Tommy Vitor

And he's just a really good vehicle to kind of tell this much larger story about how we've gotten to this place where we've gotten.

Well, I think Tucker, when he was a magazine journalist especially, he had a really good bullshit detector.

And he was also pretty courageous.

He was not afraid to cross the important conservative figures, not afraid to go against the conventional wisdom.

With Trump in 2015, 2016, I think

One thing that happened with Tucker after his cable news career kind of flamed out, he developed a website called The Daily Caller.

And his original vision for The Daily Caller was a fairly like, I don't want to say sober, but very fact-based website.

He talked about how The New York Times was sort of a model in some ways because they cared about facts.

Yeah.

I don't remember that really playing out quite like that.

But that was the early pitch, wasn't it?

That was the early pitch and that was the first staff that he hired.

I think he realized very quickly that there was not an audience for that.

But in recognizing what the audience was, he was able to see that conservative viewers really wanted –

you know, kind of like nativist content, you know, kind of racist content, you know, focus on like black on white crime and things like that.

And he saw the, um, the gap that existed between the conservative base and the Republican establishment.

I think a lot earlier than, you know, most conservative pundits did just because he had the, the, the, the traffic metrics in front of him and he saw what readers wanted.

So when Trump came along in 2016, um,

you know, I mean, people don't remember this now, but like Fox was not a big booster of Trump in 2016.

I mean, they tried to torpedo him in that first debate and it created a problem for Fox that they needed just to produce like a compelling television segment.