If Tucker Carlson had his way, farting in public might be punishable by death by firing squad. Earlier this week, the Fox News host got very, very serious when he shared not one but two—count ‘em, two—videos of Joe Biden coughing… then suggested with a straight face that the president had committed a crime. By coughing. Jimmy Kimmel was not about to let the Fox News host’s diatribe go without comment.
On Wednesday night, Kimmel reminded viewers that “Even though [Donald] Trump announced we’d rounded the corner [on COVID] more than a year ago, and his Fox friends enthusiastically agreed, actually he infected his inner circle—and vice versa—with COVID. Some people, like Tucker Carlson, are still working hard to criticize Joe Biden for the way he’s handling [the COVID pandemic].” Which is how we got to the cough heard ’round the world.
Kimmel shared some clips of Carlson showing Biden coughing, then bafflingly claiming that “no one from the CDC arrested Joe Biden that day. No one ever will. The people who make the rules don’t have to follow them.” There’s also the fact that the CDC doesn’t have the authority to arrest anyone, not to mention that coughing isn’t a crime. “Where are those CDC police when you need them?,” Kimmel wondered, then added: “What a soppy bag of phlegm he is.”
Kimmel also proposed that from here on out we refer to the male version of a “Karen” as a “Carlson,” which sounds like a perfectly relevant equivalent—even if not all of the Karens of the world deserve it.
You can watch the full clip above; the Biden bit starts around the 5:30 mark.