Tucker Carlson snookered Mike Huckabee. “When I sat down with Tucker Carlson on Wednesday,” the American ambassador to Israel reflected on X, “I was expecting a thoughtful conversation and that he would ask questions and give me the opportunity to actually respond.”

Huckabee entered the studio for what he thought would be an interview led by a man of good faith. Carlson conducted something closer to a cross-examination. But Carlson turned the exchange into political theater—a one-sided grilling framed around the loss of American dignity to foreign priorities. From the outset, he framed Huckabee as the courteous emissary of a foreign-policy establishment that, in Carlson’s telling, has subordinated American citizens to the priorities of Jews worldwide. Carlson cast himself as a polite but angry citizen refusing to defer to a captured member of a corrupt elite.

A single organizing question ran through every exchange: Does the United States government still belong to its citizens, or does it serve a transnational elite, dominated by the Jews?

It was there when Carlson detailed his own alleged humiliation by Israeli officials and the U.S. embassy’s supposed deference to them. It was there when he grilled Huckabee on meeting Jonathan Pollard, the convicted spy who betrayed America for Israel. It was there when he pressed on why accused American sex offenders find refuge in Israel, or why Epstein files mentioning Israeli figures remain sealed.