Fox News’ Tucker Carlson offered a full-throated defense of President Donald Trump, blasting the impeachment inquiry that arose from a White House whistleblower as an “administrative coup d’état and labeling House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff “demonstrably mentally ill.”

Carlson’s rant at the start of his primetime show came just hours after a blockbuster House Intelligence hearing, where the acting Director of National Intelligence, Joseph Maguire, defended the actions of an anonymous whistleblower, who alleges in a complaint that Trump and White House lawyers not only engaged in multiple acts of abuse of power but they also attempted a cover-up of those actions.

While the whistleblower’s exact identity remains unknown, the New York Times published a report on Thursday afternoon identifying the person as a career CIA official. The Fox News host used this detail about the whistleblower as the jumping off point for a soliloquy railing against a bureaucracy that, Carlson claimed, has undermined Trump since he came into office. “The [whistleblower] did not agree with the president’s foreign policy views,” Carlson said, “so he felt entitled to veto those views and bring the US Government to a standstill.”

“Part of this is our fault in the media, we’ve set up terrible incentives where you don’t get on television unless you say extreme and mindless things,” Carlson, who has a long history of being criticized for extreme rhetoric, added. “What is surprising is how so many of these extreme and mindless statements come from people with long and distinguished careers, debasing themselves in order to be on television. The prime example is the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff.”

Carlson then called out Schiff for going into “a kind of trance” at Thursday’s House Intel hearing, where the Congressman offered an awkward parody of Trump’s asking to investigate Biden — and was widely mocked for it.

“Keep in mind, that isn’t some guy babbling in the men’s room at Starbucks,” Carlson added after a clip of Schiff’s weird moment. “That is the man who chairs the mighty House Intelligence Committee. We trust him with the most sensitive information and yet he is clearly, demonstrably mentally ill.”

Turning his sights on the House Democrats in general, Carlson then blasted the whistleblower complaint and impeachment inquiry as nothing less than a naked attempt to usurp the results of the 2016 election.

“They would like a new form of government where Americans’ real rulers are the unelected bureaucrats in the intel agencies in Washington. They’re not kind of  hiding this, they’ve been fighting for it pretty openly since before Trump’s presidency began,” Carlson proclaimed. “The Intel community disagreed with his foreign policy views so they tried to destroy him. That happened. That’s not some defense of Trump. That’s an observation of what happened. Two weeks after he took office, somebody decided to leak the president’s phone calls with foreign leaders — imagine that. Imagine having to run the country when you can’t even speak confidentially with your counterparts in other countries, how does that help America? It does’t help America. You may hate Trump, you should still be against that but that kind of thing has been happening ever since. Well, that’s an administrative coup d’etat. It’s not an overstatement to say that’s what it is.”

“If these people whose names you don’t know who were never elected to anything succeed in taking over the government and running things in real life,” Carlson ominously warned, “we’re done, our democracy won’t recover.”

Watch the video above, via Fox News.

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