WASHINGTON—A team of NASA scientists monitoring a 14-mile-long asteroid in the inner solar system admitted today they decided to reverse course after watching Tucker Carlson interview Donald Trump on Tuesday.

“We were on a dinner break and flipped on the television,” said Peter Jenniskens, a research scientist at the SETI Institute and NASA Ames Research Center whose primary responsibility is to protect Earth from an asteroid strike. “When Trump started talking about the hot Chinese interpreter and nuclear warming, it made us second guess our work,” said Jenniskens. “I got together with my colleagues, and we decided at this point, we feel it would be best for everyone if the asteroid makes a direct hit.”

The last recorded asteroid to hit the planet wiped out the world’s dinosaur population 65 million years ago. Jenniskens rose to fame in the scientific community following his 2017 theory that suggested that a few prehistoric creatures survived that strike during the Cretaceous period and later formed a movement known as MAGA in 2016.