Tucker Carlson’s Long, Strange Trip

In the fall of 1984, the New England prep school, St. George’s, held an all-school assembly. One of its few African-American students, a senior, rose to speak about Eleanor Bumpus, an elderly Black woman living in the Bronx who had recently been killed with a shotgun blast by a police officer as she resisted eviction from her public housing unit. “Does anyone think that woman deserved to die?” the senior asked. A tenth grader named Tucker McNear Swanson Carlson raised his hand. 

Carlson, as Jason Zengerle shows in his new biography Hated by All the Right People, was a born troublemaker. Zengerle, a staff writer at The New Yorker, offers a vivid, well-researched, and astute portrait of Carlson, whose ambitions may well include a run for the presidency. Carlson got his start at The Weekly Standard magazine, but has since sloughed off his former incarnation. Gone is the affable bowtie-clad neocon fellow traveler, replaced by a flannel-shirt-wearing populist authoritarian who has no compunction about platforming the likes of Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and touting the virtues of “heritage Americans.” His conversion has made him a lightning rod not only for the left but also for his former neocon chums. 

Former Representative Adam Kinzinger, the Illinois Republican, called Carlson a “traitor” after the pundit traveled to Moscow in February 2024 to fawn over Russian President Vladimir Putin in a Kremlin interview. Though Zengerle doesn’t draw an explicit parallel, Carlson’s reinvention very much resembles that of JD Vance (whom Carlson helped persuade Trump to name as his vice-presidential running mate). More than anything else, Carlson’s career, like Vance’s, appears to be a prolonged exercise in moral elasticity. “Whether Carlson really believes the awful things that he says,” Zengerle writes, “matters less than that he says them at all, and that millions of people—members of Congress, titans of industry, the president, and just everyday Americans—listen to and take their cues from him.”  

Carlson, who was born in 1969, grew up in San Diego, where his father, Dick, was a local television newsman. A swashbuckling figure, Dick married two heiresses; named his second son “Buckley” after his hero, William F. Buckley, Jr.; served as Ronald Reagan’s head of Voice of America and George H.W. Bush’s ambassador to the Seychelles; and ended his days writing a column for the reactionary Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, which was owned by the reclusive billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. Tucker, however, claimed that California liberals oppressed him as a child. “Liberals were everywhere,” he later recounted. “They smelled like patchouli. They showed up late to everything. They talked incessantly about solar power, humpback whales, and the Hopi Indians. They annoyed the hell out of me.”  

This was a bunch of hooey. Zengerle observes that, far from being surrounded by liberals, Carlson spent his youth in La Jolla, a wealthy seaside village near San Diego that was home to numerous Republican fuddy-duddies. His father, for one, hung out with the likes of Jerry Warren, former White House press secretary for Richard Nixon. “The scent of patchouli was well-nigh indetectable,” Zengerle writes, “over the pool at the La Jolla Beach & Tennis Club, where Carlson lounged during his summer vacations.”  

Always an indifferent student, Carlson entered St. George’s School in tenth grade. His lousy grades scotched any dreams he might have harbored about attending Harvard or Yale. “His failure to gain entrée to the Ivy League gnawed at him, and would, decades later, serve as a touchstone for his populist ideology,” Zengerle writes. So anemic was his academic record that it required the intervention of the headmaster—Reverend George Andrews, whose daughter he was dating—to secure Carlson’s admission to Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. Here, too, Carlson raised hackles on campus, this time with his fervent denunciations of liberal professors and homosexuality. After departing Trinity, Carlson once again leaned upon the ever-helpful reverend (now his father-in-law) to arrange a paid internship at Policy Review, a journal published by the Heritage Foundation. 

Carlson’s next big break came when he landed a position at The Weekly Standard, edited by the triumvirate of William Kristol, Fred Barnes, and John Podhoretz. A gifted writer, Carlson penned essays about figures such as Jack Kemp and Grover Norquist that Zengerle describes as “consistently insightful—and frequently withering.” He adopted, or at least espoused, the neocon foreign policy credo, championing the Iraq War. But by 2004, Zengerle writes, “Carlson was one of the first—and for many years, only—conservative pundits to recant his support for the Iraq War.” Carlson also began to doubt the judgment of others who supported the war, such as Senator John McCain and Kristol. Had he been wrong, too, he wondered, about Patrick J. Buchanan, who had opposed the Iraq War—and whom he had previously attacked as an antisemite? Carlson called Buchanan to apologize. 

In reassessing his prior convictions, such as they were, Carlson did not break with the right. Instead, he traded one set of conservative doctrines for another—from neocon to paleocon. With the backing of Foster Friess, the conservative Wyoming tycoon, he launched The Daily Caller in 2010. Carlson eventually realized that to compete with Breitbart News, he needed to move further right. Carlson’s pursuit of clicks prompted him to hire Scott Greer, who had attended gatherings of the Wolves of Vinland—a neo-pagan white supremacist group that met in the woods of central Virginia—and Jonah Bennett, who participated in a secret email listserv called Morning Hate.  

But the publication, as Carlson knew, was small beer. In 2009, he received a call from Roger Ailes, the unscrupulous head of Fox News, who declared, “You’re a loser, and you screwed up your whole life” before offering him a contributor contract. It was classic Ailes. He relished hiring journalists who were down on their luck and would be beholden to him. And for Carlson, who had seen his television career fizzle at CNN and MSNBC, this was seemingly his last chance on cable. “I’m doing whatever they want me to do,” Carlson told The New York Times. Elsewhere, he referred to himself as Rupert Murdoch’s “bitch.” A lack of self-awareness, you could say, was never a problem for Carlson. 

It wasn’t until Trump’s 2016 presidential bid that Carlson’s star began to ascend. According to Zengerle, Carlson was open to Trump because he saw him as a rising star who could tap into the right’s resentments. At the Daily Caller, Zengerle writes, “he’d been immersing himself in its web-traffic metrics; they served as an early-warning system for Carlson about where the conservative base was headed—and how a populist candidate who explicitly ran on nativism, white grievance, and sexism might have a lane in a Republican primary.” In November 2016, Tucker Carlson Tonight premiered. Carlson, Zengerle suggests, did not become a Trump booster so much as a foe of the neocons who opposed him, thereby “helping to invent the ideological escape hatch now known as anti-anti-Trumpism.”  

Ousted from Fox in 2023, Carlson might have seemed like he was on the skids. But his adaptability ensured that his star power became magnified. According to Zengerle, many of the Trump administration’s “actions and initiatives, its provocations and outrages, seemed as if they originated in the dark and dangerous corners where Carlson tread [sic] and toiled the previous decade.” What’s more, Carlson helped put the kibosh on two neocons: Marco Rubio becoming Trump’s running mate and Mike Pompeo being tapped as defense secretary. Carlson also connected Trump with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., backed Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence, and pushed for Darren J. Beattie to become acting undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs. Carlson’s son, Buckley, got a job on JD Vance’s staff as well. “Tucker has people everywhere,” a Trump adviser told Zengerle. 

Carlson’s ship, in other words, has finally come in. Zengerle explains that, as a New Republic intern in the 1990s, he met Carlson when the bow-tied conservative would drop by the magazine’s Washington, D.C. offices to accompany his friend, Stephen Glass, for lunch across the street at The Palm. Eventually, Glass, the young New Republic writer, would be exposed as what Zengerle calls the “perpetrator of perhaps the most sustained and elaborate fraud in journalistic history.” Zengerle does not reflect upon it, but who is the greater fabulist? Glass, who concocted several dozen stories, or Carlson, who has systematically fomented conspiracy theories at the heart of many of the president’s policies? 

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