(Daily Signal)—Two days after the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, political commentator Tucker Carlson said, “It’s not crazy to think that there was something there; it was an effort to kill Trump, it wasn’t just a lone gunman.”
Trump’s assailant crawled onto a nearby rooftop Saturday night while Trump was on stage at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, 33 miles north of Pittsburgh. The shooter fired multiple shots, striking Trump in the right ear.
It remains unclear how the gunman, who was killed, was not seen and neutralized by the Secret Service or other authorities prior to opening fire.
“At some point we may find out what happened on Saturday,” Carlson says.
The Daily Signal caught up with Carlson behind the scenes of the Republican National Convention at The Heritage Foundation Policy Fest to ask about the implications of the assassination attempt on the election, and Trump’s selection of Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, for vice president.
Watch the interview below or read the lightly edited transcript:
Virginia Allen: Big news today—we learned that [Sen.] JD Vance is the pick for vice president. Did Trump make the right choice?
Tucker Carlson: We absolutely made the right choice. And I think, well, I love JD Vance. I know him pretty well personally, and I think he’s an outstanding person. He’s really smart, but he puts his intelligence to good use, which is to say the pursuit of wisdom. I mean, JD Vance is one of the only politicians I’ve ever met. He hasn’t been a politician in very long, but who thinks about what’s the right choice? What’s the moral choice? What’s the best choice for the country? So yeah, I’m thrilled.
But I would also say that Trump didn’t choose a long list of truly destructive people who hate what Trump believes and who, for reasons that they would have to explain, wanted to serve them anyway. What is that? If you didn’t agree with somebody, you probably wouldn’t want to be their running mate, right? But if you want to be the running mate anyway, that would suggest what?
Well, A, that you were incredibly dishonest, and B, that you’re probably working to subvert them. And there was, I’m not privy to Trump’s mind, but I did watch the process closely. And there were an awful lot of people who I personally consider loathsome. But even if I didn’t consider [them] loathsome, I know for a fact [they] dislike what Donald Trump believes, and they wanted to serve with him. And there was a lot of pressure, a lot of pressure brought to bear on the president to choose them, and he didn’t.
And so I consider his choice an act of courage. I’m grateful for it. I think it says something really good about where this administration will go. I’m saying confidently that he’ll be the president he deserves to be. I think he will be. And so I find it thrilling.
Allen: Tucker, the past 24 hours has been wild, the amount of news that has come out. How did the attempted assassination on former President Donald Trump change this election?
Carlson: Well, Trump won when that happened because he displayed physical courage. And if you live in a society where people are literally dating by remote virtually and working virtually, you can kind of lose touch with the physical reality of life.
But the unchanging truth is that leadership requires courage. And not just abstract courage, moral courage, but physical courage. Someone starts shooting a rifle like are you going to wet yourself and start crying and run away, or are you going to stand up and look at your people and raise your fist and say, fight?
And very few people are capable of doing that, and he is. And therefore he wins because that supersedes all this nonsense that we talk ourselves into. Believing is important. No, the guy got shot in the face. He stood up with blood streaming down the side of his head, blood on his hands, and said, fight. Totally defiant. That’s an act of undeniable courage that was not staged. You couldn’t stage that. And that man is the leader, and he wins.
And by the way, notice what happens to everyone in the crowd when a leader is strong, his people are calm, his courage gives them heart. That’s true for a father, and it’s true for a president. So yeah, he just won, and he deserves to win. That was the ultimate test
Allen: You had predicted about a year ago, that an assassination attempt on Trump was likely. How did we get here?
Carlson: Well, we got here. Disaster has many authors. So we got here for a bunch of different reasons. I think there’s been, I say this [as] someone who’s been in the media my whole life, 33 years, an extraordinary amount of recklessness and dishonesty in the American news media, which is loathesome.
The legacy media, the big companies that I spent my life working for have really dedicated themselves to lying in a very cruel and vicious way. People like Joe Scarborough did a lot, I think, to make assassination attempts like that possible. They’re comfortable with violence— Scarborough especially is comfortable with violence, but a lot of them are, I think, and so they should be ashamed they’re not, but they should be.
But I think more broadly, there’s a lot going on that is unseen. There’s a lot of evil all of a sudden in this country. I never noticed it before. I’m not saying it wasn’t here, but in the 55 years I’ve been here, I never— I haven’t seen it like I’ve seen it in the last year, people really being vicious, people espousing cruelty and killing, people telling you that abortion for its own sake or war for its own sake is a good thing. What is that? That’s evil. So there’s a lot of that. And this is, I would say, a manifestation of it.
Allen: You are seen as very controversial by the leftist media.
Carlson: Oh, you’re so controversial. Oh, you’re so controversial.
Allen: Did the assassination attempt on Trump make you regret anything that you’ve said?
Carlson: Well, I regret all kinds of things. I endorsed the Iraq war. I mean, talk about living in shame. Yeah, I regret a lot of things I’ve said, and all I want to do is apologize for those things and to say I was wrong, which I don’t enjoy saying I was wrong or apologizing, but it’s the only way forward. So yeah, I regret all kinds of things I’ve said, but I’m not controversial. That’s one of those words. When I was an editor, I banned that from my newsroom. It doesn’t mean anything. What it means is I don’t like you.
In point of fact, I think I’m the most moderate person I know. My parents got divorced—I hate change. I want everything to stay exactly the same. That’s the opposite of radical. I’m the opposite of radical. I like the status quo. I go to bed at 10 o’clock with my wife and three dogs. I’m not into anything radical at all. I’m the least radical person I’ve ever met. In fact, I’m not radical enough.
So no, if I’m a radical, I’m not the one getting rid of Easter and replacing with tranny day. You know what I mean? The person replacing Easter with tranny day is calling me radical. OK.
Allen: You’re conservative for a reason. In other words, you want to conserve things.
Carlson: Well, I’m just temperamentally that way. I mean, I like the country I grew up in a lot. I loved it. I love it still, but I’m very worried about it now. But no, I loved it.
If I could press a button and make it 1985 again with no internet, no threat of AI and all the rest, I mean, I would do that. I can’t do that. Of course, that’s a middle-aged man’s dream. But I’m only saying that—it’s kind of pathetic even to say that, but it’s true. But just to show that, if you think I’m radical, you don’t know what the word means.
Allen: Going back about five days, most of the conversation in the news was of course about President Joe Biden and his cognitive ability to serve another four years. Would a Harris administration be any different than a Biden administration?
Carlson: Well, I don’t know. I have fewer friends [in] the Democratic party that I once had. Not surprisingly so I’m not privy to much insight information, some, but my strong sense is they, no, they’ve given up. Trump is going to be president. They know that at this point.
It would just be too messy to stop that, stealing the election once again, like they did in 2020. It was just too hard. Everyone’s expecting it. I think it would not be worth it actually.
At some point, we may find out what happened on Saturday. A guy with a rifle wound up on a building that close with a ladder, and all these people saw it. And the Secret Service, what is that? It’s not crazy to think that there was something there. It was an effort to kill Trump, and it wasn’t just a lone gunman who was killed, that it was something else.
But I don’t think going forward, look, I think everyone has kind of accepted the fact that Trump’s going to win and it’ll be too hard to stop him from winning. That’s just my gut as of today.
And Kamala Harris, that’s not going to work. What they really want to do is subvert Trump with a running mate who agrees with the Democrats on the big issues, on the economy and foreign policy. And there are a whole bunch of those. And donors tried to force them in in the last 48 hours. They tried really, really hard. You can’t beat Trump clearly. You shoot ’em in the face and he gets more popular. I mean, really. S
o what we need to do is just rot it from within with some running mate who, let’s make Nikki Haley the running mate, or something like that, and they failed. So I’m pretty hopeful.
Allen: What’s your message going to be here at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee when you speak on the main stage?
Carlson: Oh, gosh. Well, I’ve never written a speech. I’ve given a lot of speeches over a thousand, and I’ve never written one. And so I won’t start. I’m not going to start this week. But my feeling about speeches is always the same, which is, it’s just like reporting a story. … You pay super close attention. You talk to as many people as you can. You listen carefully. You try to figure out what’s going on, and then you say a prayer and start talking. So that’s my plan.
Allen: You have a speaking tour coming up this fall, starting in September. Tell us a little bit about that.
Carlson: We’re going across the country. I can’t—I live in a beautiful place, and I hate to leave, so I make myself, but we’re doing 15 or 16, 16 I think, dates across the country for a month, coast to coast. And the inspiration for that was frustration with Facebook and other media monopolies that were censoring me. And I thought, well, the one thing you can’t censor is a live event. And so let’s just get big venues, big venues, and tell the truth. And that’s exactly what we’re going to do. And I’m psyched.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
Unlike most Ameritards, the Jesuits who raised us at a Catholic orphanage taught us to ALWAYS ASK THE NEXT QUESTION!
OBVIOUS NEXT QUESTION: Was anyone inside the building Crooks was situated on top of when he shot his rifle?
Why yes, there were Butler PD snipers and PA state troopers inside that building which served as the assassin sniper’s nest!
https : //youtu [dot] be/0Jmvuc9JsXI?si=6D8wDEp_mKBMnoHH