Tucker Carlson: ‘No One Believes You Anymore, Joe Biden—No One Should Believe You’

Friday, FNC host Tucker Carlson blamed President Joe Biden’s perceived ineptness for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, calling it a humiliating defeat for the current commander-in-chief.

Carlson pointed to Biden administration officials touting sanctions in the prelude to the invasion, which, as he noted, did not stop the attack.

Transcript as follows:

CARLSON: Let’s say you really didn’t care about the country you lead, let’s say you wanted to humiliate and degrade it and undermine its ancient institutions, what would you do? Well, you might take the single most important appointed position in the entire government and announce in public that you were filling that position on the basis of appearance, not on the basis of skill, or wisdom, or fealty to the founding documents of the United States, but on the basis of the way the person looks.

So it’s not a question of saying, we found the most qualified person who happens to look this way. What you’re saying is, we found a person who looks this way, who by the way, may be qualified.

That would send a very clear message that you don’t like the country you run, and you don’t care about the institutions that its ancestors built, and Joe Biden is doing that. We’ll have details straight ahead.

Also tonight, we are hearing reports of new attacks across Ukraine, including in the capital city at this hour. We will, of course, be monitoring those and tell you when we learn more.

But first on last night’s show, we tried to bring you as straightforward an analysis as we could of the invasion of Ukraine. It was then in progress, it still is.

The war at that point was less than 24 hours old, and it seemed disrespectful and wrong, to use the deaths of people on the ground as a partisan cudgel. Whereas horrifying, of course, but it’s also a grave and profound thing. You ought to stand back and offer a moment before you start drawing convenient conclusions from the suffering you see.

Death is a mystery. Acknowledge that. That’s how we feel.

Joe Biden’s allies in the media do not feel that way. They used the opportunity to attack their political opponents immediately, as they always do. They have no restraint and no shame. We’re grateful not to be them.

So that was last night.

Tonight, it is fair to note the obvious. The invasion of Ukraine is a humiliating defeat for Joe Biden. He is our leader. He staked this country’s reputation, billions of dollars, and the full force of the U.S. government on preventing Vladimir Putin from invading Ukraine.

Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine anyway, and America is diminished by that.

It’s not the first time Joe Biden has done something like this. Less than six months ago, Biden oversaw an almost indescribably chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. He left American citizens behind. He armed the Taliban with advanced weapons systems on the way out. It could not have been worse.

So here you have two historic foreign policy debacles in under a year. Is there a precedent for that? What’s the message of it?

Well, weakness, obviously. Republicans often say that, but as usual, don’t go far enough. Weakness? Well, North Korea is weak. They literally have famines. People starve to death in North Korea, that’s weakness. But they are still a nation we have to contend with because they bite.

A venomous spider is weak, you can crush it, but you’re still afraid of it because it bites.

We do not bite, and that is the problem. We’re not simply weak. The United States government under Joe Biden is ridiculous. It is pompous. It is self- involved. It is long-winded and fatuous.

It’s not so different from the fading old man who leads it. There is no hiding this, the rest of the world sees it clearly, so do many Americans.

If watching the invasion of Ukraine this week made you feel a little sick, this is probably why. Of course, you felt sorry for the Ukrainians being killed, but you also sense that this was a genuine disaster for us in America. And you’re right, it is.

Joe Biden is quickly draining the reservoir of America’s credibility and power that it has accumulated over centuries of wise-decision making. Like the U.S. Treasury, this is not Joe Biden’s capital to spend. He is squandering something that others made. How much is left at this point? I hate to even to think about it. Someday we’re going to find out.

So the problem here isn’t complicated. Joe Biden broke the oldest rule of all, don’t make threats you can’t back up. You think he’d know that if he had actually squared off against corn pop at the public swimming pool in Wilmington 60 years ago, but he never did, so he doesn’t know that if you say something serious, you had better mean it.

It is reckless to tell obvious lies. If you do that, before long, and it happens very quickly in fact, people figure out that you can be ignored. You’re not a superpower, you’re a joke, and that’s why you never under any circumstances say anything like this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KAMALA HARRIS (D), VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: The purpose of the sanctions has always been and continues to be deterrence, but let’s also recognize the unique nature of the sanctions that we have outlined.

These are some of the greatest sanctions, if not the strongest that we’ve ever issued.

NED PRICE, STATE DEPARTMENT SPOKESPERSON: The President believes that sanctions are intended to deter.

ANTONY BLINKEN, U.S. SECRETARY OF STATE: As to the sanctions, the most important thing we can do is to use them as a deterrent, as a means of dissuading Russia from engaging in further aggression.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Now, if you saw the dates, you noticed those clips are from recently, in some cases, just days before Vladimir Putin showed precisely how meaningless our sanctions actually were.

“The greatest sanctions ever,” said Kamala Harris wearing her stupid little mask on Monday. She’s a buffoon. You knew that. Now, it’s obvious that her buffoonery is a real peril for the rest of us.

No one in the White House seems to understand this, it’s life’s most obvious lesson. So here was Joe Biden from today telling you that actually, these sanctions, the greatest most deterrent sanctions ever, were never intended really to deter anything. Sorry, if you took it seriously the first time, we didn’t really mean it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOE BIDEN (D), PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: No one expected the sanctions to prevent anything from happening. That has to show — this could take time and we have to show resolve so he knows what’s coming and so the people of Russia know what he has brought on them. That’s what this is all about.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Who gives him these scripts? Do they not think we have access to YouTube, or maybe they were just hoping Google will scrub it by the time he holds another press conference? You just told us on Monday that the purpose of the sanctions was to deter the invasion of Ukraine.

So at the very least acknowledge they didn’t work as intended. They can never acknowledge that. Oh, the vaccine prevents transmission and infection. Just tell the truth. People will understand, but they lie every time.

Now they’re telling us Putin knows what is coming. We’ll get him next time. Right.

No one believes you anymore, Joe Biden. No one should believe you. It is very hard to take unserious people seriously. A serious President who cared would have reassessed everything. America’s foreign policy and how it is administered after the Afghanistan withdrawal last August. That was a disaster.

So a responsible person would have asked himself, how do we prevent this from happening again? That’s how responsible people think. It is how leader who care about their countries think. Of course, it is the baseline requirement for leadership.

This was a disaster. How do we prevent it from happening again? That’s not hard.

But lifetime federal employee that he is, Joe Biden did the opposite of that. His first instinct was to protect the bureaucracy, not the country, the bureaucracy. So not a single person from the Pentagon or the State Department was fired or even reprimanded. In fact, famously, the only person who was punished in the end for that historic debacle was a Marine colonel who complained about it. He went to jail for complaining.

And you will see the same response this time after the disastrous invasion of Ukraine. The American officials who so publicly trashed this country’s credibility will be promoted for it. They always are.

Victoria Nuland is one of the geniuses behind the Iraq War. That was almost 20 years ago. Did that hurt her career? It should have. It should have ended her career in place, right then. Go do something useful. Learn how to lay tile. But it didn’t end her career. In fact, her career accelerated.

In fact, this same person, Victoria Nuland, went on to help lead the Ukraine debacle we’re watching now. She is completely unqualified for the job she has. We knew that 20 years ago. And yet, she is highly successful in Washington. Someday she’ll probably be the Secretary of State. Remember her name, Victoria Nuland. She will be rewarded for failing.

Meanwhile, people who criticize Victoria Nuland or who care enough about this country to critique Joe Biden’s foreign policy disasters find themselves denounced in the media as of all things, traitors to America and then spied on by the NSA.

You see how that works? It’s all self-protection, and because it is, only buffoonery is rewarded and that is exactly why John Kerry is still around.

Here is John Kerry telling the BBC in public, on camera, that the real victim of this war is something called the climate.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOHN KERRY, U.S. SPECIAL PRESIDENTIAL ENVOY FOR CLIMATE: Massive emissions, consequences to the war, but equally importantly, you’re going to lose people’s focus. You’re going to lose certainly big country attention, because they will be diverted, and I think it could have a damaging impact.

So I hope President Putin will help us to stay on track with respect to what we need to do for the climate.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: And of course, he flew private to that interview, hoping nobody noticed, not caring if anyone noticed, like what’s the explanation behind it? How could you say something like that? That clip is real.

We didn’t make it up. It’s hard to believe it, but it is real. It’s all real.

If you did a nationwide search for the people least capable of leading a large nation through complicated times, you would get our leadership class. You would get John Kerry. Oh we found him. The search is over and of course, at the very top of that list would be John Kerry’s friend, Hillary Clinton.

So here is Hillary Clinton revealing the real story. She is telling you that the actual enemy in this war is not in Russia, not Eastern Ukraine, it is not Vladimir Putin, it’s you.

The real enemy of this country is anyone who dares to criticize the mismanagement of Hillary Clinton and her friends. Watch.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HILLARY CLINTON, FORMER PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: I think it’s time for what’s left of the Republican Party that has any commonsense, not just to say: Okay, go help defend Ukraine against Putin, but to stand against those people in politics, in government, in the media and elsewhere in our own country who are literally giving aid and comfort to an enemy of freedom and democracy.

It can’t — it can’t continue because it plays right into the ambitions of not just Putin, but also President Xi of China to undermine democracy, to literally divide and conquer the West without ever invading us, but by setting us against each other.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Your opinions are the real threat to democracy. Dare criticize us, and we will denounce you as a dangerous traitor, because that’s democracy.

So Vladimir Putin invades Ukraine, but guess whose fault it is? It’s your fault.

Notice a theme here? It is always your fault, every single time, and they’re going to punish you for it.

Hillary did say one interesting thing in that clip, probably inadvertently, she didn’t say it, but the allusion was there. Russia and China are now aligned as a bloc against the United States. Now how did that happen? It is pretty obvious. You’re looking around the world, you’re thinking, who are the big powers with meaningful economies and nuclear weapons? Maybe they shouldn’t be aligned against us. That’s just the simplest kind of math.

Maybe we shouldn’t do anything that pushes our enemies into a bloc, because that threatens us. But they don’t know that that’s happening, or maybe they’re in favor of it. God knows what the Biden administration is thinking.

According to The New York Times, quote, “The United States met with China over three months to present Intelligence showing Russia’s troop buildup near Ukraine, and to urge Beijing to help avert war. Chinese officials, rebuffed to the United States, and then shared that information with Moscow.”

Yes. So we went to China for help to prevent Putin from invading Ukraine at the very moment that Russia and China were forming a very public alliance against us.

Did that really happen? Apparently, it really did happen. How long can this go on? And maybe that’s why Biden didn’t mention China during his press conference.

He gave them our intelligence, and they gave it to Putin. Perfect.

But don’t mention that or you’re a traitor.