David Remnick: When 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. 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. 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. When Zengerle was first coming up as a political journalist, Tucker Carlson was someone he kind of admired. Let'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?
Jason Zengerle: 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 small circulation political magazines in Washington that, I would say, punched above their weight in terms of influence. Tucker was only a few years older than me, but he was already light years ahead of my own career, extremely well established. He was the hot young writer in Washington. This was in the late 1990s, I think, 1997.
Tucker would come to have lunch with another hotshot young writer in town who worked at The New Republic, named Steve Glass. While he waited sometimes for Steve to come out of his office, he would entertain the interns. He was extremely affable, extremely funny. He would tell great stories, kind of give us a peek of the stuff that was going on that we suspected was going on in Capitol Hill, but we didn't know ourselves. He was someone we all looked up to and admired. I think we respected his work.
David Remnick: Why did you guys admire him?
Jason Zengerle: 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. Tucker wrote this subtly kind of devastating profile that showed Bush to be callow, kind of stupid, stubborn, and all these things that if you paid attention, would have revealed Bush, all the things that made him kind of a bad president.
David Remnick: Jason, 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. 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.
Jason Zengerle: Tucker's always been very good about seeing where things are going. He kind of skates to where the puck is going to be. I think that he first did that when he left print journalism. I think he recognized, maybe before some other people like myself, that if he wanted to attain the fame, fortune, and power that he clearly did, he was not going to be able to do that in print. He left his job as a pretty promising young magazine writer and moved into cable news.
David Remnick: 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?
Jason Zengerle: 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. You had Bill Kristol, David Brooks, Charles Krauthammer, and Tucker was the guy who was kind of more interested in storytelling.
David Remnick: 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?
Jason Zengerle: No, he was absolutely part of mainstream media and absolutely a member of the Washington political and media establishment. One of its youngest members, but certainly a member. He was friends with all 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. Tucker actually had a show on PBS for two years, Tucker Carlson: Unfiltered. He was not at all like the person he is today.
David Remnick: 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.
Tucker Carlson: I think you're a good comedian. I think your lectures are boring.
Jon Stewart: Yes.
Tucker Carlson: Let me ask you a question on the news.
Jon Stewart: Now, this is theater. It's obvious. How old are you?
Tucker Carlson: 35.
Jon Stewart: And you wear a bow tie.
[laughter]
[applause]
Tucker Carlson: Yes, I do. I do.
Jon Stewart: So this is--
Tucker Carlson: I know. I know. I know. You're right.
Jon Stewart: So this is theater.
Tucker Carlson: Now, let me just-- Now, come on.
Jon Stewart: Now, listen, I'm not suggesting that you're not a smart guy, because those are not easy to tie.
Tucker Carlson: They're difficult.
[laughter]
Jon Stewart: But the thing is that this-- you're doing theater, when you should be doing debate, which would be great.
Paul Begala: We do, do--
Jon Stewart: It's not honest. What you do is not honest. What you do is partisan hackery.
David Remnick: What impact did that have on Tucker Carlson, that moment? Because I remember it pretty well.
Jason Zengerle: Yes, 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. 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. I think everybody at Crossfire thought that it was going to be a fun episode.
They thought Stewart was in on the joke, basically, that it was all going to be kind of pretend theater, and it wasn't serious. It's really funny when you watch that episode. Paul Begala, who was the chair on the left, he just kind of shuts up and just lets Stewart go. Tucker's the only one kind of engaging him, and that's why Stewart went after him that way.
David Remnick: What was the impact on Carlson?
Jason Zengerle: Well, a few months later, a new president of CNN took over and canceled Crossfire altogether and let Tucker's contract expire. Basically, explained to The New York Times at the time that I agree with Jon Stewart. I think he was right. It was a humiliation for Tucker. I think that it created in him kind of a bitterness and a resentment because a lot of the people that he considered his friends and supporters, people in that kind of DC political media establishment, they didn't come to his defense. I mean, maybe privately they did, but publicly they didn't.
I think the resentment that he feels today towards, what he call legacy media or corporate media, a lot of it starts right there.
David Remnick: 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.
Tucker Carlson: 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 liberal paper, it's also a paper that cares about whether they spell people's names right. By and large, it's a paper that actually cares about accuracy. Conservatives need to build institutions that mirror those institutions that are-- 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?
Audience: The New York Times is with them, and that's--
Tucker Carlson: 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 cons--
Audience: No.
Tucker Carlson: No, no, and conservatives need to do the same. Yes, they are.
David Remnick: What is he foretelling there?
Jason Zengerle: 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. His original vision for The Daily Caller was kind of a conservative analog to the Huffington Post. 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. He was working at that time to sort of gin up money for it, but also interest.
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. He went to give that speech at CPAC. He knew what he was going to get there. He knew he was going to get booed. He thought that the negative reaction would appeal to these serious young conservatives and young conservative journalists, and also appeal to sort of the DC media elite. He was still a member in good standing in that group.
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 serious journalism, facts, things like that, and here I am." He got a fantastic reception. I think it's hard to imagine now, but the people in Washington, the people he now attacks, they embraced him and they supported him and he got all sorts of help and advice from people at Politico and people at CNN and all these other institutions that wanted him to succeed.
David Remnick: I'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. 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. Zengerle 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. After 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.
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 book that were published in the wake of Trayvon Martin's murder. What happened there?
Jason Zengerle: Well, Tucker, I think very quickly realized that this vision he had for this fact-based conservative publication was not going to get any traffic, and there was no audience for it. He very quickly pivoted. Most of the original reporters he hired left and he brought in a new crop of reporters. These men and women were really pretty far out there ideologically. At the same time that this is going on, Breitbart is kind of coming onto the scene. Breitbart's having a lot of success with this really kind of inflammatory, 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 Trayvon 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.
David Remnick: The discovery is that extremism sells.
Jason Zengerle: 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 the Republican establishment hasn't really figured out yet, but Tucker's figuring it out while he's running The Caller.
David Remnick: In November 2016, the program Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox premieres. Here's a promo clip for the show.
Tucker Carlson: What's the show gonna 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. That'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. 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. 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 double speak, mock smugness, and barbecue nonsense every night, hope you'll watch.
David Remnick: Now, of course, this is just days in the wake of the election of Donald Trump, to what extent did Tucker Carlson hold power and the President of the United States to account?
Jason Zengerle: I don't think he held power in the president of the United States to account. I mean, if you considered power at the time 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. 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.
He would find these debate partners who 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 their face was framed against him in these two boxes, and he could control the debate. It wasn't like Jon Stewart. 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. It was a completely unfair fight. Those are the people he was punching. He was punching down, and he was punching left.
David Remnick: What was his relationship with Trump about?
Jason Zengerle: He had a complicated relationship with Trump. 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. He thought maybe Trump would have a better use of his time.
I think initially he was a little taken aback by that. I think he found Trump entertaining. He thought he was kind of a charming rogue which were the kind of people he used to write about. I don't think he thought that he was necessarily equipped to be president.
David Remnick: Now, Jason, where did Carlson actively disagree with Trump or the MAGA party line?
Jason Zengerle: 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. He was more committed to the anti-immigration stuff, the anti-crime things, kind of those issues than Trump was himself. If he had issues with Trump, it was Trump was maybe just too casual of a racist. He didn't really believe it.
David Remnick: Why was Tucker Carlson fired by Fox?
Jason Zengerle: I wish I knew the answer to that. I was not able to get to the bottom of that.
David Remnick: Does Tucker Carlson know?
Jason Zengerle: 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. His theory is that he was offered up to Dominion as part of the Dominion settlement. The Dominion case was a lawsuit filed by a company that counts votes. After the 2020 election, Dominion became the center of a number of conspiracy theories that alleged that the election been stolen from Trump. Those conspiracy theories were given a lot of air on Fox News.
Not by Tucker Carlson, it should be said, but by other hosts. Dominion sued. 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.
David Remnick: Did losing his job at Fox intensify his ideology?
Jason Zengerle: I don't think it intensified his ideology. I think it basically just took the guardrails off. I think people talk about how Trump 2.0 is no guardrails. He's unrestrained. I think Tucker post Fox is similar. There's just no one there anymore to tell him no. When he was at Fox, there was nominal corporate supervision. It was a publicly traded company. 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.
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. 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. While 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.
David Remnick: Anti-Semitism is good business.
Jason Zengerle: I think he's made that calculation. Yes.
David Remnick: 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. Of course, he dined with Trump and Kanye west at Mar-a-Lago. Fuentes, in October, was on Carlson's show. Let's listen to a clip from that.
Nick Fuentes: I realized that the conservative movement was completely bankrupt in that way.
Tucker Carlson: Yes, we were absolutely right.
Nick Fuentes: And I became very radical.
Tucker Carlson: Well, let me just say, I'm so familiar with-- I was much older when it happened to me and much more insulated. I was on a college student. I was like, 45. I was in a much better place to withstand the pressure. But I do think, 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. I never understood why they did that.
Then I thought, maybe the point is to make me racist. Where 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? If you stare too intently at the accusers, at the whatever Ben Shapiro, Mark Levens, or Ted Cruz or whoever it is calling you names, it 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?
Nick Fuentes: No, I don't think it ever did because I know who I am.
David Remnick: This is a moment of self-searching almost from Tucker Carlson.
Jason Zengerle: Very introspective. Yes. 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. 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. Fuentes fired back on his show and it seemed-- there was this feud going on online and it seemed like Tucker was losing.
All of Fuentes, his fans were just attacking Tucker on X and pillorying him. He had Fuentes on because I think he recognized that he couldn't afford to alienate Fuentes, his audience. He kind of extended this olive branch and made nice with him.
David Remnick: How influential is Tucker Carlson now?
Jason Zengerle: I think he's very influential. I think he's influential in a couple ways. I think he's very influential inside the Trump administration. When Trump was president 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. I mean, I think one reason is, 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 JD Vance. He has a number of allies in the administration, Bobby Kennedy, Tulsi Gabbard, all the way down to sub cabinet positions. He's friends with those people. There's just that matter of just his influence in government. Beyond that, people listen to his show. He's able to smuggle ideas that were considered just out of bounds. He's able to smuggle them into the mainstream now because he gives them voice on his show.
He's a talented enough communicator and a smart enough guy that he can explain them in ways that they maybe don't seem quite as awful as they are when they're presented in their kind of 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. Cable news is kind of a dying medium. Just thinking about the people out there today who are influential voices on the right, you don't really hear about Sean Hannity that much.
You don't hear about Jesse Watters or Laura Ingraham. You hear a lot about Tucker. You hear a lot about Nick Fuentes. 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 their arguments and ideas.
David Remnick: What does Tucker Carlson want?
Jason Zengerle: That's a fantastic question, and that's a question that I think is occupying the minds of a lot of people in Republican politics and in the conservative movement, because 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. He 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.
I think he considers himself a movement leader. 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.
David Remnick: You think it's possible that he would run for office?
Jason Zengerle: Yes, 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. So much of politics now is just being a media figure and being an entertainer. Tucker does those things very well. Plus, he has some pretty core ideological beliefs. I think he wants to see those beliefs take root in the country and be executed. I think the question for him is, what's the best vehicle for that? I mean, right now, JD Vance is saying all the things that Tucker believes.
Maybe if Tucker has his druthers, JD Vance can be the person who becomes president and does all these things, and Tucker will be whispering in his ear, but at the same time, JD Vance isn't that talented a politician. I think if Tucker Carlson concludes that JD Vance can't get elected, can't become president, well, then maybe he has to do it himself. I think our politics are at a place where that really doesn't seem as outrageous as it would have even just a couple years ago.
David Remnick: Jason Zengerle, thank you so much.
Jason Zengerle: Thanks a lot.
David Remnick: Hated by All the Right People is the title of Jason Zengerle's new biography of Tucker Carlson. Zengerle has just joined The New Yorker as a staff writer.
 
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