The former Fox News host Tucker Carlson stirred up a crowd of Trump supporters on Wednesday night with a bizarre extended metaphor that cast former President Donald J. Trump as an angry father about to come home and give a “vigorous spanking” to his disobedient daughter.
As he warmed up the crowd before Mr. Trump spoke at a rally in Duluth, Ga., Mr. Carlson said that the country under Democratic leadership was like a toddler allowed to “smear the contents of his diapers on the wall of your living room,” or a “hormone-addled 15-year-old daughter” who gives her parents the finger and slams her bedroom door. And he cast Mr. Trump as the strict, disappointed father.
“When Dad gets home, you know what he says? ‘You’ve been a bad girl, you’ve been a bad little girl, and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now,’” Mr. Carlson said. Grinning, he went on: “And no, it’s not going to hurt me more than it hurts you. No, it’s not. I’m not going to lie. This is going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me. And you earned this. You’re getting a vigorous spanking because you’ve been a bad girl.”
The crowd went wild.
Mr. Carlson’s speech — at a rally hosted by the conservative group Turning Point Action that featured Mr. Trump as the headline speaker — was full of disparaging comments about women. He called former Representative Liz Cheney “Dick Cheney’s creepy little daughter” and described Democrats as “the party of weak men and unhappy women, one of which leads to the other, by the way.”
He raged against Vice President Kamala Harris in particular, referring to her as “Carmela or whatever her name is” and asking: “Kamala Harris, who couldn’t change the tire on your truck, much less drive it — how did she wind up at the top of the pyramid? And then once she’s there, she lectures you like you did something. It’s too much! We can’t allow that!” Making a grabbing motion, he described her as a pawn of the Democratic “machine” and called her “just a hapless victim who happened to be there in the right color, so they grabbed her.”
Mr. Carlson told the crowd that they had been unfairly demeaned by Democrats who called their views fringe, exhorting them to view themselves instead as a trampled majority, “the most mistreated group in this nation.”
He cast Democrats as illegitimate, calling them “the most parasitic, useless, violent, nasty, aggressive people in your country.” He said that “they have no legitimacy in a democracy, where the government must rule by the consent of the governed.”
In an apparent reference to people who fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War, he continued: “They tore down statues to their memory. People who never built anything in their lives, they went out of their way to humiliate you and spit on you and the graves of your ancestors.”
And he told the crowd directly that they should not accept the election results if Ms. Harris wins.
“At the end of all of that, when they tell you they’ve won, no!” he said. “You can look them straight in the face and say: ‘I’m sorry, Dad’s home, and he’s pissed.’”
