By extolling Trump as “Daddy” meting out corporal punishment, the disgraced TV host is pitching authoritarian patriarchy.
Who’s the daddy? Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.(Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
The two remarkable facts about Tucker Carlson are that he lost a high-profile TV post by being too racist even for Fox News—and that he has been rehabilitated by the Trump campaign. In 2023, as a result of a lawsuit launched by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News for lying about the 2020 election, the network’s executives saw a memo that Carlson wrote to his producer where the cable news star exulted in Trump supporters’ beating up a protester. Carlson enthused: “A group of Trump guys surrounded an Antifa kid and started pounding the living shit out of him. It was three against one, at least. Jumping a guy like that is dishonorable obviously. It’s not how white men fight.” Carlson, already under fire for repeatedly employing white nationalists and for echoing neo-Nazi ideas such as the “Great Replacement” theory on his show, now had his fingerprints on a smoking gun: It was clearly racist to equate honorable fighting with white men. Fox, as part of its house cleaning to salvage the network’s reputation after the fiasco of its libelous attacks on Dominion Voting Systems, pushed Carlson out the door.
Post-Fox, Carlson remade himself as a social-media provocateur—one who is even more openly bigoted. Last month, he hosted a lengthy interview with Darryl Cooper, an amateur historian and Holocaust revisionist. The New York Times reported that on Carlson’s show, Cooper “proceeded to make a variety of false claims about the Holocaust and World War II, including that millions of people in concentration camps ‘ended up dead’ merely because the Nazis did not have enough resources to care for them, rather than as a result of the intentional genocide that it was.”
In the pre-Trump era, someone like Carlson who was so intimately linked to not just racism but even Nazi apologia would be regarded as radioactive for any mainstream political campaign. But the Trump campaign, in keeping with its strategy of outreach to cranky constituencies neglected by mainstream Republicans, has repeatedly used Carlson as an honored surrogate.
On Wednesday, Carlson was warming up the audience at a Trump rally in Duluth, Georgia. In his praise of Trump, Carlson broke new rhetorical ground by celebrating the former president as a stern “daddy” who would inflict physical punishment on childish Democrats.
Working himself up to a lather and often laughing manically, Carlson conjured up a lurid vision of America as a dysfunctional family under the Democrats. Carlson’s bizarre speech deserves to be quoted at length.
The situation, Carlson said, “is very familiar to anyone who has children, which is if you allow it, you will encourage more of it. If you allow people to get away with things that are completely over the top and outrageous. If you allow your 2-year-old to smear the contents of his diapers on the wall of your living room and you do nothing about it, if you allow your 14-year-old to light a joint at the breakfast table, 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. Those kids are going to wind up in rehab. It’s not good for you. It’s not good for them. No, 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. 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.…
“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. This is 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.’”
The image of Donald Trump inflicting a “vigorous spanking” on a 15-year-old girl is disturbing by itself—and becomes even more so when one remembers Trump’s long record as a sexual harasser. Trump once boasted about walking into a changing room filled with teenage beauty pageant contestants. Trump has been accused of sexual assault by more than 20 women, and a court found him guilty of abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll.
Given Trump’s history, Carlson’s attempt to recast the GOP presidential nominee as a stern but just patriarch seems both absurd and politically self-defeating. One is almost tempted to advise Carlson to give up political speeches and seek a therapist for his unresolved “daddy” issues.
But Carlson’s speech, however delusional, is a product of cold political calculation as much as personal pathology. Trump is running for the second time against a female candidate, one who has energized women enraged by the ending of reproductive freedom by Supreme Court justices Trump appointed.
Trump is facing what is shaping up to be the largest gender gap in American presidential history. According to USA Today, Trump is “leading among men 53% to 37%. Vice President Kamala Harris’ lead with women is 53% to 36%.” The problem for Trump is that women vote at a higher rate than men: In early voting in six states (Colorado, Georgia, Indiana, Michigan, North Carolina, and Virginia), women make up at least 54 percent of the electorate. This is an excellent sign for Harris.
The Trump campaign has responding by doubling down on patriarchy as a way to mobilize low-propensity male voters (and perhaps traditionalist women). This is the logic behind Trump’s references to himself as the “protector” of women, as well as Carlson’s spanking-daddy rhetoric.
In her thoughtful new book. Wild Faith, the journalist Talia Lavin notes that the culture of evangelical Protestants encourages the corporal punishment of children as a necessary part of the social order. In 1970, evangelical child psychologist James Dobson (who would go on to found Focus on the Family) argued in his book Dare to Discipline, “The parent’s relationship with his child should be modeled after God’s relationship with man. This same love leads the benevolent father to guide, correct, and even bring some pain to the child when it is necessary for his eventual good.”
Lavin reports that the influence of Dobson and many other influential evangelicals of his ilk have
made corporal punishment of children not just permissible but nearly mandatory within church communities. Their relentless pursuit of obedience in children created a culture across evangelical denominations that made the beating of children with rods and hands a daily ritual; the theological framework they provided made it seem like a mortal sin to refrain from doing so; and they preached to congregations that took sin very seriously indeed.
This is the audience Carlson is hoping to mobilize with his talk of Daddy Trump punishing the errant children of America. But Carlson’s rhetoric surely risks a backlash of biblical proportions. It’s unlikely that most American women want to be treated like misbehaving children deserving a thrashing. In fact, like JD Vance’s grumblings about childless cat ladies, Carlson will likely seem weird to mainstream America. The best hope for the Democrats is that Carlson’s creepy fantasies intensify opposition to Trump’s third presidential bid.
Jeet HeerTwitterJeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He also pens the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms.” The author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Prospect, The Guardian, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe.