There was, realistically, only one topic that Tucker Carlson could have chosen to go directly at on Tuesday night — Joe Biden’s selection of Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate — and, boy, did he do exactly that.
Carlson began the episode with an 11-minute screed about Harris. Tucker was livelier than usual and visibly outraged. Normally, he’d keep a dry and even tone throughout his opening, with occasional dalliances with overt emotional expression — but, on Tuesday night, he was all about emotional expression just about from the get-go.
“Big news in the political world just hours ago: Joe Biden’s handlers announced they have selected Sen. Kamala Harris of California to run as Biden’s vice president. We will admit, we did not see this coming,” Tucker began.
“In fact, just last night on this show, we told you that Susan Rice was likely to get that job. Rice is a hardened partisan, but she’s not stupid. And more to the point, Rice has sincere beliefs, whether you like them or not. And we don’t. But Kamala Harris is the opposite of that. Harris may be the single most transactional human being in America. There are timeshare salesmen you would trust more than Kamala Harris. You could find payday lenders who are more sincere.”
And that was the calm and restrained portion of the show. It only escalated from there.
“So it seemed too inconceivable then, given his current state, Joe Biden would choose someone so transparently one-dimensional as Kamala Harris. Someone as empty as he is. It would be the first entirely hollow presidential ticket in American history, and we thought it could never happen,” Carlson said.
“But it is. They’re doing it anyway. Biden-Harris, that’s what they’re going with.”
But perhaps the biggest moment came after Tucker’s lengthy rant about Harris.
His first guest, former Hillary Clinton adviser Richard Goodstein, pointed out correctly that Carlson had been mispronouncing Harris’ name the entire episode. And Carlson really did not enjoy being corrected. Watch:
Carlson tried to spin that into a discussion about how he’s not allowed to criticize Harris, even though he had been criticizing her for more than 10 straight minutes by that point.
You can watch his opening rant in the video below.