This weekend, Tucker Carlson interviewed a bevy of Republican presidential candidates in Iowa. Despite the fact that polls show that nearly zero Americans consider the war in Ukraine to be a top voting priority, Carlson spent a disproportionate share of his time grilling the candidates over their position on Ukraine. He took the position that favoring additional aid to Ukraine in its defensive war against Russia amounted to taking money out of the hands of poverty-stricken Americans in inner cities; as he asked Mike Pence, “Every city in the United States has become much worse over the past three years. … Our economy has degraded. The suicide rate has jumped. Public filth and disorder and crime have exponentially increased. And yet your concern is that the Ukrainians, a country most people can’t find on a map, who’ve received tens of billions of U.S. tax dollars, don’t have enough tanks?”
This same line of logic was utilized over the weekend by Senator JD Vance (R-OH), who spoke at the Turning Point USA conference in Florida. “There’s no issue that these people with the Ukrainian flags in their bio are more obsessed with, they call it entitlement reform but what they’re saying is they want to cut social security … so we can send more money to Volodymyr Zelensky in Ukraine,” Vance said. Never mind the fact that this is patently untrue: those with Ukraine flags in their Twitter bios are highly likely to favor massive governmental expenditures domestically. Never mind the fact that Vance himself used to be a proponent of entitlement reform.
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