The audience at a Donald Trump rally in Georgia on Wednesday erupted into bizarre chants of “Daddy’s home!” and “Daddy Don!” after an extraordinary and borderline creepy and sexist speech by far-right personality Tucker Carlson likening the Republican presidential candidate to an angry father spanking his daughter.

“Dad comes home. He’s pissed. Dad is pissed. And when dad gets home, you know what he says? ‘You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl, and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now,’” the former Fox TV host told the crowd in Duluth.

“‘I’m not going to lie. It’s going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me. And you earned this. You’re getting a vigorous spanking because you’ve been a bad girl. You’re only going to get better when you take responsibility for what you did. It has to be this way.’”

The Washington Post reported that Carlson’s comments, made during his warm-up to Trump taking the stage, intended to portray the ex-president as a person coming “home” to the White House to mete out discipline to the vice-president, Kamala Harris, as “punishment” for her term in office.

But others saw the rant as simply “disturbing”, given Trump’s background as an adjudicated rapist and sex offender, and new allegations published by the Guardian that he molested a former model introduced to him by the late sexual abuser Jeffrey Epstein in the early 1990s.

Carlson, who was fired by Fox in April 2023 for “getting too big for his boots” at the network, has a controversial past of his own, including promoting Nazi falsehoods and conducting a lengthy, rambling interview with Vladimir Putin in Moscow in February in which both were highly critical of the US.

Despite his reduced profile since his dismissal as one of Fox’s most prominent and highly paid stars, Carlson is still a highly influential figure in Trump’s Make America Great Again (Maga) movement, exemplified by the crowd’s reaction to his “spanking” comments in Duluth.

CNN reported the atmosphere at the event was similar to the Republican national convention in July at which Trump accepted the party’s presidential nomination.

“When Trump came on stage, they started screaming and chanting ‘Daddy’s home!’ and ‘Daddy Don!’ This is something I have not heard at a Trump rally so far. The vibe in the room is like a mini-RNC,” reporter Alayna Treene, who was covering the event, said in a clip published to X.

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Trump’s own comments in Duluth, at a rally hosted by far-right youth group Turning Point USA, featured a familiar and lengthy diatribe of insults against Kamala Harris, his Democratic opponent in the 5 November election.

“She’s not a smart person. She’s a low-IQ individual,” Trump said, before embarking on a meandering speech that included a curious claim that he had “stopped a war with France” during his time as president.