Fox News exile turned independent right wing gadfly Tucker Carlson launched a deeply deranged extended metaphor at a rally for former president Donald Trump on Wednesday, likening the Republican nominee to a “Dad” who is going to give a painful and “vigorous spanking” to a “bad little girl.”
Speaking before Trump at the event in Duluth, Georgia, Carlson compared a Trump victory in next month’s presidential election to when “Dad comes home,” prompting a delirious ovation from the staunchly MAGA crowd.
Carlson, in his winding and idiosyncratic tangent, posited America as a misbehaving child and Trump the patriarchal savior needed to spank her.
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“If you allow your 2-year-old to smear the contents of his diapers on the wall of your living room and you do nothing about it, if you allow your 14-year-old to light a joint at the breakfast table, if you allow your hormone addled 15-year-old daughter to slam the door of her bedroom and give you the finger, you’re gonna get more of it and those kids are going to wind up in rehab,” the firebrand talk show host told the crowd. “It’s not good for you and it’s not good for them. No, there has to be a point at which Dad comes home.”
Carlson said, when “Dad” Trump comes home, “he’s pissed” but “not vengeful” and “loves his children, disobedient as they may be.” He then said the father figure would need to let the metaphorical child know “he’s very disappointed in their behavior.”
And here is where things came perilously close to the creepy borders where Humbert Humbert and fascist coded rhetoric meet.
“When Dad gets home, you know what he says?” Tucker asked. “‘You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl and you’re getting a vigorous spanking.”
Carlson noted this spanking, in the words of the imagined progenitor administering it, would “‘hurt me more than it hurts you. I’m not going to lie. It’s going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me.’”
When Trump came on stage later in the event, the faithful MAGA flock shouted “Daddy’s home” and “Daddy Don.”
The metaphor never quite resolved to a place that explained what a “vigorous spanking” of America by “Dad” Trump would look like in practice, though in recent days former Trump allies and longtime opponents have warned he would be a “fascist” in office.
Trump’s erstwhile chief of staff, retired U.S. Marine Corps general John Kelly, said this week that he meets the definition of “fascist,” and Vice President Kamala Harris agreed with him at a town hall on Wednesday.
