Of course, Carlson, an early sceptic about the Iraq War, last week called the attack on Iran “absolutely disgusting and evil”. Trump responded by saying “Tucker has lost his way” and “he’s not MAGA”.
While this may signal the end of his hold over Trump, they’ve weathered disagreements before – as when Carlson attacked last year’s strikes on Iran, as well as consistently pressing Trump over the Epstein files.
But if Carlson’s ruptures with Trump widen, some observers told the author of a new book, “he could then portray himself to a disillusioned MAGA base as the true leader of their movement – and run for president himself in 2028”.
The great mystery of Tucker Carlson is how a once-serious journalist, whose writing for the likes of New York magazine and Esquire was admired, wandered into the crazy world of the American far right and came to dominate it.
In his book, Hated By All the Right People, Jason Zengerle (a contributing writer for the New York Times magazine) traces Carlson’s evolution over past 30 years. It is, he writes, the story of what has happened to the United States in that period.
Origin stories
Carlson was born in 1969 to a prominent conservative father and a bohemian heiress mother: they divorced before his eighth birthday and Carlson’s father got sole custody. His mother lived mostly abroad. “I don’t know this person,” Carlson reported feeling as she was dying. She left him a dollar in her will.
He failed to graduate from college, where, Zengerle writes, he was an “abysmal student”, but charmed his way into a succession of small conservative media outlets, and a few national magazines. By the turn of the century, he discovered the lure of television and went through a series of attempts to break into mainstream broadcasting.
First CNN, where Jon Stewart essentially ended Carlson’s contract and his show by savaging it, at length, while appearing as a guest. Then PBS, and MSNBC – where Carlson picked liberal self-described “butch lesbian” talk radio host Rachel Maddow to be his sparring partner. (Maddow is now one of the most high-profile media defenders of progressive politics in the US.)
At his lowest point, he became a political analyst at the only cable-news network he’d yet to work at, Fox News – or, as he’d once described it, “a mean, sick group of people”.
His rise (and increased air time) was tied to Donald Trump’s: he was the rare conservative or Fox News pundit who didn’t initially dismiss him. Fox gave him his own show days before Trump was elected in 2016.
For seven years, Carlson was a mainstay of Fox right-wing cheerleading, until he was unceremoniously dumped in 2023. Just why he was removed is not clear. Carlson came to believe it was part of Fox’s settlement in the Dominion lawsuit. Zengerle speculates Rupert Murdoch finally lost patience with Carlson (despite his closeness to Lachlan Murdoch), as he had on several occasions with Trump too.
Considered for Trump’s ‘veep’
Carlson bounced back, creating his own successful network, on which he hosted interviews with Andrew Tate, Nazi apologist historian Darryl Cooper and Trump himself (including an interview aired on X at the same time as Fox’s first presidential primary debate, in which Trump refused to participate).
In 2024, he campaigned vigorously for Trump’s second term. Trump even told reporters, Zengerle writes, that he “was entertaining the idea of tapping Carlson as his veep”.
Carlson had endeared himself further by presenting a three-part series, Patriot Purge, which presented the riots at the Capitol on January 6 2021 as “a false flag operation, instigated by undercover FBI operatives in the crowd, so that the Biden administration could then persecute Americans for the crime of being conservative”.
During the Biden years, a bizarre crowd of conspiracy seekers and racist right-wingers paid court to Trump. Carlson was among the most important: possibly even more than Elon Musk. As Zengerle writes, he was active behind the scenes in the vice-presidential selection of JD Vance, whom he had helped mentor into politics, and at least two cabinet members: Robert F. Kennedy Jr and Tulsi Gabbard.
Vance’s “remarkable dressing-down” of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky was “a direct echo” of Carlson’s criticisms on his shows for the previous three years. Carlson’s criticisms of Zelensky drew on antisemitic tropes, calling him “ratlike” and “a persecutor of Christians”.
Zengerle credits Carlson with providing much of the mismatch of policies that have marked Trump’s second term (as well as the border wall with Mexico, which Carlson argued for as far back as 2005).
Trump has consistently expressed hostility to immigrants, with the notable exception of white South Africans – whose cause Carlson seems to have pioneered – and promoted Viktor Orban’s Hungarian authoritarian regime, which Carlson called a “lesson” for America after he visited to interview Orban, before anyone in the US had paid him much attention.
Unsurprisingly, Carlson has expressed sympathy for Vladimir Putin. He became the first American journalist to obtain a one-on-one interview with Putin after the invasion of Ukraine.
It was widely believed Putin played him, avoiding any difficult questions about respect for Ukrainian sovereignty: just as he had played Trump in his infamous meeting in Helsinki in 2018. Zengerle does not explore whether there is any connection between the two men’s remarkable sympathy for the Russian dictator.
Since Trump’s re-election, Carlson has become less sycophantic, particularly on Iran and the Epstein files. At one point, he claimed Epstein was working at the behest of Israel’s government: part of the increasingly antisemitic and anti-Israeli raves that characterise the contemporary Carlson.
Carlson and the Republican journey
Carlson, like Vance before he became vice president, has become a strident America Firster, opposed to involvement in foreign wars or desire for regime change.
Given the uncertain outcome of the current war on Iran, it is impossible to predict whether Carlson’s position as perhaps the most significant right-wing ideologue in the American media is doomed to burn out, or to become yet more influential.
Either way, Zengerle is right to point to Carlson’s career as a symbol of the way the Republican Party has been captured by a set of beliefs and principles previous Republican leaders would have denounced as racist and undemocratic. The two Republican candidates for president before Trump, John McCain and Mitt Romney, would no longer find a home in their party.
But of course, they both lost to Barack Obama. Trump’s 2016 victory caused a major reversal in American politics and many of the people who originally abhorred him are now part of his inner circle. Both Vance and secretary of state Marco Rubio had declared him totally unfit for office. Zengerle reminds us that while a senator, Rubio supported immigration reforms he has now disavowed in fealty to the president.
Carlson shared these doubts about Trump in 2016, though he was one of the first to recognise the strange charisma that would propel Trump to the top.
As the Republican Party has moved increasingly into territory that used to be regarded as frankly conspiratorial and crazed, so too has Carlson. But while Zengerle does an excellent job of charting this transformation, he does little to explain why it happened.
He writes well, as befits a veteran of the best US print media, but there is a surplus of information and a lack of real analysis. Take the example of Carlson’s increasingly virulent antisemitism. Early in his career, he worked with and for many prominent Jewish intellectuals, like neoconservative writers Bill Kristol and John Podhoretz. Zengerle demonstrates that Carlson is providing increasing time to extreme antisemites, but makes no real attempt to explain it.
Calculation or genuine belief?
But his drift towards the fringes of overt racism seem to date back to his founding of the briefly successful website The Daily Caller in 2010.
While it began with some claim to journalistic integrity, The Daily Caller soon found space for that particularly virulent antisemitism that ties together ancient tropes about Jews with fear and hatred of African Americans and Muslims. Carlson’s willingness to host antisemites on his program has meant his criticism of Israel’s behaviour in Gaza is too easily dismissed by the powerful Israeli lobby in the US.
Reading Carlson’s increasing attraction to fringe irrationality, I wondered how far this is political calculation and how far it represents genuinely held beliefs. Does Carlson ever wake in the night and ask himself if he bears any responsibility for Trump’s cruelty to alleged illegal aliens – or Republican attempts to disenfranchise electors?
Hated by all the Right People is a revealing title, akin to Hillary Clinton’s comment about the “basket of deplorables” who voted for Trump. But I would have liked to see Zengerle explore the reasons for Carlson’s appeal. As he concludes, Carlson now speaks to millions. Maybe he should have spoken to some of these millions, to better understand why they listen to him.
Dennis Altman, Vice Chancellor's Fellow and Professorial Fellow, Institute for Human Security and Social Change, La Trobe University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
