Fox News’s Tucker Carlson began his Election Eve program on Monday with a single image from President Trump’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, over the weekend. While he said the picture does not predict how the race will turn out, it is the perfect metaphor for the 2020 election the state of the U.S.
“Butler is like a lot of places you will find in this country once you head inland from the coasts,” he said. “It’s a former industrial town, the made Pullman railcars there for many years, but it’s been losing population for decades. They still have nice people in Butler. For $60,000, you can buy a decent house there. It’s a place you might be happy in, but our professional class is not impressed by Butler. They don’t consider Butler, Pennsylvania, or places like it, the future. To them, places like Butler are embarrassing relics of a past best forgotten, the men of Butler may have built this country and they did but they mean nothing to our leaders now.”
Carlson said no one in D.C., New York, or L.A. cared when suddenly large numbers of people in Butler started dying from overdoses. Things got so bad there that residents built a memorial at the center of town.
“Given all of that, it was interesting how the people around Butler feel about Donald Trump. Here’s a picture of the president’s rally there on Saturday night. Tens of thousands of people came, so many people that the crowd obscured the horizon. It looked like a visit from the Pope,” Carlson added. “When was the last time a political speech drew that many people?”
Instead of looking at why so many people in such a small town would show up to a political rally, the mainstream media panned it as a superspreader event and left it at that.
“Why did all those people come? Why?” Carlson wondered. “They must’ve known that Donald Trump is the most evil man who’s ever lived. They’ve heard that every day for five years. They know people who support Donald Trump are also evil. They’re bigots, they’re morons, they’re racist cult members. They know that Americans have been fired from their jobs for supporting Donald Trump, not to mention kicked off social media, belittled by their kids’ teachers, shunned by decent society. Only losers and freaks support Donald Trump. People in Butler knew all of that, but on Saturday, they went to the Donald Trump rally anyway.”
Carlson continued: “Why exactly did they do that? We should be pondering that question deeply as we watch tomorrow’s returns and as we live through the aftermath of them. Millions of Americans sincerely love Donald Trump, they love him in spite of everything they’ve heard. They love him often in spite of himself. They’re not deluded, they know exactly who Trump is, they love him anyway. They love Donald Trump because no one else loves them. The country they built, the country of their ancestors fought for over hundreds of years has left them to die on their unfashionable little towns mocked and despised by the sneering half-wits with finance degrees, but no actual skills, who seem to run everything all of a sudden.
“Whatever Donald Trump faults, he’s better than the people in charge. At least he doesn’t hate them for their weakness. Donald Trump in other words is and has always been a living indictment of the people who run this country, that was true four years ago when Trump came out of nowhere to win the presidency and it’s every bit as true right now, maybe even more true than it’s ever been and it will remain true regardless of whether Donald Trump wins reelection. Trump grows because they failed, it’s as simple as that. If the people in charge had done a halfway decent job with the country they inherited, if they cared about anything other than themselves even for just a moment, Donald Trump would still be hosting “Celebrity Apprentice,” but they didn’t. Instead, they were incompetent and narcissistic and cruel and relentlessly dishonest. They wrecked what they didn’t build, they lied about it. They hurt anyone who told the truth about what they were doing. That’s true. We watched.”
Carlson concluded that the United States is "still a great country, the best in the world,” but called America’s ruling class “disgusting.”
“A vote for Trump is a vote against them,” he said. “That’s what’s going on in that picture, that’s what’s going on in this country.”
Donald Trump is and has always been a living indictment of the people who run this country. That was true four years ago when Trump came out of nowhere to win the presidency and it's every bit as true right now. Our ruling class is disgusting. pic.twitter.com/0JLb6L5AFR
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) November 3, 2020