Tucker: Mistake for Trump To Change Summit Answer, Shouldn't Have Given in to Intel Swamp
As soon as the joint news conference concluding the Helsinki summit finished Monday, the liberal media and bipartisan political establishment launched an assault against President Donald Trump for the remarks he made after meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The president was called “treasonous” and an enemy of the American people because, in the view of the media and his detractors, he failed to denounce Putin publicly over Russian efforts to meddle in the 2016 election and appeared to express some skepticism toward U.S. intelligence community assessments.
Trump clarified some of his remarks on Tuesday and stated his acceptance of the intelligence community assessments, a rather significant change that didn’t sit well with Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
Carlson opened his Tuesday program with a scathing and highly skeptical monologue full of biting sarcasm that took to task both the over-the-top outrage of Trump’s initial remarks as well as Trump’s “buckling” to the pressure exerted on him to change those remarks.
“Well, as the rage storm swirled, the president bowed to the inevitable, genuflecting before U.S. intelligence agencies whose judgement must never be questioned and recited the now obligatory oath of loyalty to the spy bureaucrats now in charge of our country,” Carlson said.
He played a brief clip of Trump walking back his “controversial” remark — he said he meant to say no reason Russia “wouldn’t” meddle as opposed to no reason they “would” — and then Carlson dropped his pen on his desk in disgust as he declared, “So that’s the hostage tape.”
“The president buckled to criticism, and that’s not what they’re saying but that’s exactly what happened, he buckled. And that happens — this is politics after all,” he said.
But Carlson made it clear that it wasn’t so much Trump he was upset with for buckling, but those who had compelled him to bow to the relentless pressure — the collection of current and former bureaucrats and political pundits who have been wrong about most everything foreign policy-wise for the past several decades.
“What is amazing, and unusual and ominous, is who made him buckle. The people yelling the loudest about how the Russians are our greatest enemy and Trump is their puppet, happen to be the very same people who have been mismanaging our foreign policy for the past two decades,” Carlson explained.
He listed off a number of major foreign policy failures — such as the prolonged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the toppling of Libya’s government, the civil war in Syria, the obvious clamoring for war in other nations — and said, “These are the people who have made America weaker, and poorer, and sadder.”
“The group whose failures got Trump elected in the first place. You would think by this late date they would be discredited completely and unemployable, wearing uniforms and picking up trash by the side of a turnpike somewhere,” he continued.
“But no, they’re not. They’re hosting cable news shows, they’re holding high positions of influence at the State Department. They run virtually every non-profit public policy institution in Washington,” Carlson added disgustedly.
Carlson rightly noted that the Cold War was over and it was past time for America to rethink previous alliances and consider our own best interests in the new global reality.
“Russia is not a close friend of the United States, but the question is why should we consider Russia a mortal enemy? Of course, Russia spies on us, so do a lot of countries, some of them far more effectively than Russia.”
That would include China — who Carlson views as America’s biggest threat and rival — as well as the influential Sunni Gulf states in the Middle East and the Latin American nations that are actually “meddling” in our elections by “changing election outcomes here, by forcing demographic change on this country at a rate that American voters consistently say they don’t want,” none of which are called for their actions by the “experts” who ignore the very real threats posed.
“In some ways, this whole story is about Donald Trump and what he said and what he does. But on a deeper level it has nothing to do with Donald Trump,” concluded Carlson. “This is about Democracy, whether or not voters rule their country. It turns out the very people telling you they are saving our Democracy are working overtime to destroy it, and scolding you as they do.”
Say what you will about Russian meddling in the election — which quite possibly happened — as well as Trump’s seemingly forced acquiescence to the assessments of the intelligence community, but Carlson is absolutely right to express at least some skepticism and demand tangible proof regarding that community’s proclamations, given their prior history of failures on the foreign policy front.
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