In June 2024, Tucker Carlson no longer had a primetime perch on Fox News and, as Politico put, was “disappearing” from the mainstream media landscape. There was also a downstream effect of Carlson’s diminished buzz: his publisher, Little, Brown and Co., canceled a planned biography by Jason Zengerle, a veteran political writer now with the New Yorker.
“I can’t imagine if Tucker had still been at Fox and was still operating at that high level that they probably would’ve canceled it,” Zengerle told TheWrap as his long-simmering book, “Hated by All the Right People,” hit shelves this week.
Not only was the book revived by Crooked Media Reads, but so was Carlson’s career. He’s now thriving on podcasts and YouTube — and once again commands attention in the White House, where earlier this month he lunched with President Donald Trump. Politico clocked the incendiary host’s resurgent clout this past week under the very different headline, “Tucker Carlson is here to stay.”
For years, journalists have privately — and publicly — asked what happened to Tucker Carlson? How did one of the most talented magazine writers morph into a right-wing firebrand, hosting what the New York Times described as “what may be the most racist show in the history of cable news.” The media is flush with deep dives on the matter, from the Columbia Journalism Review (“The Mystery of Tucker Carlson”) to the Atlantic (“What Does Tucker Carlson Believe?”).
Zengerle, wisely, isn’t promising to solve the riddle, acknowledging in an interview that he doesn’t have “a satisfactory answer” when it comes to Carlson’s psyche. What Zengerle aimed to do, he said, was to explore the “incentive structure in conservative media and in conservative politics over the past 30 years that influenced his decisions and influenced the way he went.”
Carlson is a solid case study for Zengerle, having shifted platforms — from magazine writer to cable news host to independent creator — and political sensibilities as the Republican Party lurched rightward and conservative media increasingly rewarded provocation and conspiratorial rhetoric. Once a bowtie-clad young pundit in the mold of Ronald Reagan, and later an admirer of John McCain, Carlson aligned himself with a nationalist, anti-immigration agenda alongside Donald Trump and JD Vance, while praising strongman leaders like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán.
Zengerle acknowledged the challenge of writing a nuanced book on Carlson and his career, as it may not win an audience with hardcore fans — or haters. Though Carlson is known to talk to journalists, he didn’t give an interview to Zengerle and appeared dismissive of the project when reached this week by TheWrap. “I didn’t even know he’d finished it,” Carlson said.
“I can’t imagine anyone who’d buy it,” he added. “I’m not that interesting.”
From a beltway magazine to blistering monologues
Carlson established himself in Washington by writing sharp, often contrarian pieces at the Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine helmed by Bill Kristol, whose own path — from pro-Iraq War, George W. Bush booster to Never Trumper and Bulwark co-founder — also speaks to how radically GOP politics have shifted in the past three decades. It seemed like Carlson was going to follow in the tradition of libertarian political satirist P.J. O’Rourke, or perhaps New Journalism pioneer Tom Wolfe.
But while Carlson’s writing drew the attention of editors in New York, like Tina Brown, he was increasingly drawn to television, becoming a commentator and co-host of CNN’s right-vs.-left slugfest “Crossfire.” The show was canceled in 2025, not long after “Daily Show” host Jon Stewart told Carlson and liberal sparring partner Paul Begala that “Crossfire” was “hurting America.” (In our modern age of hyperpartisan media warfare, the show’s premise — a liberal and conservative debating issues of the day — feels downright quaint.)
Carlson stayed in the television orbit, appearing in 2006 on “Dancing With the Stars” — he was the first celebrity eliminated — and later landing at MSNBC, where he introduced a young Rachel Maddow to a national audience. Though “Tucker” was canceled, Maddow would go on to become the face of the network as it shifted further left.
A turning point in Zengerle’s book comes when Carlson launches the Daily Caller with somewhat early high-minded intentions before seeing the energy of the right shift to more rage-baiting sites like Breitbart News.
The previous year, Carlson drew boos at CPAC by praising the New York Times as a “liberal” paper that “actually cares about accuracy” and urging conservatives “to build institutions that mirror those institutions.” Zengerle believes Carlson was “sincere in what he was saying,” even if he surely knew he’d get blowback from the conservative crowd.
Ahead of launching the Daily Caller, Carlson told me it would “be defined by its reporting, by the new facts it adds.” In that December 2009 piece, “Fight’s on to be right’s TPM, HuffPo,” I also spoke with Andrew Breitbart, who was launching a more combative site taking on the “Democrat-media complex” — and which would evolve, under Steve Bannon, as a populist nationalist launching pad for Trump’s political rise.
“I think that the longer he sort of was at the Caller and kind of looking at what kind of articles worked,” Zengerle said, “that gave him this insight into Trump that other conservative pundits just didn’t have.” So as prominent figures on the right dismissed Trump’s chances in 2016, he added, “Tucker was the only guy who was like, there’s potential here.”
Carlson’s start on Fox News was inauspicious, grabbing airtime on weekends, before taking off with a 7 p.m. show announced just days after Trump’s 2016 election victory. “When he was at Fox, he ran that television show as a political operation,” Zengerle said. “He would write his monologues and book his guests with an eye towards influencing policy. He knew that Trump was watching and other administration officials were watching.”
Zengerle writes how Carlson didn’t clamor for Trump’s attention off-air, like some hosts, who wanted the ear of the president. Some of Carlson’s personal views on Trump spilled out during discovery for Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation case against Fox News, which the network settled for $787.5 million just prior to the start of the trial. In one Jan. 4, 2021 text, Carlson said “we are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights.”
The book’s Jan. 6 genesis
It was in the aftermath of Jan. 6 that Zengerle first proposed what became “Hated by All the Right People.” He recalled speaking to his agent about writing on a coming Republican civil war and who would inherit Trump’s MAGA base. And yet, Zengerle recalled thinking, “no matter how nativist they went on immigration or isolationist they went on foreign policy, they would never get his supporters because they don’t have entertainment value, they’re not charismatic.”
“I was like, ‘The only person who really could do that is Tucker Carlson,’” he recalled.
Carlson, at the time, was “occupying the mental real estate that Trump had once occupied among liberals and conservatives,” with his nightly missives antagonizing the left and delighting the right.
Lately, Carlson has enraged conservative talkers like Ben Shapiro and Senator Ted Cruz, by conducting a kid-gloves interview with white nationalist streamer Nick Fuentes, who has emerged as a star among the young, far-right.
Zengerle believes Carlson is “very sensitive about where the energy is and where the audience is and where it’s going to be in the future, and I think the way he handled the Fuentes thing is a really good example of that.”
Carlson, he said, “was having this feud with this guy and he was losing, and I think he has made the calculus that you cannot be successful in conservative media and conservative politics unless the neo-Nazis like you.”
Zengerle suggested that having Shapiro and Cruz as “enemies” is “going to help [Carlson] with the people he needs to win over,” adding, “I think he’s sort of made the calculus that those guys are fighting the last war.”
In the end, no Republican took Trump’s political mantle after Jan. 6 because Trump refused to relinquish it and won the presidency in 2024. Zengerle found Carlson, post-Fox, more visibly attaching himself to Trump during the race, advocating for him on stage and privately pushing for Vance to join the ticket. “I don’t think JD Vance is vice president without Tucker,” said Zengerle.
He also said it’s unlikely Carlson would run for president in 2028 — not a far-fetched idea in our reality-show political age — given his closeness to Vance, personally and ideologically.
“I think he does not just want to be a podcaster,” said Zengerle. “He has bigger ambitions than that. But I think his ambitions are ideological ambitions. He has a vision for the country that he wants to see achieved, and I think the question about whether he would ever run for office himself, it revolves around, in order to achieve that vision, does he have to run for office? And if he concludes that, yes, that’s the only way to achieve it, I could see him doing it. I think right now, JD Vance is in pretty perfect ideological alignment with him.”
So, depending on how 2028 plays out, Carlson’s influence — honed in the attention economy — may reach even deeper into the White House.
