenever they come out, they say Trump is a racist, Trump’s a racist, Mike Tyson says, ‘He’s not a racist, he’s my friend, he’s been there from the beginning, good times and bad,’” Trump said. “But Mike Tyson’s a great guy and he’s so loyal. Always been loyal.”

“And Herschel Walker, speaking about loyal, how good a football player was Herschel? Now he’s the ambassador to the Bahamas,” Trump said, catching himself as he realized he couldn’t remember where he appointed the onetime Georgia wannabe politician. “I don’t know, Bahamas, Bermuda, is he Bahamas, Bermuda? Whatever! It’s a nice place.”

Trump’s next mention was football player and civil rights activist Jim Brown, whom he referred to as “silent but deadly.” But he didn’t stop there.

“By the way, Lawrence Taylor, great friend. Probably the greatest defensive player probably in the history of football, he’s a great friend of mine,” Trump continued.

Trump also shouted out former Representative Alvida King, “pardon czar” Alice Johnson, HUD Director Scott Turner, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, MAGA surrogate Corrin Rankin, Diandre Johnson, Agriculture Department Director of Private and Public Partnerships Director Bruce LeVell, and Senator Tim Scott.

Trump even mentioned singer-rapper Nicki Minaj, who took a hard right turn toward MAGA Avenue three months ago when her vaccine skepticism—which by then had become a hallmark of the far right—veered into a larger conservative ideology.

Last month, Minaj appeared beside the president for the unveiling of Trump Accounts, clutching his hand and hugging the alleged Epstein associate.

President Trump mixed up two different Black Caribbean countries at a Black History Month event at the White House on Wednesday, suggesting that he couldn’t care less about them or the event.

“Herschel Walker, speaking about loyal,” Trump said while apparently naming every single Black person he knew. “How good a football player was Herschel? Herschel Walker, now he’s ambassador to the Bahamas. I don’t know. Bahamas, Bermuda, Berhamas, whatever. A nice place!”

Walker is ambassador to the Bahamas. This is just the president’s latest gaffe, as he mixed up Iceland and Greenland multiple times at Davos last month.

Jay Bhattacharya has been tapped to run the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—after spending years criticizing its pandemic response.

Bhattacharya will continue his role as the director of the National Institutes of Health, as well as leading the CDC on an acting basis, four people familiar with personnel decisions told The Washington Post Wednesday.

Bhattacharya has a history of undermining the CDC’s pandemic guidance. In 2020, the then NIH head, Dr. Francis Collins, labeled the former Stanford University physician and economist “fringe,” after Bhattacharya helped author the “Great Barrington Declaration,” which called for the end of the coronavirus lockdowns. In 2024, Bhattacharya criticized the CDC’s recommendation for widespread masking during the Covid-19 pandemic, calling it “pseudo science.”

Bhattacharya will replace former Deputy Health Secretary Jim O’Neill, a market-fundamentalist Silicon Valley investor and longtime associate of billionaire Peter Thiel. Bhattacharya also has the support of powerful figures among Trump supporters, including Thiel, Joe Rogan, and Elon Musk, who claims Twitter suppressed Bhattacharya’s views before the Tesla founder bought the platform.

O’Neill replaced Susan Monarez, the last Senate-approved CDC director, who was fired last summer after only 28 days in office. Monarez was ousted after she refused “to commit, in advance, to approving every” recommendation by the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, “regardless of scientific evidence” and “to dismiss career officials responsible for vaccine policy without cause.”

But Bhattacharya may not be in lockstep with his boss, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., either. Earlier this month, Bhattacharya put himself at odds with the health secretary when he testified that he’d seen no evidence that vaccines cause autism.

This story has been updated.