Conservative commentator Tucker Carlson told Republicans gathering in Milwaukee on Monday that Americans should “be thrilled” by Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick.
Earlier in the day, as the Republican National Convention opened, Trump posted on social media that he had chosen Sen. JD Vance, an Ohio Republican, as his running mate in the Nov. 5 election.
“So now JD Vance is the VP pick, and I think every person who pays close attention has got to be thrilled by that,” Carlson said in a speech to convention delegates.
“And if you don’t know much about JD Vance, I’m not even going to make a case for [him],” the former Fox News host said.
Vance, 39, became a celebrity after writing the bestselling “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of Family and Culture in Crisis,” published in 2016. A venture capitalist, Vance initially opposed Trump but admired his presidency; he won election to the Senate in 2022 with Trump’s endorsement.
“I’m going to tell you what I just saw, which is that every bad person I’ve ever met in a lifetime in Washington was aligned against JD Vance,” Carlson quipped to the convention audience, referring to recent speculation by liberal media outlets and others that Trump would pick the conservative Ohio senator.
Carlson said Vance’s enemies are establishment politicians who support U.S. involvement in “pointless wars.”
“Every single one of those people, in a line that would extend from Milwaukee to Chicago, was lined up over the last week to knife JD Vance,” Carlson told the RNC audience. “Not on personal grounds. I mean, he’s a perfectly nice guy. He’s like one of the only members of the Senate with a happy marriage.”
The criticism of Vance came “because they thought he would be harder to manipulate and slightly less enthusiastic about killing people,” Carlson said. “That’s it. That he would be an impediment to their exercising power.”
“And boy, they went after him in a way I’ve just kind of never seen,” Carlson said.
Carlson went on to describe what he sees as a “spiritual battle” America faces in light of the attempted assassination of Trump at a campaign rally Saturday evening in Pennsylvania. The gunfire wounded the former president in the right ear, narrowly missing his brain, seriously wounded two attendees, and killed a third.
“There is no logical way to understand what we’re seeing now in temporal terms,” Carlson told the crowd. “You just can’t.”
“These are not political divides. There are forces, and they’re very obvious now, … whose only goal is chaos, violence, destruction,” he said. “And there are the rest of us who … are not always certain we’re right, but we know that that’s bad. And we’re against that.”
Carlson predicted that voters in November will return Trump to the White House because the former president showed “strength” Saturday night when he raised his fist and mouthed the word “fight” repeatedly after being shot as Secret Service agents sought to carry him offstage.
“Trump’s going to be president because he’s brave,” Carlson said. “Period.”
