Ted Cruz Admits to Tucker Carlson He Doesn’t Know How Many People Live in Iran

Ted Cruz must have been expecting an easy interview when he sat down with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson this week, because the Texas senator really did not do his homework on the topic of discussion. It turns out that the senator from Texas who wants to bomb Iran might not know a whole lot about Iran.

Ted Cruz on Iran. Full interview tomorrow. pic.twitter.com/hJNwAHAnxZ

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) June 18, 2025

As Republicans battle internally over whether or not to support direct intervention, Carlson asked Cruz a simple question: “How many people live in Iran by the way?”

“I don’t know the population,” Cruz said, in a clip shared before the full release of the interview on Wednesday.

“You don’t know the population of the country you seek … to topple?” Carlson replied. The senator then put the question back to the talking head, which felt like a bad idea. Carlson answered immediately: 92 million.

After arguing over the importance of knowing the population of a country he wants to blow up, Carlson asked, “Okay, what’s the ethnic mix of Iran?” Cruz said the nation is “Persian and predominantly Shia.” When Carlson pushed for more detail, Cruz said he was “not the Tucker Carlson expert on Iran.”

“You’re a senator who is calling for the overthrow of a government and you don’t know anything about the country!” Carlson shouted. He looked quite happy about the exchange, at one point making direct eye contact with the camera as if to say, “Can you believe this?”

On Fox News proper, Cruz has been getting a more welcome reception for his hawkish claims, like on Tuesday when he said that “if Iran gets a nuclear weapon, I think the odds are high that we would find out with a mushroom cloud over New York City or Los Angeles.” Maybe his staffers should be blamed for forgetting that Carlson, an arch-conservative, has been a leading voice of the anti-interventionist right for decades.