Tucker Shocks Entire Panel with Who's Really Influencing Our Elections
The left exploded with outraged cries of “Treason!” and other such nonsense in the wake of President Donald Trump’s summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Finland, on Monday.
At issue for many on the left — and even some on the right — was the fact that Trump didn’t blast Putin to his face about Russian interference and meddling in the 2016 election, which many on the left still blame for failed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s unexpected loss.
Tucker Carlson, a member of the Fox News team that traveled to Helsinki for the summit, joined the co-hosts of Fox’s “The Five” via satellite to discuss a number of developments following the summit, including the allegations of election meddling.
Carlson said that while he agreed with assessments that Russia likely attempted to interfere in the 2016 election, he noted that other nations also interfered in our elections in different ways, such as Mexico by “packing our electorate” with its own people.
Co-host Greg Gutfeld broached the topic of leftist outrage over Trump’s failure to explicitly call out Russian election meddling.
“It’s very hard, at least for me, Tucker, to take that media response to this seriously,” he said. “Since it’s always been at an incredible high pitch, that for some reason maybe I just don’t hear it anymore.”
“I’m wondering if this is because the media is blaming Putin for Hillary’s loss and they are constantly demanding their pound of flesh and nothing will ever be enough,” Gutfeld added.
“I’m not a shrink so I don’t fully understand that, but I don’t think Russia is our close friend or anything like that,” Carlson replied. “Of course they are trying to interfere in our affairs. They have for a long time.”
“Many countries do. Some more successfully than Russia, like Mexico, which is routinely interfering in our elections by packing our electorate, so those are all concerns,” he continued.
“I honestly don’t understand why we need to believe that Russia is the primary issue of American political life, that seems kind of nuts to me,” Carlson said.
“Maybe you disagree with Trump — which is totally fine — but the idea that where you are on Russia is the defining question, like that’s kind of demented, actually, because it’s like number 115 on the list of real concerns, at least in my mind,” he said.
“Maybe I’m the demented one, but that’s my opinion,” he added.
Carlson is absolutely right to note that while Russia most likely did attempt to meddle in our nation’s most recent election — something they have done before on numerous occasions — their interference is not unique nor does it pose the biggest threat to our constitutional republic.
Indeed, our nation and the democratic processes are influenced far more by the hundreds of thousands, if not millions over time, of immigrants from Mexico and other Central American nations who have flooded into the country over the past few years and decades.
To be sure, Russia meddling in our elections is not a good thing, and Trump perhaps should have taken a more forceful stance against Putin with regard to his nation’s efforts at disrupting America’s political processes in 2016, and they should be held accountable for what they tried to do wherever possible.
That said, Carlson is also correct that Russian interference is nothing new and doesn’t approach the top of the list of priorities for what American citizens should become outraged or overly concerned about.
Furthermore, Trump’s failure to figuratively smack Putin across the face for his nation’s efforts at election meddling in the middle of a high-stakes diplomatic summit is a far cry from “treason” and would likely have made relations between our two nuclear-armed nations even worse than they already are, an outcome no sane American citizen should want to see.
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