‘Hated By All the Right People’ traces Tucker Carlson’s rise : NPR

Tucker Carlson attends a meeting with President Donald Trump and oil executives in the East Room of the White House on January 9, 2026.

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Alex Brandon/AP Photo

When Donald Trump first announced he was running for president in 2015, then-host Tucker Carlson Fox and Friends Weekendwas one of the few experts to take his candidacy seriously.

“[Carlson] acknowledged that a nativist candidate running on the basis of white grievances might actually do quite well in a Republican primary,” New Yorkers says writer Jason Zengerle. “His star rose at Fox because he somehow had the foresight to see Trump coming.”

In his new book, Hated by All Good People: Tucker Carlson and the Collapse of the Conservative Spirit, Zengerle traces Carlson’s ascendancy and explains how he became one of the most influential people on the far right.

“He’s someone that Donald Trump listens to and really wants to hear from. And Carlson is more than happy to share his thoughts and advice with him,” Zengerle said. “That’s not to say that Trump always follows this advice, and there have certainly been instances where Carlson has been disappointed with some of Trump’s decisions, but he appears to have a seat at the table.”

Carlson got his start in conservative print media and moved to television in the early days of cable news. After being fired from CNN and MSNBC (now MS NOW), he was hired by Fox, then abruptly fired in 2023. He has since launched a new streaming show on the social media platform

“Since he left Fox, he no longer has a built-in audience and he has to navigate the attention economy. And to get people to listen to his podcast, I think he’s sort of adopted more outrageous views,” Zengerle says. “Previously, he said things more explicitly, whereas in the past he tried to modulate his rhetoric a little.”

Zengerle sees the common thread of Carlson’s career as a desire for “fame, fortune and power.” To that end, he wouldn’t be surprised if Carlson ran for office himself.

“It’s a mistake to consider him just a media figure because I think his ambitions are bigger than that,” says Zengerle. “He’s acting like a political actor, maybe even more than a media actor at this point.”

Interview Highlights

Hated by All Good People: Tucker Carlson and the Collapse of the Conservative Spiritby Jason Zengerle

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Random Penguin House

On Carlson’s move from print to television in the ’90s

The things he was good at, like being flippant, having an opinion on everything, and just being able to appear reasonably intelligent on camera, that was the start of his career. …He would spend all this time and energy making them [print] stories, and that might get a little response. And then he would go on a TV show and make an offhand remark, and a cabinet member would call him to talk about it. And I think it was that kind of recognition that made him think that television was the way to go.

On Jon StewartIt is appearance in 2004 on CNN Crossfire, which led to the cancellation of the show

I think [it] It was a very important moment in Tucker’s career and life, because it was a humiliation. He was quite friendly with Stewart. …He knew, obviously, that Stewart had a rather dim view of Crossfire and a dim view of cable news. But they all thought they were kind of…acting Crossfire it was, you know? You’d argue with this person for 30 minutes, and then you’d go out and have a steak and a drink and everyone was kind of doing the same thing, and it was like professional wrestling in a way. When Stewart came in and wasn’t in that game, I think Tucker was really surprised and he tried to debate Stewart and Stewart just destroyed him, and destroyed him in front of a studio audience. …This led to the show’s cancellation. This led Tucker to leave CNN.

I think it was a really important moment in his life and his career because he was a member in good standing of the Washington political and media elite, and I think he felt like his friends in that world weren’t helping him and supporting him the way he would have liked. And so years later, when he developed this populist streak and really turned on the people in Washington and the mainstream media and that sort of thing, I think he remembered that moment and some of his bitterness toward those people really came out at that moment.

On Carlson co-founder of conservative website The Daily Caller in 2010 and moving from reporting to tabloid content

When he launched The Daily Callerhis idea was that it would be a right-hand version of some sort of combination [of] Huffington Post And New York Times. He wanted it to be a very factual and widely publicized website. He made a criticism of conservative media that conservatives didn’t report, they just expressed their opinion, saying, “We need to get back to reporting. We need to get back to presenting the facts, and we need to be serious about the news.” And that was his vision for The caller. I think after a few months, looking at the traffic on the website, he realized that there wasn’t an audience for that kind of conservative publication – and he pivoted, and he sort of moved more towards tabloids, outrageous stuff.

More and more, I think he realized that the types of stories that were getting attention, that were [getting] a lot of the traffic, getting clicks, was related to race and immigration and gender, and he looked into that. Eventually he somehow ended up in this competition with Breitbart which Steve Bannon was directing at the time. And it was just kind of a race to the bottom of who could write the most incendiary, incendiary stories about black-on-white crime or immigrant crime and things like that. And he saw that there was an audience there for it.

On Carlson rising through the ranks at Fox

He was truly an afterthought at Fox. You had the stars, you had the Bill O’Reillys, you had the Sean Hannities. Tucker was just that guy they could put on the weekend Fox and friends show and he had some television experience. He was conservative, so he wasn’t going to say anything that strayed from the party line. He was just a bit playful. …

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. … When Trump came along, these prestigious Fox shows had a fundamental television problem. They couldn’t find intelligent, camera-ready human beings to participate in their programs and make a sensible case for Donald Trump. And Tucker was someone who could, so… he started getting more air time that way. And then, as Trump’s candidacy took off, it became clear that Trump was going to be the Republican nominee. …At the end of the campaign, [Fox News CEO] Roger Ailes was fired over the sexual harassment scandal. [News Corps CEO] Rupert Murdoch now ran the network. And Murdoch’s first big move was to take Tucker and give him his own show at 7 p.m.

Théa Chaloner and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Brett Neely adapted it for the web.