Politics

Tucker Carlson’s ‘skin-crawlingly creepy’ description of Donald Trump

Published

2 years ago

November 11, 2024

At a Wednesday rally for Donald Trump in Duluth, Georgia, disgraced former Fox News host Tucker Carlson showed up in the guise of an emcee from a psychosexual nightmare realm.

After describing the American public as “a 2-year-old smearing the contents of his diapers on the wall” and “a hormone-addled 15-year-old girl slamming the door and giving you the finger,” a red-faced Carlson proposed a solution. “There has to be a point at which Dad comes home,” he said, to full-throated cheers from the crowd. “Dad comes home and he’s pissed. He’s not vengeful, he loves his children. Disobedient as they may be, he loves them, because they’re his children. … And when Dad gets home, you know what he says? You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now. And no, it’s not going to hurt me more than it hurts you. No, it’s not. I’m not going to lie. It’s going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me. And you earned this. You’re getting a vigorous spanking because you’ve been a bad girl, and it has to be this way.”

And when Dad gets home, you know what he says? You’ve been a bad little girl, and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now.

TUCKER CARLSON AT A TRUMP RALLY IN DULUTH, GA

The crowd went wild. And when Donald Trump came to the stage, it greeted him with rapturous cries of “Daddy’s home.” This segment of the nation, it seems, is eager for a spanking. Or at least titillated at the prospect of pain inflicted on others. This is not a new phenomenon within the MAGA movement, which has always been keen on the pain of those it deems wayward — but it is a florid illustration of the way patriarchal family dynamics and punishment stand at the center of contemporary right-wing morality.

Carlson, of course, is hardly the first person to conceptualize the nation as a family, although he may be the first to engage in a blissed-out ode to spanking on C-SPAN. George Lakoff, linguist and philosopher, posited that conservative ideologies rely on a “strict father” metaphor to conceptualize the nation and how it should be ruled. In his 2006 book “Thinking Points,” Lakoff explained that in this model, “The strict father is the moral authority in the family; he knows right from wrong, is inherently moral, and heads the household. … Obedience to the father is moral; disobedience is immoral. … When children disobey, the father is obligated to punish, providing an incentive to avoid punishment.”

Authoritarian conservatives, Lakoff argues, apply the strict-father model “not just to all issues but to governing itself.” In this vision, the state and its leader adopts both absolute control and the moral necessity to punish.

But Carlson’s words might have had a special resonance for a particular breed of authoritarian conservative: members of the evangelical right, who have been Trump’s most loyal foot soldiers; 77% of white evangelical protestants voted for Trump in 2016, and 85% did in 2020. Carlson — a maestro at knowingly appealing to the far-right masses — utilized a skin-crawling, sexualized misogyny in the culmination of his metaphor. But his central appeal to an angry father was consonant with a 50-year movement on the Christian right, one in which tens of millions of Americans have experienced, firsthand, the consequences of disobeying Daddy.

In the 1970s, in response to the student-led social revolutions of the 1960s — civil rights, feminism and gay rights — a newly awakened religious right created a movement designed to quash the impulses of rebellious youth. It was called “biblical parenting.” Its first megahit was James Dobson’s incredibly cruel book “Dare to Discipline,” which instructed parents, in great detail, to take a “rod of correction”-centric approach to child rearing. Dobson, founder of the evangelical institution Focus on the Family, recommends regularly spanking children from the ages of 18 months to 10 years old, with a spanking “of sufficient magnitude to cause tears.” This will efficiently quash “willful, haughty disobedience.”

Published in 1970, the book quickly sold millions of copies and launched a movement that centered God, and the rod, in child rearing. It’s a movement that has endured in millions of households across America, and across generations — leading to a new cadre of people, like the baying crowd in Duluth, for whom authoritarian principles were first nurtured in the home.

For my recently released book, “Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking Over America,” I reviewed 50 years’ worth of evangelical parenting manuals, from 1970 to 2017, and conducted interviews with nearly 150 former evangelicals who were raised according to “biblical parenting” principles. Evangelicals also evince a consistently higher approval toward corporal punishment in polling than other groups, a case of successful propaganda enforced with paddles, switches, sticks and hands. The through line throughout decades of these parenting manuals, and in testimonies, was an emphasis on corporal punishment, sometimes brutal, in order to enforce, in the words of youth-centered ministry Youth With a Mission, “instant, joyful obedience.”

In this family model, the strict father isn’t just the moral core of the household; he is also its spiritual head, with the mother as a submissive co-enforcer. Obedience to parents, according to these texts, is both a necessary prelude for and expression of obedience to God. The stakes are existentially high: One frequently cited verse is Proverbs 23:13 — “Withhold not correction from the child: for if thou beatest him with the rod, he shall not die.” This system coerces parents into using physical violence on their children in order to save their souls. And in an extension of Lakoff’s “strict father” model of the nation, this model of the family, predicated on obedience enforced with physical violence, creates an authoritarian politics in its practitioners.

The best way to rebuke authoritarianism is to not just rebuke it, but to defeat it and make it look ridiculous and weak.

Consider that a child who has been systemically beaten in the name of God since toddlerhood grows up to be accustomed to brutality and to exhibiting instant and joyful obedience to authority no matter how capricious or unjust. Someone who empathizes with the aggressor to survive, and is inured to brutality by repeatedly being subjected to it. When you ask what might motivate a crowd of people to cheer on the idea of a national spanking — to picture, with approval, a nation submitting to punishment by an abusive father as just and righteous, a necessary corrective to disobedience — you might not have to look any further than the kitchen tables they were raised around as kids, where wooden spoons were broken on their backs.

The best way to rebuke authoritarianism, to break the tyranny of the strict father, is to not just rebuke it, but to defeat it and make it look ridiculous and weak. Mockery and defeat undoes the authoritarian more effectively than violence. When a system is predicated on a cartoonish hypermasculinity, the solution is to treat its leaders as deserving of ridicule, not fear. And until voting ends next month, we have the chance to do just that. To disobey, with glee and en masse, the edict of this punitive would-be father. He’s not our dad. He’s just a man on a mission of punishment, and we can — and must — deny him that chance.

Talia Lavin

Talia Lavin is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, GQ, The Village Voice, The New Republic and many more publications. She is the author of the books “Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy” (Hachette Books, 2020) and “Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking Over America” (October 2024). Her newsletter, The Sword and the Sandwich, is featured in Best American Food and Travel Writing 2024.

Politics

Iowa’s last Democrat on how he can win in Trump country

Published

6 hours ago

August 26, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Iowa’s last Democrat on how he can win in Trump country

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Politics

The other Dan Sullivan makes November ballot against Sen. Dan Sullivan

Published

15 hours ago

August 26, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Alaska GOP Sen. Dan S. Sullivan can’t shake his same-name challenger.

Retired teacher Dan J. Sullivan punched a ticket out of the state’s top-four, all-party primary early Wednesday morning. He could now play spoiler in a high-stakes Senate clash between the Republican senator and former Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola that could help swing control of the upper chamber.

Republicans fought and failed to keep Dan J. Sullivan off the primary ballot, arguing he was a Democratic plant designed to boost Peltola. Both Dan J. Sullivan and Peltola’s campaign have denied any coordination.

The senator’s allies have already taken steps to mitigate the second Sullivan’s potential vote siphoning, in some cases running ads using the senator’s middle initial to help differentiate between the same-named candidates.

Supporters of the state’s ranked-choice voting system, which kicks in for the general election, argue the process helps curtail the spoiler effect. But the presence of other candidates could still skew the results of the battleground race. Outside groups flooded the primary with more than $2 million to boost myriad fringe candidates — and could do so again ahead of November.

It’s not smooth sailing for Peltola, either, as she wages an uphill battle to flip a red seat in a state President Donald Trump won by 13 percentage points in 2024. She recently replaced her campaign manager in a staffing shakeup ahead of the primary, among other internal moves.

Politics

‘It’s put up or shut up time’: Battleground Republicans want the Darline treatment

Published

15 hours ago

August 26, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

President Donald Trump notched a major win on Tuesday night. Republicans in battlegrounds wonder if it was the best use of his time and money.

Sen. Darline Graham defeated Rep. Ralph Norman in South Carolina’s snap Senate GOP runoff, handing Trump a revitalizing win after several of his endorsed candidates fell in recent primaries.

It was a victory that Graham, a complete political unknown six weeks ago, could not have pulled off without Trump’s steadfast support, underscoring just how much his influence still matters among the Republican electorate in the deeply conservative state.

But South Carolina’s Senate seat will not dictate the balance of power in Washington, and GOP strategists working on critical swing state campaigns are eager for Trump to finally direct his attention to them.

“The message coming out of this is that obviously the president’s support is still super powerful. The president’s operation still has the ability to move the needle in a lot of these states,” said a Republican strategist working on several battleground races, including in Georgia, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about Trump’s involvement. “Hopefully, this is a sign of things to come that the president is willing to get involved and really start to move the needle in some other places that obviously matter a little bit more than South Carolina.”

Trump’s persistent backing of Graham defined the race: He championed her appointment to her late brother Sen. Lindsey Graham’s seat, he coaxed her into the race with an early endorsement, stood by her as she stumbled on the debate stage, and flew down to Myrtle Beach for a rare political rally that few of his chosen candidates have enjoyed this cycle. MAGA Inc., Trump’s behemoth super PAC, even spent a slice of highly sought after cash from its $400 million stockpile in the closing days of the race.

And yet, the president hasn’t taken a meaningful step into the states that will matter in a few short months — even as battleground Republicans have been clamoring for him to spend his MAGA Inc. money.

“It’s now or never. It’s put up or shut up time, and it’s really time to start to see if he’s going to get serious,” the GOP strategist said. “You’ve got September and October to really move the needle here, and it just doesn’t seem like there’s any sense of urgency, or like we understand that we are down big in some of these states.”

During her victory speech in Columbia, Graham acknowledged Trump’s heavy hand: “Our victory would not have been possible without you, and we are truly grateful,” Graham said of the president. “South Carolina is truly Trump country.”

Norman’s take on the president’s participation was not as rosy: “The president got involved. He has that right. That’s his prerogative,” Norman said in his concession speech Tuesday, prompting jeers from the crowd at his election night watch party. “Y’all,” he continued, “his policies are good. I never understood why he got in this race. It is what it is, and I’ll accept it.”

Norman’s bewilderment reflected several national and South Carolina Republicans’ confusion as to why the president would expend energy for the safe Republican seat when his MAGA allies like Mike Collins in Georgia, scandal-plagued Ken Paxton in Texas and Michael Whatley in North Carolina are facing tough Senate battles against Democratic opponents.

“There’s the principle,” said a North Carolina-based GOP strategist who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about the battleground picture. “If you’re not Trump and you have these people shoved down your throat, you’re like, ‘Okay, are you gonna help?’”

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Some Republicans are worried that though Trump helped power Graham’s win, the president’s overall unpopularity may be more of a curse than a boon in any highly competitive battleground state. A series of Trump-backed candidates lost gubernatorial and congressional primaries in recent weeks, including in Georgia and Iowa.

Republicans overall are facing a tough election environment given the ongoing and unpopular war in Iran, backlash to the administration’s highly-visible deportation agenda and voters’ persistent cost of living concerns.

“You have a president and maybe even a vice president that are just so underwater politically in the polls, that they might be a help by not intervening,” said Matthew Bartlett, a GOP strategist and former State Department official in the first Trump administration.

Still, Trump swept the battlegrounds in 2024, and his ability to boost Graham despite her foreign policy debate gaffe and questions about her political inexperience serves as a reminder of his electoral prowess to campaign officials.

The question remains when — or if — he’ll throw them a presidential life raft.

“I wouldn’t count on the money if I were in these states,” said the North Carolina-based Republican strategist. “He still could. I’m just saying, I wouldn’t count on it. We’re not dealing with somebody that’s, you know, super calculated in the way they plan.”

For months, Republicans across the country have watched on as the president has continued to amass a remarkable pile of cash — and many have implored him to empty his pockets in their races. The president told reporters last week that he’ll spend “a lot of that money” to boost “Republican candidates that I think are good,” without being specific.

However, what some saw as a distraction from the greater Republican cause this year, others read as the first few drops of Trump’s cash flood.

“If they’re going to spend 800 grand in South Carolina, they’re going to spend in the midterms,” said Matt Mackowiak, a Republican strategist based in Texas who worked on Sen. John Cornyn’s failed reelection campaign and is now backing the GOP ticket. “It signals they’re going to make a substantial investment in the midterms because you don’t make an 800-grand investment in South Carolina and say, ‘Yeah, we’re going to let everybody do their own thing.’ This was in some ways a test case.”

Trump’s targeted support for Graham — the kind that some Republicans are banking on to shift the dial later this fall — paid off for her in dividends on election night. Horry County, the site of the president’s marquee rally with the candidate late last week, resoundingly broke for Graham.

Trump’s backing also helped open the door to endorsements from key South Carolina Republican figures, including fellow GOP Sen. Tim Scott, who helped Graham shore up support in his Charleston-area home base, Gov. Henry McMaster, and two members of the state’s congressional delegation, Reps. Russell Fry and William Timmons.

Outside spending also proved crucial to Graham’s success. Her campaign and its allies outspent Norman by more than $5 million in the runoff alone, according to AdImpact.

Trump’s allies took a victory lap after Graham’s victory was confirmed Tuesday evening.

“The power of the Trump endorsement is alive and well in South Carolina,” said Mike Hahn, a GOP strategist involved in the midterms. “A good opening salvo for the team at MAGA Inc. and the president ahead of the midterms.”