Speaking at a rally on Wednesday night, Tucker Carlson likened Donald Trump to “daddy” and described him coming home angrily to give a “bad little girl” a “vigorous spanking.”
Carlson delivered the disturbing speech at a Turning Point Action rally in Duluth, Georgia, alongside his fellow MAGA acolytes Charlie Kirk, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and others, as well as Donald Trump himself. In his address, Carlson went on a manic rant encouraging his audience, who he described as “an incredibly gentle and tolerant majority,” to fight back against those who he sees as “parasitic, useless, violent, nasty, aggressive people,” like Kamala Harris, protesters who tore down Confederate statues, and weirdly, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink. But that was the least strange part of his speech.
Carlson then launched into a Freudian soliloquy by listing made-up scenarios of parents being too permissive, as a metaphor for how he sees America. If you allow a baby to smear poop on the walls or a “14-year-old to light a joint at the breakfast table,” or, he continued, “if you allow your hormone-addled 15-year-old daughter to slam the door of her bedroom and give you the finger, you’re going to get more of it.”
Tucker Carlson’s vision of a Trump presidency is that “dad comes home” and says to America,
— Edward-Isaac Dovere (@IsaacDovere) October 24, 2024
“You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl and you’re getting a vigorous spanking, right now. … It’s going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me.”pic.twitter.com/fh25KmyYmG
“There has to be a point at which dad comes home. Yeah, that’s right. Dad comes home. And he’s pissed. Dad is pissed,” said Carlson. “He’s not vengeful. He loves his children. Disobedient as they may be, he loves them. Because they’re his children. They live in his house. But he’s very disappointed in their behavior. And he’s going to have to let them know.” The crowd of thousands went wild for his comparison, chanting “Daddy’s home” as Trump took the stage. Talk about weird. And Carlson, again, didn’t stop there.
“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.’”
Carlson’s speech at the Turning Point rally is not out of the ordinary when it comes to the way MAGA talks about children and women as something you own and can punish. Just last month, Trump creepily promised he will be women’s “protector.” Meanwhile, in states like Missouri and Oklahoma, Republicans have supported corporal punishment in schools, as part of a long evangelical and right-wing obsession with hitting their kids.
This also isn’t the first time that the right has talked about spanking on the main stage. In 2016, Chris Christie threatened Hillary Clinton, promising to “beat her rear end,” and Senator Ted Cruz asked voters to give Clinton “a spanking.” But invoking the image of Trump as “daddy” or as a punishing God and having that message embraced by the frenetic crowd, who also cheered that “Christ is King,” is enough to make any normal person squirm.
