Fox News host Tucker Carlson has declared that his network colleague is a member of “the moron community” for having a different opinion about the chaotic Republican attempt to elect a new speaker of the House.
Ben Domenech, a Fox News contributor and podcaster, was briefly the subject of Carlson’s scorn during the Thursday night broadcast of Tucker Carlson Tonight. During a Fox Business appearance earlier in the day, Domenech expressed concerns about House Republicans delaying the process by stubbornly opposing GOP leader Kevin McCarthy as the new speaker. The ongoing effort is the longest attempt to elect a new speaker since 1859.
“[The anti-McCarthy holdouts] trying to achieve these demands has resulted in essentially this terrorist standoff between them and the overwhelming majority of people in their conference,” Domenech said on Fox Business. “People they are supposed to work with as a team.”
Carlson, who insisted that the House’s inability to elect a speaker after three days was neither “especially unusual” or “bad,” included Domenech’s remark at the end of a video segment featuring multiple pundits weighing in on the debacle. Carlson introduced the clips by referring to the pundits, including Domenech, as “the moron community.”
Jason Koerner; Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
“It’s not a disaster, it’s how the system’s supposed to work,” Carlson said of the search for House speaker. “But don’t tell the moron community that, they’re too overwrought to hear you.”
“Oh, they’re so excitable!” a laughing Carlson added after the clips played, before going on to launch a more direct attack on his network colleague.
“Another one of the buffoons in the clip[s] you just saw went further and called the whole thing terrorism,” Carlson said. “Which is the remorseless use of violence against a civilian population to effect a political goal. So [Representative] Chip Roy is Osama bin Laden now? Hunt him down in his cave!”
Roy is one of 20 House Republicans who have refused to back McCarthy after 11 separate votes since the first session of the 118th Congress began on Tuesday. The House completed five of the votes on Thursday, before adjourning until noon Friday, the two-year anniversary of the January 6 siege on the U.S. Capitol.
While McCarthy has secured the most votes of any Republican candidate in every round of voting, he requires the votes of all but four of the GOP conference member to be elected, due to the razor-thin majority that his party achieved after poorer-than-expected midterms.
Dissenting Republicans have backed a changing lineup of GOP congressmen for speaker this week, including Andy Biggs, Jim Jordan, Byron Donalds and Kevin Hern. Representative Matt Gaetz also nominated former President Donald Trump for the role, although he was the only member of Congress to actually vote for the former president.
Newsweek has reached out to Fox News for comment.
