How Did Tucker Carlson Get This Way? How Did America?

 

Nonfiction

How Did Tucker Carlson Get This Way? How Did America?

 

In “Hated by All the Right People,” the journalist Jason Zengerle looks at the conservative pundit’s many transformations.

 

By Jennifer Burns

Jennifer Burns is the Edgar E. Robinson professor in United States history at Stanford and the author of “Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/27/books/review/hated-by-all-the-right-people-jason-zengerle.html

Jan. 27, 2026

 

If you’re looking for an answer to the question “How did we get here?” — from 1990s multiculturalism and free market globalism to ICE raids and Venezuela — you could do worse than using the arc of Tucker Carlson’s career as your lens. And if you’re looking for insight into the right-wing pundit’s transformations, you’ll definitely want to read Jason Zengerle’s breezy, entertaining and ultimately disquieting “Hated by All the Right People,” a biography of Carlson that tracks his turn from bow-tied beau ideal of the Washington establishment into the MAGA conspiracy theorist in chief.

 

A veteran journalist, Zengerle fills in some aspects on Carlson’s checkered childhood — material privilege offset by his mother’s stunning abandonment when he was 8 — but most of the book concentrates on Carlson’s professional life, taking detailed forays into media history and the various ideological cul-de-sacs of the pre-Trump era.

 

As an intern for the progressive magazine The New Republic in the late ’90s, Zengerle first encountered a 20-something Carlson when he would stop in for lunch with the now-disgraced liberal journalist Stephen Glass. Back then, Carlson drew the admiration of progressives, including Zengerle, for his crackling, witty magazine articles on subjects like the businessman Ross Perot’s dodgy dealings with the Nixon White House.

 

Some of that awe-struck reaction to Carlson remains in “Hated by All the Right People,” especially as Zengerle follows his subject through his youth. Carlson’s successful romance of the headmaster’s daughter at his Episcopal boarding school in 1980s Rhode Island is depicted as almost heroic. Zengerle also plays down a moment in which Carlson raised his hand when a Black classmate, giving a presentation on an elderly Black woman killed by N.Y.P.D. officers, asked, “Does anyone think that woman deserved to die?” At the time, Zengerle writes, “it was viewed less as racist than puckish.”

 

A mediocre student — Zengerle uncovers his 1.9 G.P.A. at Trinity College, which prevented him from graduating — Carlson still managed to talk himself into an early post at The Weekly Standard, becoming a protégé of its founder, Bill Kristol. It was the heyday and the last golden era, it turned out, of the little magazine.

 

Nothing much in these early years distinguished Carlson from mainstream conservatism. Along with colleagues at The Weekly Standard — where he was known more for his narrative craft than his opinions — Carlson defended legal immigration against influential eugenicists who wanted to close the border. He also criticized the race-baiting politician Pat Buchanan for his overheated populism.

 

There were occasional defections from the Republican Party line. After relentlessly cheerleading the Iraq war, Carlson traveled to Baghdad himself to assess the situation, concluding afterward he’d been duped. He publicly declared that the war had been a mistake in 2004, a position almost singular among conservative pundits. Still, to outward appearances, Carlson seemed to be the embodiment of the establishment.

 

What ultimately shifted Carlson’s trajectory was his move into TV. In Zengerle’s telling, when Carlson joined the debate show “Crossfire” as its resident conservative in 2001, he found it impossible to maintain either nuance or his contrarian instincts. Instead, he became the sneering partisan hack the show’s format demanded.

 

Then, in 2004, the comedian Jon Stewart appeared as a guest on the show and accused Carlson of “hurting America.” Clips of the comment circulated widely. Shortly thereafter, Carlson lost his position at CNN, where Stewart’s critique evidently struck a chord, and the show itself was canceled.

 

Was this a win for American politics? Looking back, Zengerle writes, one can almost feel nostalgia for a show that featured opposing points of view instead of an echo chamber. Even at the time, Carlson was appreciated for his happy warrior vibe. “Tucker isn’t tainted by Republican rage,” the journalist Michael Wolff wrote in 2001 at the beginning of his cable news tenure, while the Rev. Al Sharpton, of all people, thanked Carlson publicly a few years later for keeping “the dialogue alive.”

 

It was this reputation Carlson tried to lean into when he started his next venture, the website The Daily Caller, co-founded in 2010 with the aim, as Zengerle puts it, to focus on “accuracy rather than bombast.” In the headiest days of Web 2.0 outrage cycles, that attitude didn’t last.

 

 

The Daily Caller made a splash, but not as much as provocative right-wing websites like The Drudge Report or Breitbart News. Watching their success and obsessively monitoring his own online traffic numbers, Carlson observed that readers wanted attacks upon liberals, not informed opinion. The site’s young writers trended toward alt-right ideas on race and immigration, which Carlson slowly absorbed in his pursuit of clicks, hoping to outflank Breitbart and Drudge by tacking even further to the right.

 

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The book cover of “Hated by All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind” by Jason Zengerle.

This pursuit of online eyeballs made Carlson receptive, somewhat, to Donald Trump’s unlikely candidacy in 2016. It also made him an ideal bridge between the old and new styles of conservatism. Desperate to attract Trump’s fan base, Fox News turned Carlson into a headliner with a show that would be called “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” which Fox announced five days before Trump won the 2016 election.

 

For all his ambivalence about Trump — earlier in 2016, he had reportedly told an acquaintance that the Republican front-runner was “not evil,” but “mentally ill” — Carlson realized that the president’s fixation on the show gave him enormous power. Carlson and his guests’ tirades sank the appointments of State Department and U.N. hopefuls; an interview with the conservative activist Christopher Rufo triggered the White House crusade against critical race theory.

 

By the 2022 primaries, Carlson had become a veritable movement leader who staged his own “Tucker primary” by offering political candidates airtime. He had also become, in Zengerle’s judgment, the source of “a populist-nationalist ideology that was far more coherent than anything being offered by Trump himself.”

 

Ultimately, not even Fox could kill the monster it had created. Dumped by the network in 2023 as controversies inside and outside the studio mounted, Carlson followed the trade winds once again. He created his own digital media company, set aside his qualms and fully embraced Trump. As the next election approached, both men would rely on the other as they sought restoration and retribution.

 

By the dawn of the second Trump term, Carlson’s influence had only increased: He was a key backer of JD Vance for vice president and pivotal to the appointments of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to health secretary and Tulsi Gabbard to director of national intelligence. Although the book was written before Carlson’s interview with the white supremacist Nick Fuentes set off a firestorm across the right, Zengerle does catch Carlson’s unmistakable turn to antisemitism, the mother of all conspiracy theories.

 

So what happened to this guy, the bow-tied brawler once untainted by Republican rage? The whole story resembles a Greek tragedy, with Carlson struggling against a deep-seated character flaw — the desire for attention and fame — and eventually sacrificing everything to that. Along the way, his darkest impulses are nurtured and fanned by a rapidly evolving media landscape. Character meets technology, one might summarize.

 

Yet it’s not so much a Greek tragedy as a particularly American one. After all, we’re the ones watching, clicking, bingeing on outrage. There was something troubling about “Crossfire”’s pantomime debates. The audience was left out of the joke: When the combat was over, Carlson and his liberal adversaries, in reality the best of friends, usually went out for a bite afterward. But the alternative, it turns out, is far worse. Carlson may not have been hurting America then, but surely he is hurting it now.