After enduring — and supporting — Donald Trump for so many years, you’d think that Tucker Carlson would be used to a fair amount of illeism, a.k.a. third person chatter. But you wouldn’t know it based on the Fox News host’s extreme overreaction to hearing Dr. Anthony Fauci refer to himself in the third person in a collection of clips from 2021 that Carlson and/or his team compiled.
As Mediaite reported, Tucker dragged up a trio of clips in which Dr. Fauci — in an attempt to de-politicize COVID and encourage all Americans to get vaccinated against the virus by attempting to explain that the information he shared with the public was based on science, not any person opinions — did his best to distance himself from the virus. Dr. Fauci talked about how it was easier for anti-vaxxers and other COVID non-believers to attack the doctor’s credibility than science itself, but that he was merely speaking for the science whenever he issued a new mandate or update at the height of COVID.
Carlson was bizarrely nonplussed:
Ok, first of all, the only people who refer to themselves in public non-ironically in the third person are Fidel Castro and mental patients, ok? So that should’ve been a tipoff right there. I am science? I’m the state, the state is me. Woah, settle down, megalomania man. This is nuts!
Narrator: It was not nuts.
You can watch the clip for yourself over at Mediaite.