Of all the Russia-friendly comments Tucker Carlson has made this year, the Fox News host’s monologue Friday night contained one of his most hyperbolic claims.
Carlson opened his show talking about the war in Eastern Europe, specifically the steps President Joe Biden has taken before and throughout the Russian invasion of Ukraine. After imposing a series of sanctions and vowing to seize oligarchs’ Western assets, the administration on Tuesday announced a ban on imports of Russian oil in order to target “the main artery of Russia’s economy.”
The subsequent rise in gasoline prices—and inflation in general—led Carlson to doubt whether such a move was worth it to combat Russian war crimes. In fact, Carlson said that Russian President Vladimir Putin emerges from this policy as the “winner” because Russia can still sell its more expensive oil in global markets. (Carlson didn’t mention that Russia has reportedly been selling its oil at a substantial discount, likely because many importers don’t want to be seen as bankrolling a deeply unpopular war.)
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“Our global financial systems benefit us. That might not be fair, but it’s true. They are the basis of our wealth,” Carlson said. “If you destroy them in an effort to get Putin, who are you really destroying? You are destroying the United States. That is exactly what they have done. When you attack and destabilize the global financial systems… you are attacking and destabilizing the United States, not Putin.”
The effects of the West’s response to Putin’s invasion have been quite costly to Russia, actually, with the ruble’s value plummeting, for instance, and its GDP expected to shrink by 15 percent, according to one estimate. Yet Carlson insisted that Biden made not just a bad mistake, but a grievous error unprecedented in U.S. history.
“You cannot see this right now because there’s so much hysteria being ginned up by the media, particularly on social media,” Carlson continued. Then, introducing some hysteria of his own: “But when that hysteria lifts, when the cloud finally evaporates, it will be obvious that the Biden administration’s response to the invasion of Ukraine is the single most damaging thing any American president has ever done to this country and to the world. Not to Putin—to us, and to a lot of small countries that didn’t deserve it.”
