Tucker Carlson mocked over fawning praise for Russian shopping trolleys

Ex-Fox News host’s trip to praise increasingly authoritarian and militaristic country comes as strongman leader Vladimir Putin is blamed for prison death of opposition leader Aleksey Navalny

Tucker Carlson is facing mockery after he marvelled at something overwhelmingly common in Europe – the use of locks on shopping carts – which is also on the rise in the US as European supermarkets expand across the pond.

After his fawning interview with authoritarian Russian leader Vladimir Putin, which came close to becoming a two-hour monologue by the president, the former Fox News host continued his Russian tour to praise the country that has become an international pariah following the invasion of Ukraine.

In a “TC Shorts” video shared on X, formerly known as Twitter, Mr Carlson can be seen unlocking a shopping cart at a Russian grocery store.

“All right, here we go. So I guess you put in 10 rubles here and you get it back when you put the cart back – so it's free, but there's an incentive to return it and not just bring it to your homeless encampment. OK!” Mr Carlson said as he grabbed the cart.

He immediately faced mockery for gushing at the practice.

Florida Congressman Maxwell Alejandro Frost said: “Dude has never been to an Aldi’s.”

The German chain of grocery stores operates more than 12,000 shops in 18 countries.

“Fantastic tech advancement! Guess who hasn’t been in an airport anytime in the last 40 years?” musician Chris Stein said.

Former Republican Congressman Joe Walsh added: “In other news today, @TuckerCarlson is in a Russian grocery store somewhere in Moscow admiring their shopping carts. It’s been quite a fall for Tucker, hasn’t it?”

Historian Joshua Zeitz said: “It’s been a strange few years, but I did not have ‘Tucker Carlson Defects to Russia’ on my 2024 bingo card. He joins great western patriots like Kim Philby in starting a wonderful, prosperous life in Moscow.”

Part of the infamous Cambridge Five spy ring, Mr Philby was a British intelligence officer and spy for the Soviet Union who after defecting lived in Moscow until his death in 1988.

Former Virginia Democratic House of Delegates candidate Jessica Anderson asked: “Has Tucker never been to an IKEA?? Or any European nation before.”

During his grocery store visit, Mr Carlson said: “If you take people's standard of living and you tank it through filth, and crime and inflation, and they literally can't buy the groceries they want.

“At that point, maybe it matters less what you say, whether you're a good person or a bad person, you're wrecking people's lives in their country.

“And that's what our leaders have done to us. And coming to a Russian grocery store – the heart of evil, and seeing what things cost and how people live. It will radicalise you against our leaders. That's how I feel anyway – radicalised. We're not making any of this up, by the way at all.”

In July 2021, the Russian news agency Tass reported that “more than 60 per cent of Russians spend about half of their monthly income on food”.

The average salary in Russia was 73,383 rubles a month as of November last year – about $793, according to Trading Economics.