Who’s afraid of Tucker Carlson?

He flopped on CNN and MSNBC. A hit on Fox, he was sacked again in 2023, only to rise up as powerful as before, interviewing world leaders on his own-brand network. Tucker Carlson’s career—like Donald Trump’s, with which it is entwined—has bounced between disaster and triumph. In his bilious radicalisation and plunge into new media, his personal saga is also the recent “story of the United States”.

Or so Jason Zengerle, now of the New Yorker, claims in his lucid new biography of Mr Carlson, “Hated by All the Right People”. This is a tale of hypocrisy and derangement, and the gushing of power from its traditional bastions to upstarts. Yet with the homage that even critical biographers often pay their subjects, the author may overstate his case.

Mr Carlson’s progress can be traced in two main ways. One is technological. In the late 1990s he was a snarky writer at the Weekly Standard (without the press, he argued, America “would devolve into a totalitarian police state within about 20 minutes”). Then he was enticed by the bright lights and lucre of cable TV. Things might have been different had he not bombed as a contestant on “Dancing with the Stars”, or if the game show he hoped to host had taken off. As it was, after successive misfires, he landed a prime-time slot on Fox News in 2016. Latterly he has broadcast on X and his own streaming network.

The drama’s other axis is intellectual. Mr Carlson is an inveterate contrarian, but otherwise his views have drastically evolved. Once a genial fan of John McCain and Israel, his ideological bona fides doubted by some Republicans, he rode the right’s high-speed escalator to a dark conspiracism. Now he hobnobs with neo-Nazis and foreign strongmen. The book’s title comes from a compliment he paid to Hungary’s Viktor Orban.

From another angle Mr Carlson’s story, like Mr Trump’s, is of a man who longed to join America’s elite and wound up decrying it. A gilded youngster by most standards (like Mr Trump), he reportedly aimed for the Ivy League but settled for Trinity College, Connecticut; later came those painful TV snubs. In a way he has been on a familiar journey, embracing increasingly eccentric ideas with age.

Was he—or any individual—to blame for the incendiary path of American media? In 2009 he maintained that the primary objective of any news outlet must be “to deliver accurate news”. The online Daily Caller, which he co-founded in 2010, was meant to bring civility to political discourse. Instead it sank into a grim contest for clicks with Breitbart News. The ultimate culprits, apologists might say, were consumer tastes and the algorithms that served and reinforced them.

As to why Mr Carlson thrived in this swamp, Mr Zengerle cites his “unswerving ambition” and “unbending will”. Plainly there is a market for his mix of preppy attire, puzzled expressions, smackdowns and nice hair. Crucially, despite in private scorning Mr Trump, whom in 2021 he called “a demonic force”, he grasped the president’s appeal early. He was prescient about rising news formats. And the arc of his career intersected fortuitously with those of streaming and social media when, out on his ear, he turned to X, just acquired by Elon Musk.

His own clout rests on the audience he built at Fox—and his audience of one, namely the TV-addled president, apparently an avid viewer. Mr Zengerle, like others, discerns Mr Carlson’s influence in the choice of J.D. Vance as vice-president and on other policies, such as concern for white South Africans. “He has descended into madness,” Mr Zengerle warns, “but he is speaking to millions.”

True, up to a point. America’s media market is so vast that its silos and echo chambers can be capacious. But they are still silos, as Mr Carlson shows. He has scoffed at the idea of a presidential run, which is just as well, as polls give him almost no support. Tellingly, in his interview with Vladimir Putin in 2024, he raised fixations of the online right, seemingly thinking Mr Putin would clock them (he didn’t). That is the problem with big echo chambers: from the middle of them, you can’t feel the walls.

Mr Carlson has bounded free of old media, one of the juggernauts that drove his success. But he is still riding the other, Mr Trump’s MAGA movement. Welcomed at the White House, he is a player in maga rows over foreign interventions (he opposes them) and antisemitism (he indulges it). How far he can retain his following and influence in a post-Trump era remains to be seen. In that, too, his story resembles America’s.■