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Home » Tucker Carlson Show: w/ Ex-Trucker Gord Magill – June 1, 2026 (Transcript)

Tucker Carlson Show: w/ Ex-Trucker Gord Magill – June 1, 2026 (Transcript)

Read the full transcript of former long-haul trucker and author Gord Magill’s interview on The Tucker Carlson Show, June 1, 2026.  

Editor’s Note: In this in-depth interview, former long-haul trucker and author Gord McGill joins Tucker Carlson to expose what he describes as a calculated “war on truckers” within North America. McGill details how industry deregulation, the reliance on exploited foreign labor, and the widespread use of unreliable electronic logging devices have compromised national security and eroded the profession’s traditional standards. He argues that these systematic changes are not merely economic issues but represent a dangerous failure of oversight that threatens the stability of the entire supply chain.

Introduction

TUCKER CARLSON: Gord, thanks so much for doing this.

GORD MAGILL: Oh, hey, thanks for having me.

TUCKER CARLSON: The reason I wanted to do this is because I think it fits. I’m going to give you my 1-minute overlay of why I think this is important. It’s always important when people are hassled and destroyed for things they didn’t do wrong. But I think the fate of truckers in the United States and Canada is part of a much larger trend.

So about 10 years ago, I think this is correct, I put it in a book I wrote, that driving for a living was the number one most common job for high school educated white men in the United States, which is to say the people displaced by deindustrialization. The factories died, the country went from making things to finance and real estate, and the people left behind weren’t helped, they were destroyed. By the Sacklers and drugs, and also by kind of relentless hounding and scolding by the ruling class. I don’t quite understand what that was, but I just noticed it, have noticed it, still noticing it.

So driving, trucking was not only like a huge part of the working class economy, like at the center of the working class economy in the West, but also sort of a symbol of culture and autonomy. Like, “I’m behind the wheel, no one can control me.”

GORD MAGILL: “The last American cowboy,” as it were.

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly. And it was celebrated, by the way, in the ’70s and early ’80s.

GORD MAGILL: Oh, massive cultural output celebrating and venerating the American trucker.

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly. When ordinary Americans, whose ancestors built this country, were not considered criminals by virtue of being alive. But anyway, I think this is part of a much larger shift and attack on the best people in the country. And last thing I’ll say is the other thing a lot of these guys do is go fight wars, right?

A Third-Generation Trucker

GORD MAGILL: Well, my grandfather landed at Normandy, D-Day plus 3, in a Sherman tank in a Canadian uniform, fought legitimate real Nazis — not the ones that are the figments of people’s imagination. And then came back to Canada and eventually got into the trucking business. I’m a third generation trucker, man.

TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, so there you go.

GORD MAGILL: I’m sorry, I just wanted to get my Canadian cred out of the way. My dad was in the reserves. We got both. We’re on both bases, sir.

The War on Truckers

TUCKER CARLSON: So tell me — you’ve written a book, End of the Road: Inside the War on Truckers. Most people are not aware there is a war on truckers, has been ongoing, this war on truckers. Give us an overview. What does that mean, “war on truckers”?

GORD MAGILL: Well, it’s sort of an analogy, right? There’s wars on workers, as you mentioned — deindustrialization, shipping manufacturing overseas. They couldn’t get rid of truckers, right? We’re here. This is geography. You can’t move things around America without being in America or Canada.

And so I think what we’ve seen is the result of — they tried to, in 1980, open up the market in order to bring the same forces to North America. So you can’t ship the jobs away. So let’s make it so that the jobs are more competitive, in their speak. So the Motor Carrier Act of 1980 comes in. And the idea is that the previous regulatory framework for trucking, the old Motor Carrier Act, which had a regulated business — so you had to publish your rates. It took a lot to actually get what you might call a taxi medallion. You had to have authority to operate a trucking business that was controlled by the government. They did have an argument that this made things too expensive, that it was sort of a cartel.

But the reforms went so far in the other direction that basically anybody with $300 and a pulse could sign up to become a trucking company. And the effects of that, which were brought by people who wanted free market reforms—

TUCKER CARLSON: Free market. Free market.

GORD MAGILL: Yeah. Well, hey, who isn’t? The problem is that since then—

TUCKER CARLSON: We didn’t get free markets.

The Driver Shortage Myth

GORD MAGILL: No, we did not. And since then they have asked the government to help them with the consequences of the reforms they asked for. So after the Motor Carrier Act of 1980 comes about, there’s intense competition. Lots of trucking companies go out of business. Lots of drivers quit. People move into other things because now the competition — you got your lower prices. Not everybody’s going to operate at that price, right?

So now they start seeing that drivers are a little harder to come by. Okay, maybe just pay them more. Figure out your rate structure. You asked for a free market reform. It’s up to you to fix this problem. But instead of doing that, in 1987, this corporate lobby group who I have a very low opinion of — the American Trucking Association — came out with this study and claimed that if we don’t have an additional 600,000 truckers by 1990, the entire economy would collapse.