Fox News host Tucker Carlson lashed out at Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskyy on his primetime show, saying Zelenskyy was "dressed like the manager of a strip club" when the Ukrainian president addressed Congress this week.

Zelenskyy was making an in-person appeal for support to fight the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Zelenskyy was dressed in his trademark army green battle fatigues and stressed the importance of U.S. financial and military aid to continue supporting war efforts.

Tucker Carlson
Tucker Carlson speaks onstage during Politicon 2018 at Los Angeles Convention Center in Los Angeles, California, Oct. 21, 2018. Phillip Faraone/Getty Images

"As far as we know, no one's ever addressed the United States Congress in a sweatshirt before, but they love him much more than they love you," he told viewers on Wednesday.

Carlson also criticized Zelenskyy's request for more money and weapons. "The point was to fawn over the Ukrainian strip club manager and hand him billions more dollars from our crumbling economy," Carlson said. "It is hard. It may be impossible, to imagine a more humiliating scenario for the greatest country on Earth."

Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz of Florida told Carlson on Thursday that he refused to stand when his House colleagues gave Zelenskyy a standing ovation. Gaetz noted that if he stood to applaud the Ukrainian president, it would have been a "North Korea–style act."

"Now, when President Trump said that America would never be a socialist country, you saw Democrats sit on their hands," Gaetz continued, referencing a line in former President Trump's 2019 State of the Union address. "But when we say you shouldn't send endless amounts of money to this place where we're exacerbating death and conflict, it's like we're traitors to the movement because Lauren Boebert and I didn't stand up in some sort of North Korea-style performance."

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