Tucker Carlson Turns on Trump: 'He's Not Going To Do That'
Fox News host Tucker Carlson, known to American audiences as a conservative pro-Trump voice who often counters the mainstream media’s Trump-bashing slant, gave a different view President Donald Trump when he became the subject of an interview instead of the one asking the questions.
The bottom line on Trump is that he has failed to accomplish what he said he would do, Carlson said in an interview with the Swiss publication Die Weltwoche.
Urs Gehriger, an editor at the publication, noted that in Carlson’s book “Ship of Fools,” he derides Trump’s critics but skips over Trump’s record.
“That’s true,” Carlson said.
Gehriger then asked if Trump had kept his promises and achieved his goals.
“No,” Carlson said. “His chief promises were that he would build the wall, defund Planned Parenthood and repeal Obamacare, and he hasn’t done any of those things.”
Carlson then said the reason for that lies within Trump himself.
“… I’ve come to believe that Trump’s role is not as a conventional president who promises to get certain things achieved to the Congress and then does,” he said. “I don’t think he’s capable. I don’t think he’s capable of sustained focus. I don’t think he understands the system. I don’t think the Congress is on his side. I don’t think his own agencies support him. He’s not going to do that.”
But if Carlson said Trump is not cut out to be legislator-in-chief, he said the president is the voice that rivets America on the issues that shake its society to the core.
“I think Trump’s role is to begin the conversation about what actually matters,” Carlson said. “We were not having any conversation about immigration before Trump arrived in Washington. People were bothered about it in different places in the country. It’s a huge country, but that was not a staple of political debate at all.
“Trump asked basic questions like, ‘Why don’t our borders work?’ ‘Why should we sign a trade agreement and let the other side cheat?’ Or my favorite of all, ‘What’s the point of NATO?’ The point of NATO was to keep the Soviets from invading western Europe, but they haven’t existed in 27 years, so what is the point? These are obvious questions that no one could answer.”
Gehringer then returned to the subject of achievements and asked Carlson what Trump has achieved.
“Not much. Not much. Much less than he should have. I’ve come to believe he’s not capable of it,” Carlson said, noting that the legislative process is so complex it requires someone to master it.
He said Trump “knows very little about the legislative process, hasn’t learned anything, hasn’t and surrounded himself with people that can get it done, hasn’t done all the things you need to do so. It’s mostly his fault that he hasn’t achieved those things.”
Later in the interview, Carlson called the Democratic Party “the party of the rich.”
He said Trump has changed the political dynamics of what had become an elitist system.
“Donald Trump, who is often seen as this world-changing figure, is actually a symptom of something that precedes him that I sometimes wonder if he even understands, which is this realignment,” Carlson said. “He served the purpose of bringing the middle class into the Republican Party, which had zero interest, no interest in representing them at all. Trump intuitive, he felt, he could smell that there was this large group of voters who had no one representing them and he brought them to the Republican side, but the realignment is still ongoing.
“In other words, the Democratic Party used to represent the middle class. It no longer does. It now hates the middle class. The Republican Party, which has never represented the middle class, doesn’t want to. That is the source of really all the confusion and the tension that you’re seeing now.
“I do think, going forward, the Republican Party will wake up and realize these are our voters and we’re going to represent them whether we want it or not. They have to, or they will die.”
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