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Tucker: What holiday should be canceled next?

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Tucker Carlson picks a fight over which federal holiday gets erased next.

On the July 1 edition of “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” the host turned his monologue on two of his own party’s senators, accusing them of trading away Columbus Day to appease what he called a “rage mob.” The trigger was a Senate amendment from Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and James Lankford of Oklahoma that would swap Columbus Day for Juneteenth as a federal holiday. Carlson framed the move not as a budget fix, but as the latest cave to activists tearing down statues of Christopher Columbus across the country.

• Sens. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and James Lankford (R-Okla.) filed an amendment to replace Columbus Day with Juneteenth as a federal holiday, offsetting an estimated $600 million in added paid-leave and administrative costs.
• Carlson accused the two Republicans of appeasing an “anti-American rage mob” that has targeted Columbus statues and monuments nationwide.
• Carlson warned that giving up Columbus Day would only invite further demands to dismantle other traditional American holidays and institutions.

The Johnson-Lankford Trade

The Juneteenth push had real momentum by late June 2020, with congressional Democrats and a growing number of Republicans backing legislation to make it a paid federal holiday marking the end of slavery. Johnson and Lankford didn’t oppose the concept outright — their amendment was pitched as fiscal discipline, cutting Columbus Day from the calendar so a new Juneteenth holiday wouldn’t add roughly $600 million in federal paid-leave and administrative costs. On paper, it read as a budget-neutral swap rather than a verdict on Columbus himself.

Carlson didn’t see it that way. He treated the offset as a convenient excuse for two senators to hand over a 500-year-old commemoration without a fight, timed to a summer in which Columbus statues were being toppled or removed in cities from Boston to Richmond.

Carlson’s Case Against the Swap

Carlson’s central complaint was that Johnson and Lankford were negotiating with people he believes have no interest in a deal — only in the next target. He argued that the same activists tearing down Columbus monuments wouldn’t stop once the holiday was gone, and that Republicans offering it up as a bargaining chip were rewarding the campaign rather than containing it.

Two Republican senators want to abolish Columbus Day.

That line, delivered early in the segment, set the tone for everything that followed — Carlson treated the amendment less as legislative horse-trading and more as capitulation dressed up in a spreadsheet. He drew a straight line from statues coming down in the streets to a Senate floor amendment doing, in his telling, the same work through the budget process.

A Pattern of Concession, in Carlson’s View

Carlson placed the Columbus Day amendment inside a broader story he’d been telling for weeks: Republican officials backing off rather than defending institutions and monuments under pressure. He accused the GOP establishment of cowardice, arguing that conceding one holiday would simply move the target to the next one. It’s the same argument he’d made about local leaders declining to protect statues and monuments from vandalism — a theme that runs through pieces like ordinary citizens standing up while politicians cower to the rage mob, and one that echoes the administration’s own response detailed in coverage of Trump authorizing arrests of anyone vandalizing monuments.

For Carlson, the specifics of the Johnson-Lankford math mattered less than the precedent. If Columbus Day could be traded away to save $600 million, he argued, then no holiday on the federal calendar was safe from the next round of demands.

Whether the Johnson-Lankford amendment actually advances will depend on how the broader Juneteenth push moves through the Senate in the weeks ahead — but Carlson made clear on air that he’s watching which Republicans hold the line on Columbus Day and which ones fold first.