Hours after Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) suspended his presidential campaign, Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Wednesday night claimed that the Vermont senator "never wanted to win" the presidency.
"That's it for Sanders, he's 78 years old, he will never be the president but he did leave his mark. For two cycles in a row, Bernie Sanders evoked panic at the highest levels of the DNC," Carlson said during his monologue on Tucker Carlson Tonight, "Twice in a row, Democratic leaders managed to crush him in the end and they did that despite the fact that Sanders had a large and passionate following, as well as a genuinely populist message."
Carlson then questioned how the Democratic party managed to beat him twice. "They couldn't have managed to do it without Sanders' help," he speculated. "Sanders never wanted to win, like so many ideologues, he wanted to lose. It makes him feel virtuous."
To support his argument, Carlson pointed to Sanders' decision not to aggressively attack his 2016 competitor Hillary Clinton's Clinton Foundation and calling out one of his own supporters earlier this year for criticizing former Vice President Joe Biden.
Unlike some of his former Democratic 2020 rivals, Sanders largely refrained from attacking the other candidates throughout his campaign and instead, focused on touting his progressive policies. However, during the last Democratic debate, the first Sanders-Biden onstage primary battle, the Vermont senator did spend a considerable amount of time holding the former vice president to account over his patchy history on a wide range of issues, from Social Security cuts to the Defense of Marriage act.
"If the Democratic party isn't bad enough for Sanders to attack it, then why do we need a revolution. Sanders never answered that question and now he never will, because underneath it all, he was a party man to the core," Carlson concluded.
Newsweek reached out to Fox News for comment.
Sanders suspended his presidential bid on Wednesday morning, essentially handing the nomination to Biden. "While the campaign ends, the struggle for justice continues on," Sanders tweeted.
"As you all know, we have never been just a campaign. We are a grassroots, multi-racial, multi-generational movement which has always believed that real change never comes from the top on down but always from the bottom on up," Sanders said in a virtual address to supporters. "While this campaign is coming to an end, this movement is not."
The Vermont senator also congratulated Biden and called him a "very decent man."
"Together, standing united, we will go forward to defeat Donald Trump," Sanders said.
