Thursday during a monologue segment on his Fox News Channel program, Tucker Carlson pushed back against comments President Donald Trump made about his attorney general, Jeff Sessions.
Carlson argued Trump should not be criticizing Sessions, who he described as his “closest ally” and someone who understood why Trump won the 2016 presidency.
The “Tucker Carlson Tonight” host also said Trump might be losing sight of who his allies are in Washington by arguing it was not investment bank Goldman Sachs that elected him, but America’s “long-ignored” middle class.
Transcript as follows:
Now, take a step back, and you can see how this all happened. The president is a 71-year-old political novice and all of a sudden he is the subject of a vague, open-ended federal investigation whose goal may be to imprison him and his family. Ask anyone who’s had an independent counsel on this case, and there are a lot of them here in Washington, what that’s like. It’s terrifying.
The pressure is soul-distorting. You can wind up lashing out at the people around you, even — maybe especially the ones trying to help you the most. So, that’s probably what’s going on. And yet, attacking Jeff Sessions was still a useless, self-destructive act.
The first rule in politics, as in war, as in life: Don’t shoot the friendlies. Sessions is the closest ally Trump has in this administration, one of the very few who even understands why the president won in the first place.
Unlike most political appointees in Washington, Sessions made big sacrifices to work in this administration. A year ago, he was one of the most popular people in the state of Alabama, with a senate seat he could have held forever.
Many on his staff didn’t want him to endorse Donald Trump, but he did anyway purely because he felt it was important. Sessions was worried about what an unsecured border and mass immigration would do to America even though the biggest effects wouldn’t be seen until decades after he was long gone from this earth.
So, he jumped in and accepted Trump’s offer to become attorney general. He didn’t do this to get rich and certainly not to become more popular. He instantly became less.
You’ll remember that many of his former colleagues in the Senate slandered him as a bigot during his confirmation hearings. As attorney general, Sessions has been the rare person in the entire executive branch making actual progress implementing the agenda his boss ran on because he’s a rare person who believes in it.
In an administration brimming with opportunists and ideological saboteurs, people who literally couldn’t be less interested in what voters think, Sessions has never lost sight of the lessons of the last election.
He has gone after sanctuary cities and forced immigration laws. He has ended the Obama administration’s attacks on local police departments and a lot more. He is likely the most effective member of the Trump cabinet. In return, the president attacked him in the failing New York Times. That’s not just criticism. It’s an insult.
It’s also a worrisome sign that the president may be forgetting who is on his side.
Goldman Sachs did not elect Donald Trump. America’s long-ignored middle class did. Trump voters may find his tweets about the media amusing and well-deserved because obviously, they are. But they are not the point of this exercise.
The point is to shine some light on the broad middle of this country and the millions of normal people who are hurting and who could badly use an ally in power for the first time in a long time.
Now, the hope is what happened yesterday was just a stress-related aberration, the political equivalent of yelling at your kids when you had a bad day at the office.
If so, it will not be hard to fix this. Going forward, just pay a little less attention to The New York Times and a little more to Matt Drudge. And for God’s sake, lay off Jeff Sessions. He’s your friend –one of the very few you have in Washington.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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