Vladimir Putin Apparently Didn’t Enjoy His Boring Chat With Tucker Carlson, Who He Thought Would Be More ‘Aggressive’

Did you watch Tucker Carlson’s interview with Vladimir Putin? If you did, you probably didn’t finish it. It was awfully long — longer than most movies. Those who made it to the finish line almost uniformly deemed it a “boring history lesson.” Despite getting one of the planet’s most notorious despots, Carlson, a favorite of Russia State TV, did not pry him with challenging questions, spending most of the chat staring at him with his patented dopey open-mouthed expression. As for Putin, he looked bored out of his mind, which, according to him, he was.

Per Max Seddon, The Financial Times’ Moscow Bureau Chief, Putin addressed his Tucker sit-down in a new interview, and, well, the former Fox News star left him profoundly unimpressed.

“I honestly thought he would be aggressive and ask tough questions,” Putin said. “I wanted that, because I would have given tough answers back.” He added that “to be frank, I didn’t get much pleasure from this interview.”

Strange that Putin didn’t have much fun sitting down for over two hours with a guy who didn’t even have any interesting questions. Carlson has sung the praises of Moscow, calling it “so much nicer any city in my country.” Perhaps he’d live to move there, even though there’s a chance they may have spent his trip messing with him for fun.

This time last year, Carlson was enjoying epic ratings each weeknight, feeding millions of Fox News viewers a bunch of nonsense. Since being fired last April, he’s struggled to find anything approaching that cultural footprint. Instead he’s been reduced to big gambits like boring the hell out of a guy who, given his druthers, could leave Europe once again destroyed.

Anyway, enjoy this: It’s the only time you’ll feel sorry for Vladimir Putin, a man whose punishment for invading Ukraine is having to to spend two hours talking to Tucker Carlson.

(Via The Financial Times‘ Max Seddon)