Steve Inskeep

The interview that put the 25th Amendment on the record

Steve Inskeep is the NPR journalist who, in a September 2026 interview, got Tucker Carlson to say on the record that a sitting president should have been removed from office under the 25th Amendment — and to confirm it himself when Inskeep named the mechanism (North Country Public Radio).

The conversation took place at Carlson’s studio in Maine for Newsmakers, which NPR bills as its program of biggest interviews (North Country Public Radio). Inskeep opened with a direct question: given Carlson’s claims that Trump had been more a hostage than a decision-maker in going to war with Iran, should Trump be impeached for it (North Country Public Radio). Carlson dodged at first, arguing that removal would never happen because both parties backed the war, before Inskeep pressed him again (North Country Public Radio).

When Inskeep asked whether Carlson believed Trump should be removed from office if he had effectively betrayed the country, Carlson answered that Trump “should have been removed from office immediately when he threatened nuclear war, threatening the offensive use of nuclear weapons, which is to say threatening the destruction of humanity” (North Country Public Radio). Inskeep followed with a single clarifying line: “You’re talking now about 25th Amendment, where a majority of the cabinet—” (North Country Public Radio). Carlson replied, “That’s correct” (North Country Public Radio). He then added: “He should have been bundled up and taken out. That is a crime. There’s no greater crime than that” (North Country Public Radio).

Carlson went on to recount a private meeting with Trump in the Oval Office, saying he flew back from Tel Aviv, sat alone with the president two days later, and told him the Iran war was being pushed by Israel rather than being about Iran’s nuclear program (North Country Public Radio). According to Carlson, Trump looked at him and said, “in the end, we all die anyway, so it doesn’t matter” (North Country Public Radio; Montana Public Radio). When NPR asked the White House about that claim, the White House did not answer specifically, instead pointing NPR to a Trump social-media post calling Carlson and others “stupid people” (Montana Public Radio).

The exchange mattered because of who was asking. Inskeep had interviewed Carlson before and pressed him the way he presses sitting senators — and the resulting transcript, rather than secondhand summaries, became the authoritative record of what Carlson said (North Country Public Radio).

Three decades at NPR

Inskeep joined NPR in 1996, and his first full-time assignment was covering the New Hampshire primary (NPR Illinois). He moved through the beats that train a national political reporter: the Pentagon, the Senate, and George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign (NPR Illinois). He was reporting from abroad — Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq — when he joined Morning Edition as a host in 2004 (NPR Illinois).

His own site describes Morning Edition as the most widely heard radio program in the United States, and names him as a co-host of both that program and Up First, one of the country’s most popular podcasts (Steve Inskeep). He has also appeared as a guest on ABC’s This Week, NBC’s Meet the Press, MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Reports, CNN’s Inside Politics, and the PBS NewsHour (Steve Inskeep). His writing has appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic (Steve Inskeep).

The beat work shaped the kind of interviewer he became. He has covered wars in Syria and Yemen, and he has made repeated visits to Iran — an experience that made his pushback in the Carlson interview pointed rather than abstract (NPR Illinois). When Carlson argued that both parties were on the same page about the Iran war, Inskeep countered that the last two Democratic presidents had struck or tried to strike nuclear deals with Iran instead of launching a regime-change war — “it just doesn’t seem like a true statement,” he said (North Country Public Radio).

Awards and the York Project

Inskeep’s reporting awards trace the arc of his career. He won a National Headliner Award in 2003 and two duPont-Columbia University Silver Batons for his Iraq coverage (NPR Illinois). In 2006 he won the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for “The Price of African Oil” (NPR Illinois).

In 2008 he and Michele Norris produced “The York Project,” a Morning Edition series about the enslaved Black man who took part in the Lewis and Clark expedition (NPR Illinois). The series won another duPont Silver Baton (NPR Illinois). It also fit Inskeep’s stated preference for stories about people who are not famous — he has described a passion for reporting on figures like an American soldier who lost both feet in Afghanistan or an Ethiopian woman’s journey to the United States (Steve Inskeep).

Author of four books

Inskeep has written four books of history, each built on the same interviewing and archival habits as his broadcast work (Steve Inskeep). Instant City, published in 2011, is a portrait of Karachi, one of the world’s great megacities (Steve Inskeep). Jacksonland is a history of President Andrew Jackson’s long-running conflict with Cherokee chief John Ross over the removal of Native people from the eastern United States in the 1830s (Steve Inskeep). Imperfect Union recounts the adventures of Jessie and John Frémont, an ambitious American couple in the years before the Civil War (Steve Inskeep). His latest book, Differ We Must, tells how Lincoln navigated a divided America, a subject that resonated during the 2008 financial crisis years of hosting Morning Edition — when, quoting Langston Hughes, he was “laughing to keep from crying” as the world seemed to fall apart (Steve Inskeep).

A reputation for the hard question

The Carlson interview followed a pattern in Inskeep’s career: the interviewer who does not let a guest move on. In the Newsmakers transcript, when Carlson described both parties as a single “uniparty” taking orders from outside the country, Inskeep called it “a bit of an evasion” and pushed him to say plainly what should happen to a president he believed had betrayed the country — which is how the 25th Amendment exchange entered the record (North Country Public Radio). When Carlson claimed his theories about Israeli influence had nothing to do with antisemitism, Inskeep asked whether Carlson ever wondered if he was having that effect regardless of intent (Montana Public Radio).

Inskeep is a native of Carmel, Indiana, and a graduate of Morehead State University in Kentucky (NPR Illinois).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not give Inskeep’s birth date or details of his family life — those were not in any source read in full for this profile. It does not date Jacksonland, Imperfect Union, or Differ We Must, because the full-read sources confirm only the titles and, for Instant City, the year 2011. It does not repeat secondary-blog summaries of the Carlson interview where they differ from NPR’s own transcript; the shorter NPR write-up of the conversation omits the explicit “25th Amendment” wording, so the full Newsmakers transcript is the source for the claims in this profile. It makes no claim about Carlson’s third-party ambitions or his other assertions in the interview beyond what the transcript records.