Tucker Carlson: Democrats using troops as ‘political weapon’ to send ‘we’re in charge now’ message

Tucker Carlson said more than 25,000 U.S. troops blanketing the U.S. Capitol for President-elect Joseph R. Biden’s inauguration are more about sending a “we’re in charge now” message by Democrats than a necessary security measure.

The Fox News host told viewers Monday evening that ostensibly turning Washington into a giant militarized zone was precisely the wrong move in the wake of the Capitol riot on Jan. 6.

“The Democratic Party is using those troops to send the rest of us a message about power: ’We’re in charge now. We run this nation, from Honolulu to our colony in the Caribbean and everywhere in between, very much including where you and your family live. Do not question us men with guns. We control the Pentagon,’” the “Tucker Carlson Tonight” host said. “And indeed, they do.”

For comparison, Mr. Carlson noted how Lyndon Johnson used 13,600 federal troops and the D.C. Army National Guardsmen after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.

“In 1864, as the Civil War raged on the other side of the Potomac and Americans died every day in large numbers on the battlefield, there were fewer federal troops protecting Washington, D.C., than there are right now,” he added.

Mr. Carlson said it was entirely predictable that chaos would find its way to the Capitol as millions of Americans watched it unfold elsewhere without consequences.

“If you wanted to stoke an irreparable civil conflict, you would talk this way and you would keep talking that way,” the host said while noting “ideological vetting” requests for National Guard troops. “The Democratic Party is using the military of the United States as a political weapon. But Republicans in Congress just can’t be bothered to notice that. … You could have scripted what was going to happen on Jan. 6. What we can’t know is what happens next, and let’s pray that the people planning a war on American citizens find their reason and their decency and stop talking like that immediately, much less planning to act on it.

“Most Americans are good people, even if you hate how they voted. We don’t need a war within our borders. Only the worst people will win that war.”