On the same day President Joe Biden used cheat sheets — including one marked “Tough Putin Q&A Talking Points” — to field questions from the media, Fox News host Tucker Carlson said it’s time to take action.
Carlson said top lawmakers and cabinet members should invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Biden, who last week said Fox News host Russian President Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power.” That brought swift rebukes from foreign leaders and Republicans for being a call for forceful regime change, prompting the White House to walk back Biden’s comments.
Weirdly, in a press conference Monday, Biden said he never said what everyone heard him say. Carlson said enough is enough.
“On Saturday, once again completely out of nowhere, with no warning whatsoever and apparently no forethought, Joe Biden called for regime change in Russia,” Carlson said. He played a clip in which Biden says: “A dictator bent on rebuilding an empire will never erase the people’s love for liberty. Brutality will never grind down the road to be free. For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”
Carlson added: “Doing his Churchill routine, fine. When things aren’t going well at home all presidents seek solace abroad, where they’re taken much more seriously than they are by their own voters, but he couldn’t stop himself. ‘For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,’ Joe Biden said of Vladimir Putin.”
“Now, set aside how you feel about Putin. You probably don’t like him and for good reason. Our policy, according to the president of the United States, is to take Putin out, to remove him as head of state. To be clear, regime change in Russia has never been American policy, and this is hardly the first time we have tangled with Russia. We’ve had far more threatening circumstances than this one,” Carlson said.
“The United States, you’ll recall, waged a proxy war against the Russian government for 11 years in Vietnam. Nearly 60,000 Americans died in that war, and yet no American president mentioned regime change at the Kremlin. Why? Because they were soft on the Russians? No, because Russia has about 6,000 nuclear weapons,” he added.
Carlson noted that at that Monday press conference, Biden refused to get on board with what the White House was saying, declaring that he wasn’t “walking anything back.”
“Nobody believes we’re going to take down, I was going, I was talking about taking down Putin. Nobody believes that,” Biden said.
That prompted Carlson to wrap up his segment with this: “All right. Joke’s over, too much is at stake. If there was ever a time, if there was, in U.S. history, ever a time, to invoke the 25th Amendment, it is now. As Joe Biden himself put it, ‘For God’s sakes, this man cannot remain in power,’ for all of our sakes.”
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Joseph Curl has covered politics for 35 years, including 12 years as White House correspondent, and ran the Drudge Report from 2010 to 2015. Send tips to [email protected] and follow him on Twitter @josephcurl.