Tucker Carlson started wearing a bow tie in 1984, when he was in tenth grade at St. George’s, a Rhode Island prep school with a dress code. He stopped wearing a bow tie on April 11, 2006, acknowledging the change in the final minutes of the show he hosted on MSNBC. “I like bow ties, and I certainly spent a lot of time defending them,” he said. “But, from now on, I’m going without.” The affectation had come to define him: Carlson was primarily known—and, in no small number of television households, reviled—as the self-assured young conservative who dressed like a spelling-bee champion. MSNBC advertised his program with posters that read, “The Man. The Legend. The Bow Tie.” He had been wearing a bow tie when, in 2004, Jon Stewart paid him a visit on CNN, to tell him that “Crossfire,” which Carlson was then co-hosting, was “hurting America,” and to call him a “dick.” And Carlson wore one again during a disastrous appearance on “Dancing with the Stars,” in which he was eliminated after his first routine, a semi-stationary cha-cha.
At MSNBC, the producers had spent months asking Carlson to abandon the tie, because they felt that it encouraged the audience to view him as a character, or perhaps a caricature. But the change in wardrobe wasn’t enough to save the show, which was cancelled two years later. It wasn’t even enough to alter the public perception of Carlson, who seems like the kind of guy who would wear a bow tie, even when he doesn’t. Unemployed at forty, Carlson launched a scrappy Web site, the Daily Caller, which published exposés, conservative opinion, and clickbait, such as “Jennifer Love Hewitt’s Cleavage: A History.”
What followed is one of the most unlikely comebacks in the annals of cable news. While Carlson was running the Daily Caller, he also served as a contributor to Fox News, where he became increasingly visible. On Fox, his disdain for liberal piety was less anomalous than his manner. He had begun his career as a waggish writer for the conservative Weekly Standard, and his television segments tended to be wittier and shrewder than his competitors’. The job required some amount of partisan invective, which Carlson was happy enough to supply, but he did not always manage to hide his opinion of politicians in general, which is rather low—or, as he might say, in his unplaceable high-preppy accent, rawther low.
Last fall, he once again became the host of his own show, “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” which began its run at 7 P.M. and then, in January, moved to 9 P.M., to fill the space formerly occupied by Megyn Kelly, who had defected from Fox News to NBC. The promotion was a surprise—Carlson had been hanging around the cable-news industry for far too long to be considered a rising star—and so, too, was the result. Buoyed by the election of Donald Trump, and the attendant explosion of interest in political news, Carlson drew even better ratings than Kelly had. Where Kelly had conducted a long and lopsided feud with Trump—she was relatively skeptical of him, he was absolutely cruel toward her—Carlson thought Trump was refreshing, not least because of his habit of making enemies on the left and the right. Carlson’s show was a success both on television and online, where clips of his segments, which are frequently and sometimes obnoxiously disputatious, are reborn as viral videos. The format is simple: Carlson prefers to talk to one person at a time, eschewing the “Brady Bunch” grids that many cable-news shows use to fill the screen with noise and drama. Often, watching the segments feels like stumbling into a Twitter argument, even though Carlson himself dislikes Twitter.
In many ways, Carlson is a throwback, and a contradiction: a fierce critic of the political and cultural establishment who is also, unapologetically, a member of it. He has endless disdain for the Washington élite and its conventional wisdom, including the belief—widespread among political insiders—that Washington stinks. He moved there in 1992 with his wife, Susie, and they have lived there, happily, virtually ever since. “Everyone I love is here,” he says. Carlson broadcasts from the drab Washington office of Fox News, halfway between Union Station and the Capitol, and one night he was accompanied by the sound of heavy machinery. “You may hear construction noise behind us during this show,” he said. “That’s because there is construction going on. There always is, in Washington, the richest city in America. We want to thank you for that, for sending your tax dollars here.” He smiled. “Still, it’s a pretty nice place.”
Carlson is forty-seven, and though he was formerly what one friend calls a “pretty heroic” drinker, he says that he quit in 2002, having decided that neither the pleasant nights nor the unpleasant mornings were improving his life. A few years earlier, he had given up smoking—cowed into submission, he once wrote, by “the dark forces of Health.” There is, alas, no substitute for alcohol, but for cigarettes there is nicotine gum, a product that Carlson buys, in bulk, from New Zealand, where it is sold in satisfactorily easy-to-open packaging. He chews constantly, stopping only to be filmed or to eat; he likes long lunches, during which he observes a not-entirely-strict proscription against carbohydrates.
One recent afternoon, he settled into a booth at the Monocle, a Washington establishment distinguished chiefly by its proximity to the Senate buildings. He seemed pleased to be accosted by staff and patrons alike, feigning surprise at every compliment.
One woman told him that she loved his show, and that she worked for Senator Marco Rubio. “Will you tell him to come on?” he asked.
“You’re scary, though,” she said.
“I’m not scary,” he said, brightly.
Once she was gone, Carlson said that he really does struggle to book politicians, especially ones—like Rubio, perhaps—who maintain an artful ambiguity about some of their positions. “I think you should say what you think,” he said. “I understand the practical reasons why you wouldn’t, but I still think it’s cowardly.” This, of course, is another reason that politicians might want to avoid Carlson’s show: he knows that one easy way to look courageous is to call someone cowardly, especially on television. As the show’s profile has increased, so has a certain reticence among potential guests. “It’s very hard to get people to come on,” he says. “I would love to have senators every night. I only want to debate people who are more powerful than I am.”
Like most of the big names at Fox News, Carlson is known for criticizing Democrats, but, with Republicans in control of the White House and both houses of Congress, there are fewer obvious targets than there used to be. On many nights, Carlson’s viewers watch what looks like a mismatch, as he interrogates some liberal opponent who seems unfamiliar with television—and, sometimes, unfamiliar with politics. (During one surreal segment, in February, he tried to debate the merits of an anti-Trump protest with an actor from Los Angeles who had no substantive connection with the organizers.) Part of the appeal of Carlson’s show is its tendency to generate knockouts rather than split decisions. His unofficial Reddit page features pictures of guests judged to have performed especially poorly; over each face is written “Wasted,” the word that signals total collapse in the Grand Theft Auto video games. Andrew Ferguson, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard, remembers once marvelling at Carlson’s ability to turn out well-wrought magazine prose, but he is not a fan of the show. “He’s on a network that I think is kind of disreputable, and I think he’s better than that,” Ferguson says. “To me, it’s just cringe-making. You get some poor little columnist from the Daily Oregonian who said Trump was Hitler, and you beat the shit out of him for ten minutes.”
In January, 2016, Carlson wrote an essay for Politico in which he suggested that Trump was “the ideal candidate to fight Washington corruption” (because “he has personally participated in it”) and was more likely than any of his rivals to defeat Hillary Clinton. The Great Recession had reminded Carlson that capitalism could be destructive, and that markets could not be counted upon to cure ills like rural unemployment—at least, not quickly enough to help the working-class men who were drifting out of the workforce. He was influenced, too, by talking to people in Maine, where he spends his summers (in the rural northeast of the state, he is quick to add, not on the wealthy coastline). “It changed my politics more than anything,” he says. “It’s a disaster. No one gets married.” Carlson has carefully positioned himself as not uniformly pro-Trump, but certainly anti-anti-Trump—scornful of all the experts who were sure that the Trump Presidency would be a catastrophe, and who think that they have already been proved right.
James Carville, the Democratic commentator, is a longtime friend and occasional sparring partner, and he considers Carlson “one of the world’s great contrarians.” This is an unstable identity. “To be a contrarian, you’ve got to be a contrarian against your own people,” Carville says—and one of Carlson’s gifts is a knack for making any view, no matter how widespread or advantageous, seem like a brave rebellion against someone else’s way of thinking.
One recent evening, Carlson’s guest was Mitch Landrieu, a Democrat and the mayor of New Orleans, who had made headlines by declaring that he would not allow his police officers to be used as a “deportation force” for the Trump Administration. Carlson was in his Washington studio, and Landrieu was in New Orleans, which Carlson described, in his introduction, as a city with “many policies that protect the rights of illegal immigrants,” and also one where “crime is surging.”
Some cable shows rely on the drama of putting people in the same place, but Carlson’s thrives on remote interviews, which allow his producers to “box” his face, keeping it onscreen so that viewers can watch him react. When Carlson is talking to someone he agrees with, he pulls back, adopting the role of an earnest student seeking edification from a wise professor. But the segments most people remember are the contentious ones. Carlson grows incredulous and furrows his brow; he grows more incredulous and unfurrows it, letting his features melt into a disbelieving smile, which sometimes gives way to a high-pitched chuckle of outrage. One of his favorite tactics is to insist that his guest answer a question that is essentially unanswerable, as when he pressed Bill Nye to tell him what percentage of climate change was caused by human activity, then berated him for evading the question.
Landrieu had argued that the way to fight crime was to convince immigrants that they could trust the city’s police department. Carlson responded with statistics. “Your murder rate is almost doubled from January of last year; your rapes are up almost a hundred per cent,” he said. “I’m not saying it’s your fault. I’m merely saying that clearly these policies that you say will alleviate crime”—he paused, and cocked an eyebrow—“haven’t. Moreover, is there any actual evidence, like, social science, to prove that your talking point, which I’ve heard a thousand times, ‘If we ask people their immigration status, they won’t coöperate with the police, and we’ll have more crime’— Where do you get that?”
Carlson has long believed that America’s immigration policies are too lax, and his show provides near-nightly support for the view, central to Trump’s agenda, that unchecked immigration has increased crime and unemployment. But Landrieu refused to engage. “The people that are committing those crimes are not folks that are here illegally,” he said, pivoting to an impenetrable combination of policy detail and sloganeering.
When the segment was finished, Carlson rewarded himself with a piece of nicotine gum. “Eh!” he said, with a shrug. “I didn’t think it was super-compelling television.” A tech assistant turned on some music for Carlson, who likes to have classic rock playing whenever the cameras aren’t rolling, and he retreated to his office, which contained a fridge full of Perrier and a fly-fishing rod. (Once, at the Daily Caller, Carlson was practicing casting when he nicked a staffer on the neck; the two men vigorously disagreed about whether this was hilarious.) His executive producer, Justin Wells, who works in New York, called in for a postmortem.
“Mitch went long,” Carlson said. “What did that clock out at?”
“Ten and a half minutes,” Wells said.
“Fuck!” Carlson said. “He’s a windy character. I guess they all are.” In fact, Carlson likes Landrieu, mostly. “I think he’s been a decent mayor,” he says. “But people say what they feel like they have to say.” Carlson’s show—and, you might say, his career—is built on the proposition that there are obvious truths that people are unwilling to state. In his view, American immigration policy has been distorted by “virtue-signalling”: the tendency, particularly prominent among élites, to propound dubious ideas as a form of moral preening. “It’s like, ‘We’re good people. We do certain things as expressions of our goodness.’ ”
Carlson’s aversion to self-righteousness can seem like an aversion to righteousness itself, or to the notion that any person, any government, might be counted on to do the right thing. Once upon a time, this tendency made him a small-“L” libertarian, contemptuous of the Libertarian Party (too marginal, too zealous) but drawn to the idea that government is less harmful when it is less powerful. Although he is registered as a Democrat, so that he can participate in Washington’s Democrat-dominated primaries, he says he can remember voting for President only once: in 2008, for John McCain, whom he supported mainly because he’d developed an affection for him on the campaign trail.
In place of a grand ideology, Carlson embraces an unsentimental form of tribalism: a belief that, in a cruel and confusing world, no virtue is more important than loyalty to one’s family and friends. Two years ago, Carlson and his younger brother, Buckley, were e-mailing about a liberal communications director whom they found annoying; she was accidentally copied on one message, in which Buckley described her in startlingly distasteful terms. (The e-mail included two neologisms: “spoogeneck” and “labiaface.”) Tucker Carlson conceded that his brother’s response was “nasty,” but declined to go any further. “They wanted me to denounce my brother—my only brother?” he said, weeks later, during an interview on C-SPAN. “I would die first. Under no circumstances am I going to criticize my family in public.” Similarly, when a Daily Caller blogger published a post accusing Fox News of being soft on immigration, Carlson unpublished it. “You don’t criticize your employer,” Carlson said.
Now that Carlson is the anchor at the heart of the Fox News prime-time lineup—wedged between Bill O’Reilly, at eight, and Sean Hannity, at ten—he has to think anew about what loyalty might mean. During his CNN days, Carlson described O’Reilly as a “thin-skinned blowhard” and a “humorless phony,” but now the two must coexist. (Last week, after O’Reilly inspired outrage by mocking Maxine Waters, the African-American congresswoman, for wearing what he called a “James Brown wig,” he made an unusual appearance on Carlson’s show, to promote his new book; Carlson introduced him as “the legendary Bill O’Reilly.”) Carlson likes to say that he stays relaxed and happy by pretending that no one besides his wife watches the show. But he surely knows that his prospects at Fox News would change if he suddenly became a sharp critic of President Trump. When Carlson interviewed Trump last month, he asserted, cordially but firmly, that the Republicans’ health-care bill, with its tax cut for investors, did not seem “consistent” with the message voters sent in 2016. Trump shrugged. “A lot of things aren’t consistent,” he said. “But these are going to be negotiated.”
Carlson prides himself on occasionally booking unexpected figures, like Mark Blyth, a political economist who criticizes neoliberalism from the left, or Michelle Brané, a lawyer and migrant-rights activist, who charmed him with calm answers to his suspicious questions. But he avoids overt expressions of political apostasy, at least for now. “I’m very conscious of the fact that my views, on a couple of subjects, are out of step—not just with our audience but with most other people in America,” he says. “It’s better to lead people to things, rather than to just make statements.” Having initially supported the Iraq War, Carlson soon turned against it. And, unlike most conservatives, he supports closer diplomatic ties with Iran, a topic that he hopes to explore—carefully—on future shows. “It’s going to confuse the living shit out of our viewers,” he says. “When’s the last time you saw someone defend Iran on Fox News? Right around never?”
It is still not clear what it might mean to be a prime-time contrarian at Fox News, or whether such a thing is even possible. Carlson says that network executives leave him alone, and that he follows no directives besides his own curiosity. But, last month, while Rachel Maddow was devoting her MSNBC show to an eagerly awaited—and, ultimately, disappointing—revelation of an old Trump tax document, Carlson delivered an unusually fierce indictment of the competition, telling viewers he had sources who confirmed that executives at NBC News and MSNBC were complicit, despite their denials, in leaking the “Access Hollywood” tape that captured Trump making boorish remarks about women. (On the tape, Trump is talking to Billy Bush, who happens to be an old prep-school friend of Carlson’s.) “NBC News lied to the public to help destroy a politician they didn’t like,” Carlson said, sounding very much like a company man. “Do we know they’re not doing it now?”
Carlson lives in an elegant but understated white brick colonial in the posh Northwest corner of Washington. It is full of books, but not cramped, and it still bears signs of the Carlsons’ four children, the youngest of whom just left for boarding school. If you get close to the garage, you might notice that the windows are fogged over, because Carlson uses it to season firewood, which gives off moisture as it dries. On a recent Saturday morning, Carlson was cooking pancakes, even though there didn’t seem to be many takers: one daughter, home from college, wasn’t interested, and neither was Susie, his wife, to whom he has been attached since around the time he first put on a bow tie.
“Old money” describes Carlson’s aesthetic but not, exactly, his circumstances. His father, Richard Carlson, couldn’t afford college, so he enlisted in the Marines, and then forged an eventful career in journalism, working in California as a reporter and as a television anchor. (In a 1976 local-news report, he outed the tennis player Renée Richards, who had recently transitioned from male to female.) Tucker Carlson grew up with his brother in La Jolla, nurturing a rebellious streak that he never turned against his father, perhaps because his father shared it, and perhaps because he had no one else. His mother, a bohemian, left the family when he was six and ultimately settled in France; the boys never saw her again. “Totally bizarre situation—which I never talk about, because it was actually not really part of my life at all,” Carlson says. In 1979, the year Carlson turned ten, his father married Patricia Swanson, of the frozen-food Swansons. Richard Carlson had a job in banking by then, and eventually moved to Washington, where he secured a series of Republican political appointments: he ran Voice of America, served as Ambassador to the Seychelles, and was the president of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. For many years, Richard and Tucker Carlson lunched at adjoining tables at the Palm, the clubby Washington restaurant.
Carlson was fourteen when he was sent to boarding school; one classmate describes him as resembling a beach boy teleported in from nineteen-fifties California. The school had an after-dinner debating society, which Carlson came to dominate: an eloquent young man with an elephant poster in his room who was happy to tell liberal teachers exactly why they were wrong. He started dating Susie Andrews, the daughter of the Reverend George Andrews, the headmaster. This connection came in handy during Carlson’s senior year, when, having spent more time debating than studying, he failed to impress any number of prestigious universities. The Reverend Andrews arranged for him to attend Trinity College, in Hartford.
Carlson was, by all accounts, a lousy student, and he now takes pleasure in declaring college overrated. But he was evidently assiduous in his courtship of Susie, whom he married when he was a college senior, and whom he credits with leading him to take faith seriously. (They are Episcopalians, and Carlson loves the liturgy, though he abhors the liberals who run the denomination. The Church is part of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, while Carlson is utterly opposed to abortion—it is just about the only political issue he considers nonnegotiable.) After college, he tried and failed to persuade the C.I.A. to employ him; the real-life agency, unlike its fictional counterparts, prefers not to hire young men who are gabby and insubordinate. Instead, he got a job in Little Rock, working for Paul Greenberg, the exacting editorial-page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Carlson wrote a series of articles about crime, and drafted a book called “People vs. Crime: How Citizens Can Restore Order to America’s Streets,” only to cancel the book deal and refund the publisher’s advance when he realized that he was not actually sure how to restore order to America’s streets. “You can eliminate crime,” he says now. “Just become Saudi Arabia.”
It was another writing job that made Carlson famous: he was hired, in 1995, to write for the newly founded Weekly Standard, which was published by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. Carlson delighted in filleting liberal enterprises, like the campaign to free the activist and convicted murderer Mumia Abu-Jamal, or the public-relations firm that was struggling, in 1996, to rehabilitate the tarnished image of the First Lady, Hillary Clinton. When Carlson was sent to profile James Carville, who was still enjoying acclaim for having helped Bill Clinton win the Presidency, Carville expected the worst. “I thought, They’re going to fuck me—what difference does it make?” he recalls. “But he was a nice guy, and it turned out different.”
Carlson’s story, in fact, described Carville’s “reptilian features,” his “decidedly spotty” political track record, his “partisan and cant-filled” recent book, and his all-purpose avariciousness; the headline was “James Carville, Populist Plutocrat.” If Carville remembers the experience fondly, that is probably a tribute to Carlson’s charm and to his mischievous prose, which made Carville seem like a rakish antihero.
Carlson loves rascals. He has written semi-sympathetically about the Reverend Al Sharpton, and he is friends with Roger Stone, the indefatigably controversial Republican operative, whom Carlson named men’s style correspondent of the Daily Caller. (Stone is one of the few people in Washington who mourn the demise of Carlson’s signature look. “The guy has the tastiest collection of bow ties,” Stone says. “He’s a good—if shabby—dresser.”) One of Carlson’s favorite authors is George MacDonald Fraser, the writer who gave us Flashman, the cruel but quick-witted nineteenth-century gentleman who excused his every act of brutality as a harmless jape. (Carlson wanted to name his son Flashman, but his wife and his father overruled him.) And when Jack Abramoff, the disgraced lobbyist, emerged from prison with a new book to sell, Carlson threw a party, which Abramoff called one of the happiest nights of his life. In a toast, Carlson denounced all the people in his town—in his tony neighborhood, no doubt—who, he was sure, felt themselves superior to Abramoff. Standing in his well-appointed living room, he declared, “I raise a middle finger to those people!”
Carlson’s journey from magazines to television may baffle some old colleagues, but it doesn’t baffle him. “I had financial demands,” he says, laughing. “When you’re reproducing at that rate, it’s kind of unsustainable.” By the end of the nineteen-nineties, he had three children, and Susie had given up her career, as a teacher at an Episcopal school, to raise them. Like many political journalists, Carlson periodically accepted offers to go on television and opine. For his first appearance, on the CBS newsmagazine “48 Hours,” he flew to New York to discuss the O. J. Simpson case, a topic on which he was not especially well informed. Carlson’s blithe confidence was evidently telegenic, because CBS asked him to spend the night in New York so he could talk some more the next morning. Eventually, CNN offered him a yearly contract that paid fifty thousand dollars, nearly double what he was earning at The Weekly Standard. That led to the job that many people still associate Carlson with: an ill-fated tenure on “Crossfire,” in which a host “from the right” and one “from the left” debated the issues of the day.
It is not easy, now, to figure out how “Crossfire” became such a punching bag—perhaps, having been launched in 1982, it was simply too old to command much allegiance. But it never really recovered from the day, in 2004, when Jon Stewart came to visit. He had evidently prepared an indictment, thin in specifics but skillfully delivered in front of a sympathetic studio audience. Addressing Carlson and his liberal co-host, Paul Begala, Stewart said, “You are partisan—what do you call it?—hacks,” averse to “honest debate.” When Carlson mentioned the considerably partisan nature of Stewart’s own program, “The Daily Show,” Stewart said that he was merely making comedy, and that “Crossfire” should be held to a higher standard, which he never quite delineated.
Carlson says that he was already thinking of ways to move on from the “Crossfire” format. His contract was coming up for renewal, and a few months later, on January 5th, he told CNN executives that he had reached an agreement with MSNBC, which had offered him his own show. This, anyway, is Carlson’s story. What readers of the Times saw, the next morning, was “CNN WILL CANCEL ‘CROSSFIRE’ AND CUT TIES TO COMMENTATOR.” The clear implication was that Carlson had been fired. Even more wounding was a quote from Jon Klein, the network president: “I agree wholeheartedly with Jon Stewart’s premise.”
The MSNBC show, “Tucker,” was an attempt at rehabilitation—more playful, less partisan—but it never quite thrived, despite some strong casting. Carlson selected as his foil a wonky, little-known radio host named Rachel Maddow, who eventually took over Carlson’s spot, as part of the network’s liberal makeover, and is now his competitor in the nine-o’clock hour.
The period following the cancellation of “Tucker” seems to be the closest Carlson has ever come to being depressed. The family had moved to Madison, New Jersey, and Susie remembers him saying, “I can’t get stranded here with four kids, and no job, in New York.” They returned to Washington, where Carlson and an old college roommate, Neil Patel, started the Daily Caller, which Carlson envisioned as a right-of-center online tabloid. The funding, about three million dollars, came largely from Foster Friess, the political philanthropist. The name was a cheeky homage to the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, the newspaper that first reported the 2006 incident in which Dick Cheney accidentally fired bird shot into a friend. Patel had been working for Cheney then, and it was he who recommended giving the Caller-Times the scoop, perhaps in the absurd hope that the incident would pass with little notice.
At the Daily Caller, Carlson liked reporters who were young, pushy, and not necessarily college-educated; he once said, “We are not hiring wine stewards.” He offered his employees free junk food, an unmonitored keg, a Ping-Pong table, and, if they wanted it, permission to sleep under their desks. (He also made a point of inviting stray reporters to his house for Thanksgiving dinner.) The site published traditional news articles alongside more dubious pieces, like the one that claimed the Social Security Administration was buying enough ammunition “to kill 174,000 of our citizens.” Alexis Levinson, a Caller alumna who is now a political reporter at BuzzFeed, loved working there, but she remembers a division among the staff. “There were a few of us who were there because we wanted to be reporters,” she says. “And there were other people who wanted to take over the world.”
One reporter in this latter category was Matthew Boyle, a hard-charging muckraker who now works for Breitbart, in which capacity he has emerged as a persistent critic of Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House. Another was Charles C. Johnson, who helped break the story of Elizabeth O’Bagy, a Syria expert who had exaggerated her credentials. But Johnson, a freelancer, could also be a liability for the Daily Caller; he reported, erroneously, that a Times reporter had once posed for Playgirl and had confessed that he liked to “drop trou.” (The information came from a college satire publication.) After that, Johnson stopped writing for the Daily Caller, launched a site called GotNews, and declared himself “a member, and perhaps a leader, of the alt right.”
After Carlson lost his MSNBC show, he had resolved never to turn down work again. So, when Roger Ailes asked him to become a weekend co-host of “Fox & Friends,” in 2013, he readily accepted, even though it meant commuting to New York. He got exercise by running through midtown in the middle of the night, finishing in time to be on the air by six o’clock, ready to chat about the news, gawk at a zoo animal, or interview an aging rock band. (He once played cowbell with Blue Öyster Cult.) The work was unglamorous, but Carlson says he wasn’t troubled. “I have high self-esteem,” he says. “I never felt like a loser. I think a lot of people felt that I was, but I never did.” Accordingly, he was not as surprised as some industry watchers when, last fall, Fox executives offered him his own program. For a long time, Carlson had thought of himself as a writer with an unusually high-profile sideline, but eventually he realized, or admitted, that he enjoyed live television, both its rewards and its risks. “You could blow up your life,” he says. “I like the drama.”
Last December, when a writer named Lauren Duca received a call from Carlson’s producers, inviting her on the show, she had good reason to say no: it was her husband’s birthday, and he told her, “I’d rather you not get yelled at today.” But Duca was feeling idealistic. She had recently written an article for Teen Vogue comparing Trump to an abusive husband. In the aftermath, she had received some sympathetic e-mails from Trump supporters, and she allowed herself to imagine the headlines her interview with Carlson might generate: “RARE RATIONAL CONVERSATION ON FOX.”
What resulted, instead, was a session so hostile that it might have made Jon Stewart weep, if he had seen it—and, considering how widely it circulated, there is a good chance he did. After a temperate start, in which the two seemed close to agreeing on the public responsibilities of Trump’s daughter Ivanka, Carlson zeroed in on an infelicitous phrase from Duca’s essay: she had claimed that Trump was “threatening the sovereignty of an entire religion,” and Carlson demanded that she explain what that meant. Eventually, Carlson, getting irritated, tried to embarrass her by reading the headlines to some pop-culture stories she had written, including one about the singer Ariana Grande and her “epic thigh-high boots.” He ended the interview with a condescending sneer. “You should stick to the thigh-high boots—you’re better at that,” he said.
Viewers saw Duca register shock, and heard the first part of her reply: “You’re a sex—” Then her microphone was cut, although viewers could lip-read the rest: “—ist pig!”
When it was over, Duca’s phone began to vibrate. Her e-mail address is in her Twitter profile, and Fox News viewers were sending her vituperative e-mails, along with vituperative tweets. One user created an image of Carlson as Pepe the frog, a common pro-Trump symbol, tucking Duca into bed (“TUCKED,” it said); another wrote, “JUST WAIT TILL TUCK ‘KILL A JEW FOR GOOD LUCK’ CARLSON IS SHOVING YOU IN THE OVEN AT CAMP TRUMP!” accompanied by a crude image of Carlson as a Nazi prison guard, and Duca peering out from an oven. Martin Shkreli, the so-called Pharma Bro, took an interest in Duca, sending her sardonic pickup lines and creating photographic collages of them together, until Twitter suspended his account. But, as liberal viewers discovered the exchange online, Duca began getting encouraging responses, too. Larry Wilmore, the former host of “The Nightly Show,” called her “brilliant,” and Duca’s Twitter following increased from about forty thousand to about two hundred thousand. Teen Vogue gave Duca a weekly online column, which is called “Thigh-High Politics,” in honor of the unpleasant encounter that helped make her reputation.
These days, Carlson is adored by precisely the people who might once have dismissed him as a twerpy avatar of establishment Republicanism. Johnson, the former Daily Caller freelancer, suggests that Carlson has long been more of a political insurgent than many people recognized. “He understood that there was something stirring in the psyche and the mind of Republicans and conservatives,” Johnson says. “I think Tucker, like Trump, represents the return of the alpha white male to our politics.” Online, Carlson has been given a very unofficial slogan: “You can’t cuck the Tuck.” The phrase refers to the term “cuckservative,” a mocking description of conservatives who are too weak to defend their own ideology, the same way a cuckold is said to be unable to defend his own wife. The term also has a racial connotation, derived from a pornographic subgenre in which a man, often white, watches his wife have sex with an interloper, who is often black. “You can’t cuck the Tuck” is, among other things, a way of affirming that Carlson is a white guy who isn’t afraid to stand up for himself.
Certainly Carlson himself would never put it that way, but part of his appeal is his unwillingness to apologize for who he is: he expresses no uneasiness about being a straight white man, even when he is debating gender identity with a transgender activist, or sparring about race with the African-American liberal commentator Jehmu Greene, who is a frequent guest. For Carlson, as for Trump, there is virtually no issue more salient than immigration—Carlson loves to trip up pro-immigration advocates by demanding that they explain exactly how many immigrants the country should admit, and why. After Carlson broadcast a segment about crime in immigrant neighborhoods in Sweden, Trump was inspired to tell a crowd about “what’s happening, last night, in Sweden.” It sounded as if he were talking about a recent attack; in fact, “last night” seems to have referred to Carlson’s show.
Carlson has also found ways to forge connections with the feral online culture that nurtures Trump’s most inflammatory supporters. He has earned some of his highest ratings with sympathetic coverage of Milo Yiannopoulos, the crusader against political correctness who was greeted by rioters when he attempted to speak at the University of California, Berkeley. This attention helped turn Yiannopoulos into a mainstream conservative cause, a cause that was swiftly abandoned after video circulated of him defending the value of “relationships between younger boys and older men.” Carlson jettisoned Yiannopoulos immediately: Trace Gallagher, a straight-news Fox correspondent, told viewers about Yiannopoulos’s fall from grace, while Carlson, unabashed, acted as if he had never heard of the guy.
It was showtime on Sixth Avenue, in the Fox News control room where Justin Wells and the other producers work. Wells was taking special precautions with one of the guests, an activist known for having assaulted a white nationalist during a street protest. “She’s cursed on TV before,” Wells said, “so we’re on a delay, just in case we need to bleep her.” Part of Carlson’s goal is to bring the chaos and hysteria of Trump-era politics into his studio, but his job would probably be easier if Hillary Clinton had picked up a few thousand more votes in the Rust Belt: it’s not hard to imagine him, under a Clinton Administration, gaping in delight and incredulity at each day’s news. Instead, Carlson, like all his colleagues, is a hostage to current events: what happens during the day helps dictate which kinds of people are eager to watch it rehashed at night. As Trump has struggled to turn his hugely entertaining Presidential campaign into an effective governing body, liberals have been particularly energized. In March, for the first time, Rachel Maddow won the nine-o’ clock hour, drawing more viewers between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-four than Carlson did.
In the past year, Fox News has contended with a series of embarrassments, including the sexual-harassment scandal that led to the resignation of Roger Ailes, and a federal investigation that is reportedly related to the scandal. Still, it remains the most popular cable-news network. Carlson knows that many people watch his show simply because they like Fox News, and they like the anchors who surround him. O’Reilly positions himself as an elder statesman, the cranky but avuncular voice of mainstream America. Hannity, the ultimate loyalist, often functions as a member of Trump’s extended Cabinet, giving the Administration a nightly dose of encouragement and advice. But Carlson is a bit harder to pin down. His inclination to defend Trump might best be understood less as ideological commitment than as media criticism. “If you wrote a piece saying, ‘I think Trump is a buffoon and he’s reckless, and he doesn’t really know that much, and he’s kind of the accidental President, and he plays upon people’s fears in order to gain power’—I’d say, Yeah, O.K., that’s totally defensible,” he said. “But, like, the Nazi stuff? Maybe I’m the deranged one, but I don’t see that as supportable at all.” During a 2015 interview with Alex Jones, the loose-cannon Infowars host, Carlson said that he hated listening to the media “whine” about the dangers of Trump. “Every time I hear that, I feel like sending him money,” Carlson said. And, even now, he is more viscerally annoyed by what he calls the “self-satisfaction” of Trump’s critics than by anything Trump has done, or failed to do.
Carlson thinks that, in general, people get too “spun up,” which is one of his favorite terms—a reminder of the tendency to overestimate the goodness or the badness of whoever is in charge. But no political philosophy is equally appropriate for every era. There comes a time, eventually, when wild-eyed outrage is entirely appropriate. And nobody can be sure that this is not it.
During a recent discussion of Trump’s unsubstantiated claim that President Obama had wiretapped him, Carlson offered a pro forma criticism (“You can’t say things without backing them up, if you’re the President”), and then suggested, as he often does, that citizens should be more concerned about government spying and leaking. No doubt Carlson really believes this. But, when he says it, he is surely thinking about all the people he knows who disagree, and how annoyed they will be.
In conversation, Carlson often returns to an unusual disclaimer: “I’m not a deeply moral guy.” Maybe this is his way of playing the rogue. Maybe this is a debater’s ploy—a way of insisting that some principles are so clear that even he can see them. But with Carlson it is wise to consider another possibility: Maybe he means it. And maybe he is right. ♦
