‘Stupid and Unfair’: Ted Cruz Speaks Out on Tucker Carlson’s Viral ‘Gotcha’ Moment in Explosive Interview

Tucker Carlson’s explosive interview with Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) has dominated headlines since its release, and now Cruz is speaking out on one of the most notable moments from his conversation with the former Fox News host.

In one moment clipped by Carlson’s team to promote the interview, Carlson asked Cruz about the population of Iran before expressing shock at the senator’s admission that he didn’t know the exact figure off the top of his head.

Cruz addressed the moment in an episode of his podcast, Verdict with Ted Cruz, released on Friday.

“Now, we did the interview and, and-, on Tuesday. And then Tucker released it on Wednesday. But before Wednesday he released a little snippet, and in two hours, look I’m going to give Tucker some credit, he had a little gotcha moment. So two hours of back and forth, and back and forth, and back and forth, and he decided to play a little gotcha moment,” began Cruz.

“So in the course of talking about Iran he asks me, he says, ‘Well, what’s the population of Iran?’ And I thought about it for a second and realized I didn’t actually know the exact population of Iran, and so I just said, ‘I don’t know.’ And he did the sort of classic Tucker, ‘What!?  How can you not know that!?’ And I mean he was you know vibrating, and looking as if I had, you know, admitted to, I don’t know, committing treason or something and I just said, ‘Look, I don’t memorize population tables.’ And he comes in with great, great joy and says-, and I asked him, I said, ‘What’s the population of Iran?’ He says, ’92 million!’ Actually, according to the Google searches afterwards, it’s 89 million, so he was off 3 million, which I think is funny because I assume he Google searched it right before the interview so he could do his little gotcha.” He continued:

And I’ll confess this this may not be terribly credible, but the truth of the matter is in my head what what I was going to say if I was guessing was 90 million so I was
actually felt pretty good. I’m like, “Huh, all right, pretty damn close.” But I said “Look, what difference does it make if it’s 90 million, or 80 million, or 100 million?”

And the reason I didn’t want to posit a guess is because stupid and unfair interviews, you play gotchas on this and I’ll say things like population numbers there are all sorts of countries across the globe that that have sort of really surprising populations that can have populations that are either significantly bigger than you would think, or significantly smaller than you would think.  And at the end of the day, what I was talking about which is the Ayatollah, a theocratic radical lunatic who chants, “Death to America” and is trying to develop a nuclear weapon, the threat of that is not remotely different whether Iran has a population of 80 million, 90 million, or 100 million.

So it was an irrelevant gotcha, but that little clip, what Tucker did is he released it a day before the whole interview. So he picked, out of two hours, he thought that was the best 60 seconds cause he did get me to say the words, “I don’t know,” and he felt very gleeful on that. I got to say the rest of the interview as it played out, there’s a reason he wanted to start with that clip, and that clip went viral, and that’s fine. But there’s a reason he wanted to start with that clip because the rest of the interview Tucker’s positions on Israel were very clear. He didn’t want to stand with Israel.  He was, and we’re going to lay this out in the course of the show, deeply opposed to Israel and he was deeply opposed to President Trump’s policy. And in fact he had been in writing and vocally attacking President Trump, and he didn’t want to talk about that in terms of putting it out the the results of the interview.

Watch the full clip above.