"Daddy's Home!"

A Freudian Take on Tucker Carlson's Beating Fantasy

Last week, far-right activist Tucker Carlson performed an energetic warm-up act for Donald Trump at a rally for Turning Point USA. Carlson’s speech was bizarre. After alluding to a toddler smearing feces on the living room wall, and a fourteen-year-old lighting a joint at the breakfast table, it climaxed in a sadomasochistic beating fantasy. Carlson seemed to become progressively more excited as he went on, and shouted:

There has to be a point at which Dad comes home. Dad comes home and he’s pissed. He’s not vengeful, he loves his children. Disobedient as they may be, he loves them, because they’re his children. … And when Dad gets home, you know what he says? You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now. And no, it’s not going to hurt me more than it hurts you. No, it’s not. I’m not going to lie. It’s going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me. And you earned this. You’re getting a vigorous spanking because you’ve been a bad girl, and it has to be this way.

The crowd loved it. Their whoops and cheers showed how excited Carlson’s story made them feel. And when Trump appeared on the stage they spontaneously roared, “Daddy’s here!” and “Daddy Don!”

Why did the Turning Point crowd respond so exuberantly? I want to suggest that the answer to this question may not be as obvious as it seems. So please fasten your seat belts. I’m going to take you on a Freudian ride.

Carlson’s speech was extensively covered in the media. Most commentators focussed on the misogynistic dimension of his performance. For example, Amanda Marcotte wrote in Salon:

Trump's love of sexual violence turns most voters off, but as the rhetoric of sexual assault at the Georgia rally shows, the hardcore MAGA crowd loves this stuff. Sexual assault is a coward's way to feel powerful. Like kicking puppies or abusing children, it's about inflicting pain and humiliation on someone smaller, often after trapping them, as Trump did to Carroll in a department store dressing room. Or, in Carlson's fantasies, because the victim is your child — he made sure to emphasize children "live in his house" — she has nowhere to escape. Sexual abuse is for men who are too weak and pathetic to pick on people their own size. So it is perfect for Trump and his fans who want to live vicariously through this fantasy of domination. 

Talia Lavin, writing for MSNBC, described Tucker Carlson as disguised as “an emcee from a psychosexual nightmare realm” and related the theme of corporal punishment to a brutal conservative evangelical philosophy of childrearing.

In this family model, the strict father isn’t just the moral core of the household; he is also its spiritual head, with the mother as a submissive co-enforcer. Obedience to parents, according to these texts, is both a necessary prelude for and expression of obedience to God. The stakes are existentially high: One frequently cited verse is Proverbs 23:13 — “Withhold not correction from the child: for if thou beatest him with the rod, he shall not die.” This system coerces parents into using physical violence on their children in order to save their souls. And…this model of the family, predicated on obedience enforced with physical violence, creates an authoritarian politics in its practitioners.

Several writers focus on the recently breaking accusation that Trump conspired with Jeffrey Epstein to sexually assault a teenage girl. Others mention the vaguely incestuous character of the fantasy.

All of this is relevant and true, but there may be more to the speech and the crowd’s lapping it up than meets the eye.

When I listened to Tucker Carlson’s speech, the Biblical story of the golden calf popped into my mind. The Book of Exodus explains that while Moses was on Mount Sinai communing with God, the Israelites began to doubt that he would ever return. Impatient, they turned away from Yahweh, and forced Moses’ brother and deputy Aaron to construct a golden statue of a calf for them to worship. When Moses returned and witnessed this spectacle he was furious with the Children of Israel, and in his rage he smashed the stone tablets that God had given him. Then he drained the swamp.

Pissed-off Moses

Moses saw that the people were running wild and that Aaron had let them get out of control and so become a laughingstock to their enemies. So he stood at the entrance to the camp and said, “Whoever is for the Lord, come to me.” And all the Levites rallied to him. Then he said to them, “This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: ‘Each man strap a sword to his side. Go back and forth through the camp from one end to the other, each killing his brother and friend and neighbor.’” The Levites did as Moses commanded, and that day about three thousand of the people died. Then Moses said, “You have been set apart to the Lord today, for you were against your own sons and brothers, and he has blessed you this day.”

Why did my mind go there? There’s an obvious thematic affinity with Trump’s rhetoric. Trump rages at disloyal and disobedient voters and urges those of his followers who remain to avenge him. But although Moses is, in a sense, a father figure to the children of Israel, the beating story is far more than a tale of punishment for disloyalty.

The success of populist authoritarians like Trump rests on the shoulders of their devoted followers. To recruit an army of such followers, the leader and his enablers must speak to something deep in their souls, unleashing powerful psychological forces that are then channelled towards political ends. Considering the rapturous cries of “Daddy’s home!” and “Daddy Don!” Carlson clearly succeeded in pushing the right psychological buttons.

Arwa Mahdawi, writing about the event in the Guardian newspaper, remarked “Sigmund Freud almost rose from his grave.” Indeed, anyone listening to Carlson’s speech who’s familiar with Freud’s writings will be reminded of his 1919 paper “A child is being beaten.” Freud starts the paper with these words, “It is surprising how often people who seek analytic treatment…confess in having indulged in the phantasy: ‘A child is being beaten.’” He continues, “The phantasy has feelings of pleasure attached to it…. At the climax of the imaginary situation there is almost invariably a masturbatory satisfaction.”

Early on in the text, Freud raises a number of pertinent questions about the fantasy scenario, all of which his patients were unable or unwilling to answer. The paper is largely Freud’s attempt to tease out answers to them.

Who was the child being beaten? The one who was himself producing the phantasy or another? Was it always the same child or as often as not a different one? Who was it that was beating the child? A grown-up person? And if so, who? Or did the child imagine that he himself was beating another one? Nothing could be ascertained that threw any light upon all these questions—only the hesitant reply: ‘I know nothing more about it: a child is being beaten.’

As his psychoanalytic work with these patients progressed, Freud concluded that the beating fantasy began during early childhood and underwent transformations later on to produce the final sexualized version. At it’s inception, the person who’s pictured as doing the beating is the child’s father, and the child being beaten is a sibling— the child’s rival for their father’s affection. And in the original version the fantasizer belongs to the cast of characters: they are there in the scene, watching with pleasure as their father beats a sibling. As Freud puts it: “The idea of the father beating this hateful child is therefore an agreeable one….It means ‘My father does not love this other child, he loves only me.’”

In the final, sexualized version of the fantasy, however, the person doing the beating is a teacher or other person in authority rather than the father. The fantasizer is no longer present in the beating scene, and “Instead of the one child that is being beaten, there are a number of children present as a rule.”

The final version seems to be a sadistic sexual fantasy, but Freud insists that “only the form of this phantasy is sadistic; the satisfaction which is derived from it is masochistic….All of the many unspecified children who are being beaten…are, after all, nothing more than substitutes for the child itself.”

On the surface, it’s not the fantasizer that’s being beaten; it’s an anonymous other person. But this is a disguise. This other person is a stand-in for the fantasizer, who is being erotically spanked by a surrogate father.

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Carlson’s speech seems to have touched something sensitive in the minds of his audience. They positioned themselves as Trump’s children when they chanted “Daddy’s home!” But was this sexual? As far as we know, there wasn’t any explicitly sexual excitement. But sexual excitement doesn’t have to be explicit and recognized as such. It can be “aim inhibited.” Instead of leading to genital satisfaction, it gets re-routed. The Freudian hypothesis would be that the audience’s libido was channelled into devotion to their leader.

If these Freudian speculations are anywhere near correct, Tucker Carlson’s beating fantasy speech wove together three distinct strands of thought and feeling. At the most superficial level, the fantasy expressed a misogynistic wish to physically dominate and humiliate Kamala Harris. A bit further down, it expressed the wish to punish insolent voters and politicians that have disobeyed Trump. But at bottom (forgive the pun) it is a forbidden, covert erotic fantasy of submitting to Daddy Don.