Fox News host Tucker Carlson spent the first half of his program on Thursday night warning President Donald Trump that he is on pace to lose re-election unless the Trump administration starts rounding up protesters and charging them with terrorism.
Carlson, who has spent the past few weeks railing against Black Lives Matter and framing the social movement as a violent mob, warned at the top of his show that Trump’s re-election chances are fading and voters are moving to the left.
“Not many people are saying it out loud on the right, but the fact is that President Trump could well lose this election,” Carlson declared. “In fact, unless fundamental facts change soon, it could be tough for him to be re-elected.”
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“If the president does lose, that means just a few months from now, Joe Biden would become the president,” he added. “The United States government would fall into the control of the radicals who controlled Joe Biden and they will remake the country. Now, we are fully aware that virtually nobody watching the show tonight wants to hear that, but it’s true, and key people around the president know that it’s true. They’ve seen the numbers, and they are concerned.”
Carlson claimed historians will likely “marvel at the fact that the president lost ground during a pandemic and then during mass riots,” insisting that these two events should have played into Trump’s strengths during the 2016 election: Trump’s skepticism of China and his “law and order” bravado.
The Fox News host, however, excused the president's failures as being an offshoot of the Russia investigation, insisting Trump was “exhausted” from defending himself against “the most elaborate and effective hoax in American history.”
He would spend the bulk of his lengthy monologue saying conservatives were “made vulnerable to their opponents’ lies” because most of them agreed to coronavirus restrictions, claiming this set the stage for liberals to target institutions like law enforcement in the wake of the George Floyd protests.
Carlson—who has privately advised Trump on a number of policy positions—then laid out his plan for Trump and Republicans to win this November: show trials.
“So what is the White House doing about this?” Carlson wondered aloud. “The president announced that anyone who topples a statue on federal property will face ten years in prison. That is a welcome start. What we are living through right now despite what people have told you is not a local problem. This is a national crisis.”
Saying that if the “rioters were Saudi nationals” then the president would “understand immediately it is terrorism” and mass arrests would be made, the Fox News star grumbled that the Department of Justice isn’t responding like this.
“So far, no one has been arrested for it,” Carlson declared. “It would change the course of this country’s future if the Justice Department rounded up the leaders of antifa tomorrow, along with every single person caught on camera torching a building, destroying a monument, defacing a church, and put them all in shackles and then frog-march them in front of cameras like MS-13 and call them what they actually are, domestic terrorists.”
“Not protesters, not civil rights activists, not CNN contributors, but domestic terrorists,” he continued. “And that would be their new government-approved title. Once they are charged, it’s official, in fact. They are literally, as a factual matter, accused terrorists, and that would change minds right away.”
Carlson would conclude his tirade by warning Trump a backlash isn’t forthcoming because “the opposite seems to be happening,” especially if protesters aren’t labeled as terrorists since “everyone supports protesters.”
“Normal people are starting to think like this,” he huffed. “Once big things start changing, they tend to change more quickly than we expect. All of this means this is precisely the time right now tonight to defend the institutions that we desperately need to keep in this country.”
