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With friends like these, who needs enemies?
About a week after his public fallout with tech CEO Elon Musk, President Donald Trump and former Fox News host and right-wing firebrand Tucker Carlson are taking shots at each other.
Carlson started after Trump over the president’s handling of the conflict between Iran and Israel, calling Trump “complicit in the act of war” in a newsletter. On Truth Social, Trump fired back at Carlson, giving the host a derisive nickname, as he has with many of his past political opponents. “Somebody please explain to kooky Tucker Carlson that IRAN CAN NEVER HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON,” he wrote. USA TODAY has reached out to representatives for Trump and Carlson for further comment.
How did we get here? Well, to paraphrase an expert on breakups named Taylor Swift, we have “seen this film before.”
Friendship experts previously told USA TODAY that public fallouts like these are important to pay attention to, as they shed light on messy aspects of friendship breakups that play out in all our lives. Shasta Nelson, a social relationships expert and the author of “The Business of Friendship: Making the Most of Our Relationships Where We Spend Most of Our Time,” previously told USA TODAY that, when friends fall out in an unhealthy manner, it’s especially easy for what could have been a peaceful split to spiral into a toxic feud.
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“These public relationships are a mirror to what happens so often,” Nelson said, adding that when two former friends get into an online feud, it’s usually because they’re “trying to get from the public what they ultimately need from each other, which is feeling seen in safe and satisfying ways.”
How friendship breakups impact our mental health
Up until recently, Carlson seemed to be one of Trump’s biggest fans, endorsing him in the 2024 election and giving a headline-making speech at his Madison Square Garden rally in New York in the leadup to November.
That’s partly why his recent attacks on Trump have sparked such conversation online. And it’s not just Trump whom Carlson has fought with online recently either. An interview he did with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz recently went viral on X, in which the two clashed over U.S. involvement in the Middle East.
What shouldn’t be underestimated about a friendship breakup? The mental health toll. That’s because, as Nelson previously told USA TODAY, our society doesn’t have proper etiquette when it comes to friends parting ways. Without a clear roadmap, friendship breakups often feel ambiguous or sometimes lead to unnecessary hurt.
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When that hurt gets magnified online, it tends to rise to the level of a feud.
“I can easily say that friendship breakups can sometimes be more complicated than romantic relationships, because, with romantic relationships, we have a lot more ritual around it, and we usually have more conversation,” Nelson said. “In our friendships and our platonic relationships, it can be so complicated. We expect it to go easy. Our expectations are different, and then the grief can be a lot more, and the anger can be a lot more.”
How to cope with a hostile friendship breakup
Still, if a friendship breakup does take a hostile turn − and then that hostility gets taken online − there are ways to deescalate the situation and reconcile.
Nelson recommends both friends laying down their swords and starting a respectful, ideally private, dialogue.
“The best approach is always to sit down and practice vulnerability with each other and practice taking responsibility for our own things,” she previously told USA TODAY. “It’s finding the place where we can apologize. It’s finding a way to try to understand the other person. It’s trying to use language where we say, ‘Help me understand this.’ “
If you find the other person is not amenable to that approach, psychotherapist Stephanie Sarkis advises ignoring the online slings and arrows. Responding tends to only add fuel to the fire.
“When people use social media to attack one another, it generally never goes well,” she previously told USA TODAY. “No one ever said, ‘Well, I’m really glad that I resolved that issue that way.'”
Could Trump and Carlson take this route? It’s possible. According to a transcript provided to USA TODAY by a White House representative, the president hinted that he and Carlson may be ready to make up, while speaking to reporters at an afternoon press briefing on June 18.
“Tucker is a nice guy,” the president said. “He called and apologized the other day because he thought he said things that were a little bit too strong, and I appreciated that.”
