Fox News host Tucker Carlson admits that President Trump is a “full-blown B.S. artist” who “could’ve made a fortune selling cars,” but his knack for twisting the truth to make his “sales pitches” isn’t why the media actually despises him, as they claim. In fact, argued Carlson on his show Wednesday night, the media resents Trump so much for “the exact opposite” reason.
“One of the reasons progressives say they hate Donald Trump is because he lies a lot,” Carlson said on his Fox News show Wednesday night. “Trump, they’ll tell you, is a committed liar, an inveterate one. To prove he point the left has set about trying to catalog Trump’s dishonesty with the kind of scientific precision you normally associate with obsessed baseball fans or amateur bird watchers. As of last month, according to The Washington Post, Donald Trump has made a total of 13,435 false or misleading statements while in office.”
Carlson then played a famous claim by Trump which the Post marks as the starting point of Trump’s presidential lies: his claim that his inauguration crowd was “the biggest ever.”
“We’re not going to lie to you: that was untrue,” said Carlson. “The crowd at the 2017 inauguration was not the largest ever measured on the national mall. Sorry. It wasn’t.”
“Why did the president claim that it was?” Carlson asked. “Well, because that’s who he is. Donald Trump is a salesman. He’s a talker, a boaster, a booster, a compulsive self-promoter. At times, he’s a full-blown B.S. artist. If Trump hadn’t gotten rich in real estate, he could’ve made a fortune selling cars. Most people know this. It’s obvious, transparent, really.”
Carlson then got to his central argument: Yes, Trump is a “B.S. artist,” but his lies are not what is actually driving the mass disdain for him from left-wing politicians and their allies in the media.
“Is lying really the reason the left despises Donald Trump? Or could the real problem be, as is so often the case, the exact opposite of what they claim it is?” asked Carlson.
“Think back over the last four years,” he continued. “When have the CNN anchors been the angriest? Was it when Donald Trump told some whopper, or exaggerated his own accomplishments? Nope. They’re used to that kind of lying. Everyone who spends time around politicians is used to it. What infuriates official Washington is not when Trump lies, it’s when he tells the truth. Truth is the real threat to their power.”
“There’s an unspoken agreement among the people in charge of our country not to talk about what has happened to it,” Carlson said. “They are personally implicated in its decline, for one thing — often they’re profiting from it. The last thing they want is a national conversation about what went wrong. So they maintain an increasingly strict policy of mandatory reality avoidance.”
As an example of this “reality avoidance,” Carlson pointed to our unsustainable immigration policies. “If the people in charge actually cared about us, they would protect our borders,” he said. “The gatekeepers in our national media, the people who should have been sounding the alarm about all of this, but instead made common cause with the ruling class they were supposed to be covering and keeping honest.”
When Trump tells the truth about the situation at the border, he’s branded a bigot by Democrats and the media in an attempt to deflect from the issue. Raising such issues as immigration exposes the ruling class’s “own egregious failures and selfishness,” so they instead try to redirect the conversation by declaring that “Donald Trump is a racist liar.”