Tammy Duckworth: Don't let Tucker Carlson's comments on patriotism distract from Trump's failures

Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) says Fox News host Tucker Carlson is questioning her patriotism in order to distract Americans from President Trump's incompetence.

Carlson and Trump are "desperate for America's attention to be on anything other than Donald Trump's failure to lead our nation," she wrote in a searing New York Times op-ed published Thursday. Trump wants Americans to focus on her rather than "mourning the 130,000 Americans killed by a virus he claimed would disappear in February" or remembering he is a "failed commander-in-chief" who has "still apparently done nothing about reports of Russia putting bounties on the heads of American troops in Afghanistan."

An Army veteran, Duckworth lost both her legs while serving in Iraq. Last weekend, she writes, she "expressed an openness to a 'national dialogue' about our founders' complex legacies." In response, Carlson said on his Monday night show she is a "deeply silly and unimpressive person" and one of several top Democrats who "actually hate America."

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Duckworth said that "even knowing how my tour in Iraq would turn out," she would "do it all over ago," because of the "importance of protecting our founding values, including every American's right to speak out." She will fight "to defend every American's freedom to have his or her own opinion about Washington's flawed history," Duckworth continued, and Carlson needs to learn "we can honor our founders while acknowledging their serious faults, including the undeniable fact that many of them enslaved Black Americans." He and Trump should also know, she added, "that attacks from self-serving, insecure men who can't tell the difference between true patriotism and hateful nationalism will never diminish my love for this country — or my willingness to sacrifice for it so they don't have to. These titanium legs don't buckle."

Read Duckworth's entire op-ed at The New York Times.