Apparently it’s pretty easy to impress Tucker Carlson. The former wildly successful Fox News host and current Vladimir Putin lapboy went grocery shopping in Russia during his recent trip, and boy did he get excited about shopping carts.
“There we go!” he says cheerily in a widely-shared video on X, as he inserts a coin in a slot and removes a shopping cart from its line. He then describes this “new technology” he’s never seen before. “So I guess you put in ten rubles here,” he says, like he’s showing off a new Harley. “And you get it back when you put the cart back.” Here’s a man who has clearly never been to a store like Aldi, where it works EXACTLY THE SAME. It just goes to show you how nice it must be to have that kind of money; you literally never have to go to a grocery store. Carlson does use the opportunity to get political, but would he even be Carlson if he didn’t?
“So it’s free, but there’s an incentive to return it and not just bring it to your homeless encampment.” The level of “out-of-touch” here is legendary. Is he saying that he thinks only homeless people shop for groceries, but then they immediately steal them? Carlson’s recent Russian tour, by the way, is a long way from 2020, when he would pull in an average of 4 million viewers a night as the highest rated TV show in cable news history – Tucker Carlson Tonight. Now he’s mostly relegated to social media, but that hasn’t stopped him from trying to make waves with his Putin interview.
Reviews of the interview point out that Carlson didn’t even challenge any of Putin’s claims, or press him on the ongoing war with Ukraine. Even worse: Putin is trolling Carlson now, saying that even he expected tougher questions from the veteran TV host. Here’s what Putin said, courtesy of The Guardian: “To be honest, I thought that he would behave aggressively and ask so-called sharp questions. I was not just prepared for this, I wanted it, because it would give me the opportunity to respond in the same way.”
He added that he didn’t get “much pleasure” from the interview. As Carlson’s been in Russia, he’s been posting snippets of his daily life while in the country. That’s where the shopping cart came from. He was quickly roasted on X for the position. X user @April_Sassy said, “Tucker Carlson being fascinated by putting a ruble inside a Russian shopping cart like we do a quarter at Aldi reminds me of when George Herbert Walker Bush was fascinated by a barcode scanner.”
Just wait until Carlson finds out about wheel-locking technology! Wheee!