How did Tucker Carlson become one of the far right's most influential voices?

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Tucker Carlson has become one of the most powerful, influential people on the right. He got his start in conservative print media and transitioned to TV in the early days of cable news. After he was let go from CNN and MSNBC - which is now MS NOW - and was on just one episode of "Dancing With The Stars," he got hired by Fox but eventually was fired.

My guest Jason Zengerle writes, Carlson had the highest-rated show in the history of cable news. And when he was abruptly fired from Fox in 2023, it was widely assumed he would fade from relevance. He did for many Americans, especially liberals, but he didn't go away. After leaving Fox News in 2023, he debuted a new streaming show on the social media platform then known as Twitter - now X - and launched the Tucker Carlson streaming network. Zengerle writes, the people still paying attention to him now are getting an even more extreme version of him than the one they saw on Fox News.

Zengerle is the author of the new book about Carlson called "Hated By All The Right People: Tucker Carlson And The Unraveling Of The Conservative Mind." For several years, Zengerle wrote about politics for The New York Times Magazine. At the end of 2025, he joined The New Yorker. In the book, he writes, whether Carlson really believes the awful things that he says these days 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. Zengerle adds that Carlson's story is the larger story of conservative politics and conservative media over the last 30 years. We recorded our interview last Thursday.

Jason Zengerle, welcome to FRESH AIR.

JASON ZENGERLE: Oh, it's nice to be here.

GROSS: So where do you think Carlson fits in now on the right?

ZENGERLE: I think he is certainly the most significant media figure on the American right, and I think that, you know, his influence extends well beyond media as well. You know, you look at the people in sort of the constellation of the right these days, and he's - obviously, you have Donald Trump. Obviously, you have JD Vance. I think Carlson is about as influential as anyone except for those two.

GROSS: OK. So he has Trump's ear.

ZENGERLE: Yes. He is someone that Donald Trump definitely listens to, definitely wants to hear from. And Carlson is more than happy to provide his thoughts and his advice. That doesn't mean that Trump always takes that advice, and there have certainly been instances where Carlson's been disappointed by some of Trump's decisions, but he seems to have a seat at the table.

GROSS: So in what ways has Carlson become more extreme over the years?

ZENGERLE: Well, certainly from his beginning. I mean, one of the things that interested me about him and wanted me to - made me want to write this book about him was that he started in such a different place from where he's wound up. I mean, his first big break in journalism came when he got a staff writer job at The Weekly Standard magazine back in 1995. And it was a brand-new conservative magazine, soon became kind of the flagship magazine of American conservatism. It was run by Bill Kristol. It had a real, like, impressive staff. You had, like, David Brooks, Charles Krauthammer. Some real, real heavy hitters. And Tucker was a young writer there.

And The Weekly standard was - you know, became sort of the Bible of neoconservatism. Was for a very sort of, you know, interventionist American foreign policy. Later, it was one of the primary cheerleaders for the war in Iraq. It was very pro-Israel. And that's where Tucker started. He's obviously come a long way from there, and there have been multiple, you know, inflection points and transformations and the like. His extremism now, I think, has become particularly pronounced since he left Fox. At Fox, his show was very good at taking ideas and arguments and theories that existed on the right-wing fringe and kind of smuggling those into the mainstream and presenting them in a slightly more palatable form. I think about things like the great replacement theory and things like that.

Since leaving Fox, he doesn't have a built-in audience anymore and he has to navigate the attention economy. And in order to get people to listen to his podcast, I think he has kind of embraced more outrageous views, taken stands that he know will anger people or at least maybe even intrigue people, and they'll want to tune in. So he's just become - he's kind of crossing lines that, before, he was careful not to, and he's saying things before - in a more explicit fashion, whereas in the past, he tried to modulate his rhetoric a little bit.

GROSS: So tell me some of his views now that you would describe as extreme.

ZENGERLE: When he talks about Israel, when he talks about certain Jewish public figures, he...

GROSS: George Soros, for example.

ZENGERLE: Or - yeah, George Soros. I mean, Volodymyr Zelenskyy - who I think probably a lot of people don't even realize is Jewish - Carlson attacked him, you know, called him rat-like, said he was a persecutor of Christians. He's really just engaging in, you know, pretty standard antisemitic tropes. After Charlie Kirk was assassinated, there was a conspiracy theory among far-right influencers that Kirk had been killed by Israel, that his support for Israel was starting to wane, and therefore Israel killed him. And Tucker, when he was asked to give the eulogy at Kirk's memorial service, Tucker compared Kirk to Jesus and then basically implied that the Jews killed Jesus. He told this story about these, you know, hummus-eaters who were thinking that Jesus was too powerful. He was speaking too many truths, and therefore he had to be killed.

And it was the kind of thing that, you know, you had to be paying attention. You had to know that there was this conspiracy theory about Charlie Kirk and Israel. But if you were tuned into that conspiracy theory and you heard Tucker say what he said at that memorial service, I think the message was pretty clear.

GROSS: That's interesting to me because I listened to his interview with Nick Fuentes, who is on the far right and is pretty known for being antisemitic, for saying positive things about Hitler. And I think he endorses the great replacement theory. Am I right about that?

ZENGERLE: Yeah.

GROSS: Yeah. So it surprises me to hear that Carlson kind of demonized the Jews as the killers of Jesus because when he was interviewing Nick Fuentes not too long ago, and Fuentes was, like, accusing the Jews and the Zionists of controlling the media and accusing George Soros, who is Jewish, of basically having all of Ukraine on his payroll because he funds so many projects there, Carlson intervened and said this several times, that you can't demonize all Jews. It goes against his Christian faith. Each person must be judged individually, and what Fuentes is doing is like collective punishment.

So having Nick Fuentes on the show was very controversial, and a lot of people accused him of, you know, like, platforming an antisemite, an extremist. But, you know, Carlson kept saying, I want to hear what you think. I want to understand why you think it. So there's two ways of looking at Fuentes as a guest. How Carlson was presenting it is like, I want to understand who you are and why you think the things that you think. But the other way of looking at it is just a way to be provocative and, like you said, now that he's not on TV, making sure he can use, you know, anger or outrage to help attract an audience.

ZENGERLE: Yeah. I mean, I think there were several things going on there. I mean, first, I think it's important to understand that he and Fuentes had been engaged in a feud before this interview. Tucker had criticized Fuentes on his show. He called - he'd referred to him as a weird little gay kid, and he actually accused Fuentes of being, like, a federal agent who was being used to discredit voices on the right. And then Fuentes returned fire and attacked Carlson, and the sort of - the feud spilled over into social media. And it was actually a fight that Carlson was losing. I mean, Fuentes' fans, these sort of, you know, these young, kind of disenchanted, conservative men, who are called Groypers, they were just pillorying Tucker on social media. And I think Tucker was really worried about losing that Groyper audience and losing their support and their interest. And so he had Fuentes on his show, I think, as kind of, like, almost like a peace offering to try to sort of end the feud.

And, you know, I think this question about platforming, I mean, like, Fuentes' ideas are out there, and they're going to get out there. And I don't think it's a question of whether you have him on your show or not. It was the kind of interview that Tucker did with him that I think is what caused the outrage. I mean, he did not really push Fuentes very hard on any of these issues. And I guess, you know, he was saying, don't paint with such a broad brush. But eventually, Fuentes sort of conceded, like, all right, maybe not all Jews. I guess my beef is with organized Jewry, which was the phrase he used. And Tucker did not push back on that at all, and I feel like that is where some of the concern and the outrage existed.

GROSS: We need to take a short break here. So let me reintroduce you. If you're just joining us, my guest is Jason Zengerle, author of the new book "Hated By All The Right People: Tucker Carlson And The Unraveling Of The Conservative Mind." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.

This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Jason Zengerle, author of a new book about Tucker Carlson titled "Hated By All The Right People." Zengerle became a writer for The New Yorker at the end of 2025 after years of writing about politics for The New York Times Magazine.

So he has Trump's ear now. He's had it and lost it and had it again. How did he first get Trump's ear?

ZENGERLE: When Trump first announced that he was running for president back in 2015, Tucker was, like, a benchwarmer at Fox. He was the host of weekend "Fox & Friends." But Fox had a problem in the sense that most of the pundits there were actually pretty hostile to Trump when he announced his candidacy. Tucker was one of the few who took Trump's candidacy seriously and kind of saw the potential in it. I mean, he recognized that, you know, a nativist candidate running on white grievance actually might do pretty well in a Republican primary. He recognized that in a way that other Fox pundits didn't. So his star rose at Fox because he kind of had the foresight to see Trump coming.

And then after Trump won, Tucker was elevated. He was given his own show - his own nighttime show, "Tucker Carlson Tonight." And he - you know, he became kind of a Fox star. And in the early days of Trump's presidency, in the early days of Tucker's show, Trump would watch the show and call Tucker afterwards to talk to him about it and to, you know, give him notes or just discuss the show. And I think, you know, as I understand it from people who were around Tucker back then, like, he was actually kind of freaked out by this. Like, he did not think the president of the United States should be spending his time watching cable news and then, you know, calling up cable news hosts to talk about what he just saw.

Eventually, though, he realized that, you know, Trump was watching and that he could speak to Trump through the television. And there was this one episode in particular where - and this is, I think, a couple months into the show - he had - Tucker had recorded an interview with someone who was talking about Muslim immigration in Sweden and how, you know, Muslims were making Sweden an unsafe country and bringing, you know, crime and terrorism and things like that. And it ran on a Friday night. And then the following Saturday, Trump was giving a speech, and in the speech he talked about the terrorist attack in Sweden the day before. And no one had any idea what he was talking about 'cause there hadn't been a terrorist attack in Sweden. And then someone figured out that, you know, Tucker - the Tucker Carlson segment had run the night before, and that's what Trump was referring to.

And I think it was kind of a light-bulb moment for Tucker when he recognized that he could affect presidential speeches. He could affect presidential policy. And he really started programming the show with an eye towards making government policy, having an impact on Trump. If there was a message he wanted to get to Donald Trump, he would either say it himself in his monologue, he would book a guest who would say it. And that was how he originally got Trump's ear.

GROSS: Yeah, you write that through his show, he influenced who Trump chose for the cabinet. He shot down some of the possible cabinet members. He goaded the administration into sending federal troops to Portland, Oregon, and to crack down on antiracism protests. He managed to stop a planned missile strike on Iran. So tell us how Tucker Carlson influenced some of Trump's cabinet choices and his vice-presidential running mate.

ZENGERLE: So in the first administration, he was better at taking people out than putting them in. At one point, when Rex Tillerson was secretary of state, he wanted to bring into the State Department a longtime Republican foreign policy hand named Elliott Abrams. Elliott Abrams is a neocon. Tucker Carlson does not like neocons. And Tucker Carlson, he booked a guest, Rand Paul, who was also opposed to Elliott Abrams, and he had Rand Paul talk about how bad Elliott Abrams would be. And one of the things Rand Paul talked about was how Elliott Abrams had opposed Trump in the 2016 campaign. And that was all Trump needed to hear. And that was the end of Elliott Abrams being brought into the State Department.

He did a similar thing with a number of sort of subcabinet officials. He was - you know, if he got wind of a appointment that he didn't - you know, a potential appointment that he didn't approve of, he would deliver a monologue attacking that person or, you know, book a guest who had attacked them. And, you know, he was able to take out people.

Since leaving Fox, and now into Trump's second presidency, he's been a little bit more, I guess, affirmative in terms of making sure people he likes get into government. I think, you know, the most obvious example is JD Vance. I think Tucker has done more for JD Vance's political career than maybe anyone. He was a crucial supporter of Vance when he ran for the Ohio Senate and, you know, lobbied Trump back then to endorse Vance. And Trump's endorsement of Vance is what won Vance the Republican primary. And then when Trump was deciding about who to choose as his running mate, Tucker was extremely, extremely involved and pushing very, very hard for Vance and pushing very hard against Marco Rubio. As I understand it, Tucker and Don Jr. were, I think, two of the biggest factors in Trump ultimately picking Vance as vice president.

But as soon as Trump won, you know, when he was forming his cabinet, Tucker was - Tucker pushed extremely hard for Bobby Kennedy to serve at HHS. Tucker had become friendly with Kennedy, you know, over the course of doing his show. I think they shared a lot of the same skepticism about vaccines, a lot of the same health ideas. And after Trump was shot in Butler, Pennsylvania, and Kennedy - who was still running for president at that point as an independent - when Kennedy decided that he wanted to drop out and endorse Trump, Tucker was the one who brokered that or helped broker that whole negotiation.

GROSS: So am I right in saying that Carlson told Trump that if he chose Rubio as vice president or Governor Doug Burgum of North Dakota, that they were neocons who supported military adventurism overseas and U.S. intelligence agencies would try to assassinate Trump?

ZENGERLE: I mean, as I understand it, yeah, that was the advice that he gave Trump. He was so alarmed to hear that Trump was considering those two that - you know, Tucker was on a speaking tour in Australia at the time, and as - you know, as I understand it, he called Trump and delivered that message.

GROSS: Why would U.S. intelligence agencies try to assassinate Trump?

ZENGERLE: Well, Tucker has this world view that there are these dark, sinister forces, this neoconservative cabal that wants to have, you know, the United States conducting all these military adventures abroad and that it will - they will stop at nothing to see that happen. And, I mean, look, we're kind of in a pretty, you know, far-out-there realm already. But as I understand it, you know, I guess the theory would be that they would take out Trump so they could make their puppet president.

GROSS: I'm surprised that Trump still even talks to Tucker Carlson because back before Carlson was fired from Fox News, when the Dominion lawsuit was - the trial was being held in the courts, texts were released - texts by Tucker Carlson - in which he called Trump a demonic force and said, I hate him passionately. So Trump tends to totally cancel people who oppose him. And calling somebody a demonic force and saying, I hate you, those are strong words, especially for Trump, who's very sensitive to this kind of thing.

ZENGERLE: Yeah, but you're never really fully out of it with Trump. I mean, you can say horrible things about him, but then if you try to make amends, he'll take you back in. And that's been the story of his political rise. But, you know, even before those texts came out, I mean, Tucker's Fox show was interesting because he didn't - he was very careful to never kind of join the cult of personality around Trump that kind of existed with other Fox stars, you know, like Hannity and...

GROSS: Like Sean Hannity?

ZENGERLE: Yeah, Sean Hannity in particular. I mean, Tucker would praise Trump's policies, but he wouldn't necessarily praise the man. And the way he dealt with him off-air was even more interesting. I mean, you know, Hannity was called the shadow White House chief of staff. He was there so much. He was on the phone with Trump so much. Tucker was famous for sometimes letting Trump's calls go to voicemail. You know, it's kind of like the ultimate flex. And one White House official said that, you know, he was kind of playing hard to get with Trump, and that made Trump like him even more. He said that, you know, Tucker was the hot girl who, like, didn't want to - you know, he used a different word - but didn't want to sleep with Trump. That was the (laughter) analogy he used.

And I think Trump was kind of intrigued by Tucker. And the amount of influence he had in that White House was significant, and maybe even more significant because of the act he played. I mean, I - in the book I write about how a new staffer came into the White House, and she was in a meeting her first morning and someone made reference to something that had been on Tucker Carlson's show the night before. And she said, oh, I didn't see it. And Jared Kushner, you know, turned to her and just kind of admonished her and said, you know, we watch Tucker every night. You have to watch Tucker if you're going to work in this White House.

GROSS: Well, I need to reintroduce you again. My guest is Jason Zengerle, author of the new book "Hated By All The Right People: Tucker Carlson And The Unraveling Of The Conservative Mind."

We'll talk more about Carlson and conservative media after a break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to my interview with Jason Zengerle, author of the new book "Hated By All The Right People: Tucker Carlson And The Unraveling Of The Conservative Mind." It's about how Carlson has become increasingly extreme over the years and how his story tells a larger story of how conservative politics and media have changed over the past 30 years.

You knew Tucker Carlson when you were an intern at The New Republic and he was what you describe as a hotshot at The Weekly Standard, a very conservative publication. So Carlson was a few years older than you. What was your impression of him back then?

ZENGERLE: You know, it's a small world, political journalism and political print journalism in D.C. But he was the writer, I think, that all young writers like me kind of looked up to and wanted to be. He wasn't that much older than us, but he was way ahead of us career-wise, and he was doing the things, you know, writing the stories that I think we all wanted to write. And we were all really impressed with his writing - he's an excellent writer - impressed with his reporting. He got people to tell him things that, you know, they wouldn't necessarily tell everyone. And we were also really impressed with his courage, to be honest. I mean, he was - he wrote about figures who I think a lot of people thought were maybe untouchable or off-limits, especially as a conservative writer.

GROSS: You've used him as a source many times over the years. For what kind of stories? Like, what made him a good source?

ZENGERLE: Well, that, I mean, first of all, he's - he was - he's a very, like, charming guy, and he was always very generous with his time. And he's just someone who likes to talk a lot, so it was always good to talk to him for stuff. I also liked him because even though he left print journalism and left magazines and went into television, he - I think he still kind of thought like a magazine writer. And he was interesting to talk to because he would oftentimes kind of have ideas or insights that, you know, weren't necessarily even about, like, kind of, like, direct information, but kind of helped you, like, think through your piece. I mean, he wasn't like an editor per se, and I don't want to overstate it, but he just - he kind of understood, like, what you were trying to do.

GROSS: You write that in 2010 he co-founded the conservative website The Daily Caller, and through that, he got access to, you know, what got the most clicks. And he used that to see where the conservative base was, what got the most attention on the internet. And what are some of the things he learned from studying what people want to read through what they click on, or what they like?

ZENGERLE: So when he launched The Daily Caller, his idea for it was it was going to be a right-wing version of sort of a combination Huffington Post and New York Times. He wanted it to be a very fact-based, heavily reported website. He had a critique of conservative media that conservatives didn't report, they just opined. And we need to get back to reporting. We need to get back to presenting facts, and we need to be serious about the news. And that was his vision for The Caller.

I think within, you know, a couple months, looking at the website's traffic, he realized that there was not an audience for that kind of conservative publication. And he - you know, he pivoted, and he kind of went more in the direction of, you know, tabloid-y, kind of outrageous stuff. And, you know, increasingly, I think he saw that the types of stories that were getting attention, that were getting a lot of traffic, getting clicks, had to do with race, had to do with immigration, had to do with gender. And he just leaned into that, you know, and eventually, he kind of found himself in this competition with Breitbart, that Steve Bannon was running at the time. And it was just kind of this race to the bottom in terms of who could write more kind of inflammatory, incendiary stories about Black-on-white crime or about immigrant crime and things like that. And he saw that there was an audience there for that.

And I think that was a really important kind of data point in his evolution because when Trump ran for president, when he announced in 2015, and most conservative pundits were saying, this guy's not serious, this isn't anything we need to worry about, Tucker saw the potential for his candidacy because he had recognized the distance that existed between the Republican establishment and the Republican base.

GROSS: What do you think that says about Carlson's, like, principles? He wanted to do principle journalism. Or the facts were reported by people on the right, but they reported facts. So it would be a right-wing New York Times, New Yorker. But when that didn't get a big enough audience, he did the opposite and just want to, like, extremes that sell and get attention.

ZENGERLE: I think he wanted to be successful. I think that, you know, the throughline throughout his career is a desire for fame, fortune and power. I mean, I like to think that if Tucker had been born 20 or 30 years earlier, he never would have left print journalism because he could have had the kind of career that his, you know, his sort of literary heroes had, you know, whether it was Hunter Thompson or Tom Wolfe. But he - by the late 1990s, early 2000s, he recognized, you know, I think, before a lot of us, including myself, that print was - you know, you weren't going to be able to do that in print. And so he went to television 'cause he thought that would be a vehicle for it. And, you know, that ultimately didn't work out the first go around. This new website that he started, he thought that would be it. Didn't work with his original vision for it, so he pivoted.

GROSS: My guest is Jason Zengerle, author of a new book about Tucker Carlson called "Hated By All The Right People." We'll be back after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.

This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Jason Zengerle, author of a new book about Tucker Carlson titled "Hated By All the Right People." Zengerle became a writer for The New Yorker at the end of 2025, after years of writing about politics for The New York Times Magazine.

So Tucker Carlson switched from print to cable news early in his career, in the infancy of cable news. How did he get his start on cable during the O.J. trial and then the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky story?

ZENGERLE: I mean, the story that Tucker tells is that he was in his - in the office one day at The Weekly Standard and it was lunchtime and he happened to be the only person who was in the office. And a producer from CBS called and wanted someone to come up to New York right away to offer their commentary on the O.J. verdict. And because Tucker was the only person in the office, he was the one who got the assignment. And he went up to New York, and he, you know, did well enough that they asked him to stay on for the morning show the next morning, and that was the start of it.

You know, the things that he was good at in terms of kind of being glib and having an opinion on everything and just being able to appear, you know, reasonably intelligent on camera, that was the start of his career. I mean, he really, actually makes it sound almost like anybody could do this, but he kind of accidentally got into it. And then, you know, I think the more he did it, the more he came to realize that, one, he was good at it, and two, that he was having more of an impact on TV than he was with his print journalism. I mean, he would spend all this time and energy, like, crafting these stories and it might get a little bit of a response. And then he would go on some TV show and make some off-handed remark and, you know, a cabinet member would call him to talk about it. And I think that, you know, it was that sort of recognition that made him think that, you know, TV was the way to go.

GROSS: In his early days on cable news, he looked like an old-school young Republican with his suit and his signature bow tie.

ZENGERLE: Very Alex Keaton.

GROSS: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. He looked like he modeled himself on the Michael J. Fox character in "Family Ties." So he's changed from that (laughter).

ZENGERLE: Yeah. Well, I don't think that was an act for television. I mean, that was the way he dressed off-air. I mean, I remember seeing him, you know, when I was an intern at The New Republic, and he would swing through and that was the outfit. You know, in doing the book, I mean, I - someone told me that he started wearing the bow tie in college because he used to watch George Will on the Sunday show, on the David Brinkley show, and he was trying to emulate George Will. But that was - you know, that was the look that he went for, and he had that kind of preppy haircut. And, you know, the bow tie became kind of an albatross after Jon Stewart made fun of him for it and then - you know, and he ditched it soon after that. But he's never really gotten rid of it. He hasn't worn a bow tie in over 20 years, and I think people still see him with that bow tie.

GROSS: So he for a while on CNN was co-host of "Crossfire," which was a show in which there was a host from the left and a host from the right, and they would, you know, disagree and then have on guests. And when Jon Stewart was on, and Tucker Carlson seemed to be a real, genuine fan of Jon Stewart, Stewart came on and said, like, why are you doing this? He said, I've mentioned on "The Daily Show" that the show is bad. It's not so much that it's bad as that it's hurting America. The one thing I want to tell you to do is, stop, stop hurting America. And he went on to say, you're partisan. What do you call it? Oh, hacks. You're helping the politicians and you're just dividing America more. What's the point? And that, I think, led to the show's cancellation.

ZENGERLE: Yeah, that led to the show's cancellation. And that, you know, I think was a really important moment in Tucker's career and life because it was a humiliation. He was sort of friendly with Stewart. I guess when Stewart used to go on "Larry King" at the CNN studios, Tucker would be there about to do his show, and they were both smokers and they would hang out outside on cigarette breaks. And, you know, I knew - I mean, he knew, obviously, that Stewart had kind of a dim view of "Crossfire" and a dim view of cable news, but I think they all thought they were kind of on the same team and the same club, and it was just sort of, like, play acting the way "Crossfire" was, you know? You would argue with this person for 30 minutes, then afterwards, you'd go out and have a steak and a drink, and everybody was sort of doing the same thing, and it was, like, professional wrestling in some ways.

When Stewart came on there and wasn't part of that game, I think Tucker was really surprised, and, you know, he tried to debate Stewart, and Stewart just destroyed him and destroyed him in front of a studio audience. "Crossfire" had a studio audience that cheered for Stewart, and it led to the cancellation of the show. It led to Tucker leaving CNN. And it was - I think it was a really important moment in his life because - and his career because he was, you know, a member in good standing of kind of the Washington sort of political and media elite. And his - and I think he felt that his friends in that world did not come to his aid and did not support him the way he would have wanted to. And so, years later, when he, you know, developed this populist streak and really turned against people in Washington and people in, you know, legacy media and things like that. I think he remembered that moment, and some of his bitterness towards those people really came out at that point.

GROSS: So the first show he gets after he leaves CNN and moves to MSNBC, which is now MS NOW, Rachel Maddow is a frequent guest on his show. I don't think I ever saw that. I'm not sure I saw that show.

ZENGERLE: Yeah. I don't think a lot of people did, given what MSNBC was at the time.

GROSS: And that's probably why it didn't last very long, right?

ZENGERLE: Yeah. I think Rachel Maddow probably, and I think she might even admit this, like, owes her television career to Tucker Carlson. When he got to MSNBC, he wanted to do a show that was kind of the opposite of "Crossfire." He wanted to do a show that had serious debate, intelligent conversation that wasn't hackish. And one thing that he really wanted to do was he wanted to find a liberal who could kind of argue with him and spar with him, someone who was his intellectual equal, who could talk as well as he did. It wouldn't be kind of a strawman setup. And he was going through audition tapes and he found this tape from this young Air America talk radio host at the time, Rachel Maddow. And he wanted to bring her on. And the executives at MSNBC did not like that idea. They didn't think she was television-ready. They didn't think that she looked like she could be on TV. And he really fought for her and insisted that she should be on. And that's how she got her start at MSNBC, and that's how she got her start in television was thanks to Tucker.

GROSS: So you write that, you know, after leaving MSNBC, he joined Fox News, but Roger Ailes was reluctant to hire him, and Carlson was reluctant to accept the job. Tell us the story.

ZENGERLE: Well, Carlson had a really dim view of Fox News. He looked down at it, to be honest. When he was at CNN, when he was at MSNBC, he thought that Fox was, you know, frivolous, not serious, propaganda. The people were blowhards and, you know, he said as much. But when he was fired from MSNBC, he needed a new gig, and Roger Ailes reached out to him. And Ailes liked to hire people who were kind of down on their luck. You know, I think - and he liked to do this for a couple of reasons. One, I think he liked to take people who seemed like they were washed out because if he could turn them into stars, it reflected well on him.

I think the second reason, though, was he liked to have power over people. And when he reached out to Tucker to talk to him about going to Fox, like, Tucker was at the absolute, like, low point of his career. He'd been, you know, let go by MSNBC. He was really at a low point and he was damaged goods. And when Ailes called him to talk about - you know, called him out of the blue to talk about going to work at Fox, I mean, the story, as one of Tucker's friends related it to me, as Tucker told him was Ailes' first words to Tucker was, like, you're a loser, and you screwed up your whole life. And that was - those were the terms on which Tucker was originally hired at Fox. And he was, you know, he was not hired as an anchor.

He was given the kind of contract that he had had when he'd started out at CNN. He was just a contributor. He would just basically go on to fill airtime. And people I talked to who were at Fox at the time talked about how Ailes really - he wanted to humiliate Tucker. You know, he viewed Tucker as kind of this preppy, rich kid who reminded Ailes of the college boys who used to make fun of his father, who was a blue-collar worker. And Ailes had a real chip on his shoulder and was always looking to kind of ways he could even the score. And, you know, hiring, like, Tucker Carlson, this preppy rich boy, and humiliating him that made Ailes happy.

GROSS: So once he was on Fox News, he moved further to the right.

ZENGERLE: Yeah. I mean, he was already conservative. I mean, the job he had on CNN was to sit in the right chair on "Crossfire." So he didn't necessarily become more conservative once he got to Fox. In fact, he was really kind of an afterthought at Fox. I mean, you had the stars. You had the Bill O'Reilly's. You had the Sean Hannitys. Tucker was just this guy who they could put on the weekend "Fox & Friends" show, and, you know, he had some television experience, and he was conservative, so it wasn't going to say anything that veered from the party line. He was just kind of a bit player and just, you know, replacement-level pundit, basically.

GROSS: But then he got his own show.

ZENGERLE: Then he got his own show. And he got his own show because he was able to use Trump's presidential candidacy to revive his career. He was, you know, he was relegated to this weekend "Fox & Friends" hosting duty. He wasn't getting, you know, airtime on the more prestigious Fox shows. And when Trump came along, those more prestigious fox shows, they had, like, a basic television problem. They could not find camera-ready, intelligent human beings to go on their programs and make a sensible case for Donald Trump. And Tucker was someone who could. So they're like, all right, put him on. And he started getting more airtime that way. And then as Trump's candidacy took off and it became clear that Trump was going to be the Republican nominee, you know, Tucker, he looked, like, prescient. And by the end of the campaign, Roger Ailes had been fired because of the sexual harassment scandal. Rupert Murdoch was now running the network, and the first big move Murdoch made was taking Tucker and giving him his own show at 7 p.m.

GROSS: My guest is Jason Zengerle, author of a new book about Tucker Carlson called "Hated By All The Right People." We'll be back after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.

This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Jason Zengerle, author of a new book about Tucker Carlson titled "Hated By All The Right People." Getting back to his relationship with Trump, after January 6, Tucker Carlson claimed that the invasion of the Capitol was really a result of undercover FBI agents in the crowd. What is the logic behind that conspiracy theory?

ZENGERLE: On the day of January 6, like, I don't think Tucker Carlson's response was any different from most Americans. I think he was horrified. I think, you know, you can read, obviously, in the text messages that were eventually, you know, revealed during the Dominion case. I mean, he referred to Trump as a demonic force, and he thought January 6 was terrible. He thought Trump was responsible for it. As time went on and as it became increasingly clear that Trump's supporters didn't feel that way, Tucker changed his tune and he pivoted. And he became, I think, a pretty crucial linchpin in the larger conservative project and the Trumpian project to recast January 6.

And so much of what the right and the Republican Party and MAGA now say about January 6, a lot of that starts with Tucker, who was still at Fox at that time, who starts bringing these conspiracy theories about January 6, about there being federal agents in the crowd, who were, you know, provocateurs and were doing this to kind of discredit Trump voters. That starts to get some traction on his show, and to the point where eventually he does a whole documentary about it. And I would say that's now the mainstream view among Republicans, among conservatives, of what January 6 was about. I mean, I think that's - Tucker did a lot to make that happen.

GROSS: Your book is subtitled "Tucker Carlson And The Unraveling Of The Conservative Mind." And the last sentence of your book is, he has descended into madness, but he is speaking to millions. So unraveling of the conservative mind and Tucker Carlson has descended into madness. Those are strong words. Why do you describe him as descending into madness? Is it because of conspiracy theories like the January 6 undercover FBI agent provocateurs? I mean, how much can you tell whether the theories that Tucker now espouses on his show are things he actually believes or whether he's saying those things just because it gets a big audience?

ZENGERLE: He has an increasingly paranoid and dark worldview. That in itself is not that shocking or even that unusual in the political world and on the right. It's just in the past, people who kind of go in that direction are eventually eased out of polite society in a lot of ways, or they lose their perch. They lose their jobs. They become increasingly fringe figures. I mean, in Tucker's case, though, I think he's actually gotten more influential and more powerful. And that's why he's both interesting to me and also, I think, significant. He's someone you have to take seriously, and you can't afford to ignore him because yes, he's saying all these seemingly crazy things, but people are listening to him and taking him at his word, and you can see in how January 6, the view of it has changed this ridiculous conspiracy theory about there being federal agents in the crowd on January 6. That's now the official White House view of it. And that's a reflection of Tucker's influence. And that's a reflection, I think, of kind of the madness that he's bringing to a large segment of the body politic.

GROSS: This gets to something we were talking about earlier. Is it madness, or is it opportunism?

ZENGERLE: That's the age-old question with him. And I think in some ways, it might not even matter. I mean, I think, like, look, if your - if Tucker's your best friend or if he's, you know, a family member or something, maybe it matters. But as far as most people are concerned, whether he believes it or not, he's saying it, and people believe that he believes it. And that's what matters in the end. I mean, you know, Alex Jones says crazy stuff, but people know that Alex Jones is a loon. And so they take that into consideration when they hear Alex Jones say that. Tucker, you know, he looks respectable. He sounds respectable. He is very intelligent. And I think when he lends his voice to some of these theories, I think people receive them differently, and I think they trust him more, and they take them more seriously than they might if someone else was saying it.

GROSS: I know some people are speculating whether Tucker Carlson wants to run for president. Do you have any insight into that?

ZENGERLE: I don't think Tucker wants to just be a podcaster. I think that he has a real vision for what he wants the United States to be. And I think he wants to achieve that vision. And I think he will do what he thinks is necessary to see that vision become a reality. And, you know, if at a certain point, he thinks that the only way he can make that vision a reality is to run for office himself, then, yeah, I could see him doing it. I mean, I think, right now, you know, JD Vance is very much aligned with him ideologically. And, you know, I think if it were up to Tucker, like, it would be great if JD Vance could be elected president and succeed Donald Trump. You know, he and Donald Trump are, like, in line, but he's even more in line with JD Vance, and then he can influence JD Vance, and JD Vance can sort of do the things that he wants him to do.

I mean, the - but, you know, I could also see a scenario where either JD Vance starts to disagree with Tucker on things, or Tucker reaches the conclusion that JD Vance is not capable of being elected president, that he's not a good enough politician, and therefore, his vision is in jeopardy of not being realized. And then, you know, he might have to actually step in himself if he can't find someone else who might be able to do it. But I think it's a mistake to think of him as just a media figure because I think his ambitions are bigger than that. I think his influence is bigger than that. And I think he operates as a political actor, maybe even more than a media actor at this point.

GROSS: Jason Zengerle, thanks so much for being on our show.

ZENGERLE: Thanks a lot for having me.

GROSS: Jason Zengerle is the author of a new book about Tucker Carlson called "Hated by All The Right People." We recorded our interview last Thursday. Zengerle joined the New Yorker in December, and before that, wrote about politics for The New York Times Magazine. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram - @nprfreshair.

FRESH AIR's executive producers are Danny Miller and Sam Briger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering today from Diana Martinez. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi, Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez-Wisler. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. Our co-host is Tonya Mosley.

I'm Terry Gross.

(SOUNDBITE OF HENRYK SZERYNG AND INGRID HAEBLER'S "VIOLIN SONATA NO. 5 IN F MAJOR")

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