Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) recently took shots at exiled Fox News host Tucker Carlson and former President Donald Trump during a victory lap on the foreign aid package expected to pass the upper chamber of Congress soon. He noted that Carlson “ended up where he should have been all along” during a press conference on Tuesday via Mediaite.
The dig was produced, ironically, by a question from Fox’s Chad Pergram, who noted that McConnell is “one of the most ardent backers of Ukraine in the Senate” before asking “what took so long” for other members of his party to back the bills to provide aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan.
“Well, that’s a good question. You already know the answer. I think the demonization of Ukraine began by Tucker Carlson, who, in my opinion, ended up where he should have been all along, which is interviewing Vladimir Putin,” replied McConnell. “And so he had an enormous audience which convinced a lot of rank-and-file Republicans that maybe this was a mistake.”
He continued:
I think that the former president [Trump] had sort of mixed views on it. We all felt the border was a complete disaster, myself included. And Chad, you remember covering the phases we went through. First, it was an effort to make law, which requires you to deal with Democrats. And then a number of our members thought it wasn’t good enough. And then our nominee for president didn’t seem to want us to do anything at all. That took months to work our way through it. So we ended up doing the supplemental that was originally proposed, which dealt with not all problems. It didn’t solve the border problem, but certainly addressed the growing threats at the moment.
Carlson was fired by Fox last spring, he has since launched his own media venture for which he interviewed Putin earlier this year.
