How Tucker Carlson Became the Prophet of MAGA

0:02This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

0:15When Tucker Carlson was fired from Fox News in 2023, he had the largest program on cable news. By far, Carlson could draw around 3 million viewers on a given night, way, way ahead of MSNBC and CNN. After Fox, Carlson brought a new show to YouTube, and his reach has grown. Some of his shows have as many as 7 million views. Carlson has been a standard bearer for the right. Many of us know about the racist conspiracy theory known as the Great Replacement only because of Tucker Carlson. He's quite sympathetic to Vladimir Putin, too. He also celebrated Trump's threats to seize Greenland by force, not because he cares about Greenland, but because that would have wrecked the NATO alliance.

0:59And yet, Carlson doesn't always stick to the MAGA party line. He called the shooting of Renee Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis a tragedy. And he pointed out that the way people in MAGA were making light of it, that was exactly what they had condemned after the shooting of Charlie Kirk. Few people have thought more about Tucker Carlson in recent years than Jason Zengerle, who recently joined The New Yorker as a staff writer. Zengerle's new book is called Hated by All the Right People. And when Zengerle was first coming up as a political journalist, Tucker Carlson was someone he kind of admired.

1:38Let's start at the beginning. How did you first meet Tucker Carlson? What was your relationship? And what was he like then as opposed to now? So I first met Tucker Carlson when I was an intern at the New Republic. And Tucker was working at the Weekly Standard, which was kind of the conservative analog to the New Republic. These are two, you know, small circulation political magazines in Washington that, you know, I would say punched above their weight in terms of influence. and Tucker was only a few years older than me, but he was already, you know, light years ahead of my own career, extremely well-established.

2:09He was the hot young writer in Washington. So this was in the late 1990s, I think 1997. And Tucker would come to have lunch with another hotshot young writer in town who worked at the New Republic named Steve Glass. And while he waited sometimes for Steve to come out of his office, he would entertain the interns. and he was extremely affable, extremely funny. You know, he would tell great stories, kind of give us a peek of the stuff that was going on that, you know, we suspected was going on in Capitol Hill, but we didn't know ourselves. And he was someone we all looked up to and, you know, admired.

2:44I think we respected his work. Why did you guys admire him? I admired his journalism. I thought he was a really talented writer and a pretty brave reporter. He was willing to take on sacred cows in the conservative movement. I mean, he wrote a profile of George W. Bush when Bush was still governor of Texas, was the presumed frontrunner in the presidential race. And Tucker wrote this, you know, subtly kind of devastating profile that showed Bush to be callow and kind of stupid and stubborn and all these things that, you know, if you paid attention would have revealed Bush, all the things that made him kind of a bad president.

3:26Jason, this is a book about Tucker Carlson. It's also about the rise of partisan media, which has become such a powerful presence in our lives. And it seems that in your view, Tucker Carlson predicted some changes in the media before his peers did. Tell me about that a little bit. Tucker's always been very good about seeing where things are going. He kind of skates, you know, to where the puck is going to be. And I think that, you know, he first did that when he left print journalism. You know, I think he recognized maybe before some other people like myself that, you know, if he wanted to, you know, attain the fame and fortune and power that he clearly did, he was not going to be able to do that in print.

4:10So, you know, he left his job as a pretty promising young magazine writer and moved into cable news. And Tucker Carlson cut his teeth, really, as a journalist, at the Weekly Standard, which was a conservative magazine. Where did he stand on that staff? In other words, was he particularly conservative? Were there signs of what he became early on? Not really. He was actually kind of one of the more non-ideological members of the staff. He was more of a journalist, of a reporter than an ideologue. I mean, it was a real powerhouse staff. I mean, you had, you know, Bill Kristol, David Brooks, Charles Krauthammer, and Tucker was the guy who was kind of more interested in storytelling.

4:50So in 2000, he at one point was the youngest anchor in CNN's history with a program that was then called The Spin Room. From your perspective, does it seem like he thought of himself as part of mainstream media at this time, or was he starting to kind of separate himself out into some other realm. No, he was absolutely part of mainstream media and absolutely a member of the Washington political and media establishment, one of his youngest members, but certainly a member. He was friends with all of the various anchors and swells. He was good buddies with the people on the Hill. He considered himself kind of a key cog in that ecosystem.

5:31I mean, Tucker actually had a show on PBS for two years, Tucker Carlson unfiltered. So he was not at all like the person he is today. So a really formative event in the reputation of Tucker Carlson and probably in his own psyche, although God knows I'm no shrink and even as a biographer, you aren't either. But in 2004, on Crossfire, Jon Stewart joined the show as a guest, creating one of the first really viral video moments ever. Let's take a listen. I think you're a good comedian. I think your lectures are boring. Let me ask you a question on the news. No, this is theater. I mean, it's obvious.

6:14How old are you? 35. And you wear a bow tie. Yeah, I do. I do. So this is... I know, I know. Let me And listen, I'm not suggesting that you're not a smart guy because those are not easy to tie. But the thing is that you're doing theater when you should be doing debate, which would be great. It's not honest. What you do is partisan hackery. What impact did that have on Tucker Carlson in that moment? Because I remember it pretty well. Yeah, I don't know if Tucker Carlson is the person he is today without that moment. I mean, that was such a humiliating experience for him. He was completely blindsided by it.

6:56You know, he thought he was friendly with Stewart because I think Jon Stewart used to go on Larry King at the CNN studios when Tucker was waiting around to do the spin room and he would take smoke breaks outside and Tucker would join him and he thought they were buddies. And I think everybody at Crossfire thought that it was going to be a fun episode. They thought Stuart was in on the joke, basically, that it was all going to be kind of pretend, you know, theater and it wasn't serious. And, you know, it's really funny when you watch that episode, Paul Vagala, who was the chair on the left, he just kind of shuts up and just lets Stuart go.

7:29And Tucker's the only one kind of engaging him. And that's why Stuart went after him that way. So what was the impact on Carlson? Well, a few months later, a new president of CNN took over and canceled Crossfire altogether and let Tucker's contract expire and basically explained to the New York Times at the time that I agree with Jon Stewart. I think he was right. Right. And it just it was it was just a it was a humiliation for Tucker. And I think that it it created in him kind of a bitterness and a resentment because I think a lot of the people that he considered his friends and supporters, you know, people in that kind of D.C.

8:09political media establishment, they didn't come to his defense. I mean, maybe privately they did, but publicly they didn't. And I think the resentment that he feels today towards, you know, what he calls legacy media or corporate media, I think a lot of it starts right there. Something else happened really interesting that seems formative to me in 2009. He went to CPAC, which is the big conservative gathering of the year, and he rebuked them. Let's listen to that. If you create a news organization whose primary objective is not to deliver accurate news, you will fail. You will fail. The New York Times is a liberal paper, but it's also, and it is to its core a liberal paper, it's also a paper that cares about whether they spell people's names right, by and large.

8:54It's a paper that actually cares about accuracy. Conservatives need to build institutions that mirror those institutions. That's the truth. You don't believe me? the new york times you don't think why isn't there a pub is what well but i'm not saying they're not i'm merely saying that at the core of their news gathering operation is gathering news and concern no no and conservatives need to do the same yes so what is what is he foretelling there so at the time he gave that speech he was already he had just been fired from MSNBC, and he was plotting to launch a website that eventually was called The Daily Caller.

9:40And his original vision for The Daily Caller was kind of a conservative analog to The Huffington Post. I mean, maybe The Huffington Post more than The New York Times, but if you remember at the time, The Huffington Post was the hot website, and Tucker thought that there was a space for this on the right. And he was working at that time to sort of gin up money for it, but also interest. And I think he was looking for sort of young conservative writers and reporters who were not just kind of pundits or talking heads or ideologues, but who had a dedication to finding out facts. And that was like, he went to give that speech at CBAC.

10:19I mean, he knew what he was going to get there. He knew he was going to get booed, But he thought that the negative reaction would appeal to these serious young conservatives and young conservative journalists and also appeal to sort of the D.C., you know, media elite who he was still a member in good standing in that group. But, you know, I think he was trying to almost sort of say, look, I went into the wilderness on TV for a little while. I'm coming back as a prodigal son. I'm rededicating myself to, you know, serious journalism, facts, things like that. And here I am. And he got a fantastic reception.

10:51I mean, that's, you know, I think it's hard to imagine now, but the people in Washington, the people he now attacks, I mean, they embraced him and they supported him and he got all sorts of help and advice from, you know, people at Politico and people at CNN and all these other institutions that wanted him to succeed.

11:14I'm speaking with Jason Zengerle, author of Hated by All the Right People, Tucker Carlson, and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind. We'll continue in just a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

11:38This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Ramnick. Few people have played a bigger role in America's turn to the far right than Tucker Carlson. He was and remains a chief proponent of the so-called Great Replacement idea, the notion that evil forces are conspiring to replace white Christians with racial and religious minorities, thus transforming the United States. I've been speaking today with Jason Zengerle, whose new book about Tucker Carlson is called Hated by All the Right People. Zengerly traces Carlson's path from being a puckish, right-leaning contrarian. He spent time hosting on CNN and even MSNBC and then moved toward the far right.

12:18After he lost his show on MSNBC, Carlson saw an opportunity to start something online where he could do a brand of journalism that was unconstrained by editors and bosses. It was a news and opinion website called The Daily Caller. so he goes and co-founds the daily caller but that begins to take an extremist drift at least to my ear there were pieces that you refer to in your in your book that were published in the wake of Trayvon Martin's murder what happened there well Tucker I think very quickly realized that this vision he had for this you know fact-based conservative publication was not going to get any traffic.

13:02And there was just no, there was no audience for it. So he very quickly pivoted and he, um, all the, most of the original reporters he hired left and he brought in a new crop of reporters. And these men and women were really pretty far out there ideologically. And, um, you know, at the same time that this is going on, Breitbart is, uh, kind of coming onto the scene and Breitbart's having a lot of success with this really kind of inflammatory, you know, pretty much racist coverage of black-on-white crime. That was kind of this obsession that Breitbart had. And the Daily Caller mimicked that. And the Travon Martin shooting, the Daily Caller really went all in on trying to besmirch Martin's reputation, basically, and portray him as a thug or a hothead or violent.

13:51So the discovery is that extremism sells. Yes. He is looking at the web traffic. He's looking at the metrics, And he's recognizing that what the conservative base wants is racism, sexism, nativism, all these things that, you know, the Republican establishment hasn't really figured out yet. But Tucker's figuring it out while he's running the caller. In November 2016, the program Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox premieres. Here's a promo clip for the show. What's the show going to be about? You can judge for yourself. But here's the basic theme of it. people in power tend to lie, not because they want to, but because they can't help themselves.

14:30That's human nature. The more power people have, the bigger the temptation to misuse it. The press is supposed to be the watchdog against all of this, and it worked fine for a couple of centuries. Then the press decided they had more in common with certain politicians than with readers or viewers, and that's when it fell apart. We're going to get back to basics here. We're going to hold the powerful accountable, pierce pomposity, translate doublespeak, mock smugness, and barbecue nonsense every night. Hope you'll watch. Now, of course, this is just days in the wake of the election of Donald Trump.

14:59To what extent did Tucker Carlson hold power and the president of the United States to account? I don't think he held power and the president of the United States to account. I mean, if you considered power at the time, you know, fairly obscure liberal academics or activists or journalists, he did a fantastic job of holding those people to account because those were the guests he had on, and those were the people that he barbecued. And, you know, in the early days of the Trump administration, the first Trump administration, Tucker really made kind of a name for himself and got viewers by just humiliating his guests.

15:37I mean, he would find these debate partners who, you know, just couldn't sort of hold a candle to him, and he would put them in these studios. They weren't in the studio with him. So they were kind of, their face was framed against him in these two boxes and he could control the debate. It wasn't like Jon Stewart. You know, Jon Stewart was there. He could sort of call Tucker a dick and they couldn't do anything about it. If anyone tried to call Tucker a dick in this instance, they would just cut the feed. So he, you know, it was a completely unfair fight. And that was, those were the people he was punching.

16:07He was punching down and he was punching left. And what was his relationship with Trump about? he had a complicated relationship with Trump. He was, unlike a lot of the other Fox anchors, he was wary of Trump personally, and he was keeping his distance. He was, I think, alarmed that Trump watched his show and watched so much cable television. When Trump would call him after his show aired, I think Tucker was just kind of shocked that the leader of the free world was watching this much cable news and calling to give notes. And he thought maybe Trump would have a better use of his time. So I think initially he was a little taken aback by that.

16:49I mean, I think he found Trump entertaining. I think he sort of thought he was kind of a charming rogue, which are the kind of people he used to write about. But I don't think he thought that he was necessarily equipped to be president. Now, Jason, where did Carlson actively disagree with Trump or the MAGA party line? Not in many places. I think it wasn't so much a sense of disagreement as much as he actually sort of believed it maybe more than Trump did. I mean, I think he was more committed to the anti-immigration stuff, the anti-crime things, kind of those issues than Trump was himself. And if he had issues with Trump, it was Trump was maybe just too casual of a racist.

17:34He didn't really believe it. Why was Tucker Carlson fired by Fox? I wish I knew the answer to that. I was not able to get to the bottom of that. Does Tucker Carlson know? No, I don't think he does. I mean, he has a theory, as far as I can tell, as I understand his theory. He didn't tell this to me, but I think he's told this to other people. Um, his theory is that this, he was, he was offered up to Dominion as part of the Dominion settlement. The Dominion case was a lawsuit filed by, uh, a company that counts votes. Um, after the 2020 election, Dominion became the center of a number of conspiracy theories that, um, you know, alleged that the, the election had been stolen from Trump.

18:19Those conspiracy theories were given a lot of air on Fox news, not by Tucker Carlson, it should be said, but by other hosts. And Dominion sued. And Dominion wanted a billion dollars from Rupert Murdoch. Rupert Murdoch wasn't going to go to a billion. So he offered less than a billion in Tucker Carlson's scalp. Did losing his job at Fox intensify his ideology? I don't think it intensified his ideology. I think it basically just took the guardrails off. I think, you know, people talk about how Trump 2.0 is, you know, there are no guardrails. He's unrestrained. I think Tucker post Fox is similar.

18:53There's just no one there anymore to tell him no. I mean, when he was at Fox, you know, there was nominal corporate supervision. It was a publicly traded company. I mean, he was always testing that and he was always crossing lines that other anchors there couldn't and they would let him get away with it. But at the end of the day, I think he still kind of felt a little bit restrained or constrained. He does not feel that anymore. And I think he also, in addition to not having those guardrails, I think he understands that without the Fox platform, he needs to do things that generate outrage, enough outrage that get him attention.

19:26And so while I think he does believe what he says, I think there's another thing going on where he knows he needs to get people to keep on tuning into him and coming back to him. So anti-Semitism is good business. I think he's made that calculation. Yeah. Well, in recent years, Carlson has taken to overtly putting on extremists on his YouTube channel. One of the most infamous, of course, is Nick Fuentes, who's a white supremacist, who's praised Hitler, who jokes about it. He shoves it in your face. And of course, he dined with Trump and Kanye West at Mar-a-Lago. Fuentes in October was on Carlson's show.

20:04Let's listen to a clip from that. So I realized that the conservative movement was completely bankrupt in that way. Yeah. And I became very radical. Well, it, you became, I mean, let me just say, I'm so familiar with, you know, I was much older when it happened to me and much more, much more insulated. I was not a college student. I was like 45. So, you know, and, um, I was in a much better place to withstand the pressure, but I do think one, and I want to, this is my main question to you is when you get attacked, when people call you names, like they always call me racist. And I would always think to myself, I'm actually not, I would tell you if I was racist, I'm a little sexist, but I'm not racist.

20:47And I never understood why they did that. And then I thought maybe the point is to make me racist. Where you just get to, you get to a point where you're like, well, if you're going to slander me, then I'll just become the thing you're calling me. I do think that's a feature of human nature, don't you? And if you stare too intently at the accusers, at the, you know, whatever Ben Shapiro's or Mark Levin's or Ted Cruz or whoever it is calling you names, it like distorts you and you actually change and become what they say you are. Have you thought that ever? Do you worry that that happened to you?

21:20No, I don't think it ever did because I know who I am. This is a moment of self-searching almost from Tucker Carlson. Very introspective, yeah. I mean, the Fuentes interview was fascinating. because I think the reason he had Fuentes on his show was because he was worried that Fuentes was getting his audience in some ways. You know, they had had this kind of little feud going on where Tucker had said a lot of derogatory things about Fuentes. He accused him of being a fed. He thought he was a psyop operation. And Fuentes fired back on his show, and it seemed, and you know, there was this feud going on online, And it seemed like Tucker was losing.

22:06I mean, all of Fuentes' fans were just attacking Tucker on X and pillorying him. And he had Fuentes on because I think he recognized that he couldn't afford to alienate Fuentes' audience. So he kind of extended this olive branch and made nice with him. How influential is Tucker Carlson now? I think he's very influential. I think he's influential in a couple ways. I mean, I think he's very influential inside the Trump administration. administration. When Trump was president the first time around and Tucker was on Fox, he did not talk to Trump that much personally. He kind of avoided it. That is not the case this time around.

22:43I mean, I think one reason is, you know, the first time around, he knew Trump would watch his show on Fox. He could talk to him through the TV. He does not think that Donald Trump's going to listen to a two-hour podcast now. So he has to talk to him directly. He's very close to J.D. Vance. He has a number of allies in the administration, you know, Bobby Kennedy, Tulsi Gabbard, all the way down to, you know, sub cabinet positions, he's friends with those people. So there's just that matter of his influence in government. But beyond that, you know, he, people listen to his show. He's able to smuggle ideas that were considered, you know, just out of bounds.

23:20He's able to smuggle them into the mainstream now because he gives them voice on his show. And he's a talented enough communicator and a smart enough guy that he can, he can explain them in ways that they maybe don't seem quite as awful as they are when they're presented in their raw form. And the fracturing of the media landscape being what it is, in some ways, getting fired from Fox was almost like a blessing for him because he got a head start on figuring out this new media landscape. I mean, cable news is kind of a dying medium. And just thinking about the people out there today who are influential voices on the right, you don't really hear about like Sean Hannity that much.

24:01You don't hear about, you know, Jesse Waters or Laura Ingram. You hear a lot about Tucker. You hear a lot about Nick Fuentes. You hear a lot before Charlie Kirk was killed. You heard a lot about Charlie Kirk. That's where the energy is. And that's where I think younger conservatives are looking for, for their arguments and ideas. What does Tucker Carlson want? That's a fantastic question. And that's a question that I think is, is occupying the minds of a lot of people in Republican politics and in the conservative movement because I think his critics and his enemies hope that he just wants to be a podcaster and sell his tobacco pouches and whatever else and that he'll stop at that.

24:42He just wants to be wealthy. I don't think that's where he wants to stop, though. I think he's as much a political operator these days as he is as a media figure. And I think he considers himself a movement leader. And I think he wants to be at the head of that movement, whether it's in government or out of government. I don't think he's been able to figure that out yet. So you think it's possible that he would run for office? Yeah, I think it is. I mean, I think that in a lot of ways, Trump has completely upended what it means to be in politics these days. And so much of politics now is just being a media figure and being an entertainer.