How Tucker Carlson Became the Prophet of MAGA
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Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm 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.
And yet, Carlson doesn't always stick to the MAGA party line. He called the shooting of Rene Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis a tragedy. And 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. And 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?
So 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. And 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. So this was in the late 1990s, I think 1997. And Tucker would come to have lunch with another hotshot young writer in town who worked at the New Republic named Steve Glass. And while he waited sometimes for Steve to come out of his office, he would entertain the interns.
And 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. And he was someone we all looked up to and, you know, admired. I think we respected his work.
Why did you guys admire him?
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. And Tucker wrote this subtly kind of devastating profile that showed Bush to be callow and kind of stupid and stubborn and all these things that, you know, if you paid attention would have revealed Bush, all the things that made him kind of a bad president.
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. And 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.
Tucker's always been very good about seeing where things are going.
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