While rejecting her as a candidate, Tucker Carlson expresses admiration for Sen. Elizabeth Warren's economic platform. | Richard Drew/AP Photo media Fox News host says Warren ‘sounds like Donald Trump at his best’

Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson on Wednesday praised Sen. Elizabeth Warren for her “economic patriotism” platform during a monologue critiquing U.S. politics as being distant from the priorities of everyday Americans.

Quoting Warren’s plan for reviving economic activity for working and middle-class Americans, Carlson said many of Warren’s ideas make “obvious sense,” including buying from American manufacturers and increasing workplace apprenticeship programs.


“She sounds like Donald Trump at his best,” Carlson said on his nightly program.

But it was far from an outright endorsement for the 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful, whom he characterized as a “race-hustling, gun-grabbing, abortion-extremist.”

Carlson used the Massachusetts senator to as a foil to describe what he described as the problem with American politics as a whole — that, in his view, those who look out for working-class economic interests also push for social policies further left than many Americans want.

In the process, Carlson accused Republicans in Congress of taking libertarian economic stances to the detriment of many working Americans, while failing to enforce social policy such as controlling illegal drugs.

“In Washington, almost nobody speaks for the majority of voters,” Carlson said. “You’re either a libertarian zealot controlled by the banks, yammering on about entrepreneurship … or worse, you’re some decadent, trust-fund socialist.”

Carlson said he could not vote for Warren, but conceded she is “clearer on economic nationalism than [Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell.”

Warren’s economic patriotism platform focuses on reining in corporate excess and protecting American workers when it comes to trade and job outsourcing abroad. Her platform also argues against blaming globalization and automation for economic stagnation and inequality, while enumerating a number of policy proposals to increase economic activity in the U.S.

“Sure, these companies wave the flag — but they have no loyalty or allegiance to America,” Warren wrote in a Medium post explaining her platform.

