When Tucker Carlson was an upperclassman at Trinity College in Connecticut, the CIA came to campus to recruit from among the graduating seniors. The campus went a little cuckoo: The lefties protested, and the conservative kids played patriotic music to welcome the men from Langley.
Carlson wasn’t the greatest student—one of his college highlights was home-brewing a beer that he named Coal Porter—but he was already seen as a charismatic figure around campus. “His personality was not similar to what it is now; it was exactly the same,” says Neil Patel, his roommate, an aide to Dick Cheney and eventual co-founder with Carlson of the conservative website The Daily Caller.
When the CIA arrived at Trinity, the students decided to hold a debate. First the anti-CIA contingent gave a speech. Then it was the pro-CIA side’s turn, and they asked Carlson to speak on their behalf. He said yes and stood up to talk. He spoke from the heart, looking at both factions gathered on the quad.
“Honestly, what I really think is you’re all a bunch of greasy chicken-fuckers,” he said. He then walked off.
Today, Tucker Carlson epitomizes an America divided between its best and worst selves, a place where men in Ford trucks with BENGHAZI bumper stickers get the finger from shaggy-haired Volvo drivers, only to find out their kids are on the same T-ball team. Carlson is charming, kind, and giving in his private life, but on Fox’s Tucker Carlson Tonight, the host believes that anyone who disagrees with his Trumpist take is a greasy chicken-fucker.
There are many people in Washington willing to praise Carlson’s good side. The journalist Matt Labash, who first met Carlson when they were both writers at the right-leaning magazine The Weekly Standard, told me, “With Tucker, the more successful and visible he’s become, the more generous he seems to grow. Washington is littered with people to whom he gave a leg up. Half of the twentysomething conservative journalists in Washington, for starters.”
But that’s not the Carlson you see every weeknight at eight o’clock, the slot he’s held ever since this April, when Bill O’Reilly left Fox News amid claims of sexual harassment. On his show, Carlson mocks and verbally body-slams those who disagree with him, a passel of easy marks such as Democratic politicians, well-meaning liberal activists, and young reporters. He shares with Donald Trump a deep reluctance to apologize for his mistakes, and he lobs insults that seem suspiciously like subconscious self-assessments: He loves to accuse his guests of “preening,” and he derides “pomposity, smugness, and groupthink.”
“That was something I learned from Christopher Hitchens,” Carlson says when I meet up with him in his office at Fox News this summer. “Once a day, launch a grenade into Asshole HQ.”
Carlson, more than anyone else at the network, has proved adept at papering over the crisis brought on the Republican Party by Trump’s presidency, mostly by deflecting blame onto the left. He is a talented debater who often gets the best of his guests, though he relies on a few home-field advantages. Most of the executions take place via satellite, with his prey in a different studio, which allows Carlson to react with bafflement or a triumphant smirk in real time. His mic always seems turned up to 11, whereas his opponent is forced to speak in a scaredy-cat whisper. By the end, the frazzled guest—interrupted and talked over—looks like he has just been sucker-punched at closing time while Tucker ends with a good-ol’-boy smile and a head shake that suggests, What will these crazy lefties think of next?
Anti-Trump Republicans rarely fare better. In July, Carlson had on Max Boot, a foreign-policy expert who has been critical of Trump’s submissive stance toward Russia. They sparred for a few moments before Boot said he was “disturbed” to see Carlson “yukking it up over the fact that Putin is interfering and meddling in our election process.”
Carlson shot back, “It’s little odd coming from you, who really has been consistently wrong in the most flagrant and flamboyant way for over a decade.”
The two argued about who had been the bigger idiot on Iraq (both supported the war and now regret it) before Carlson hit Boot with some snark: “Maybe you should choose a different profession. Selling insurance. House painting. Something you’re good at.”
Boot got in the last zinger before the bell: “Tucker, you’re too smart for this.”
Afterward, Carlson was half Good Tucker, half Bad Tucker. “I was too mean,” he told me. “I was too mean because I really meant it. Max Boot is not an impressive guy.”
Boot said he felt bad for Carlson: “It’s a shame that he has squandered his talents in return for a fat payday, turning himself into Tucker the Insult Comic Dog in the service of that charlatan in the Oval Office.”
Carlson’s coverage of the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville in August was illustrative of how far he’ll go to avoid criticizing Trump. He didn’t directly defend the president’s statement that there were “great people” on the side of the white nationalists, but he changed the subject as quickly as possible to activists who pulled down a Confederate statue in Durham, North Carolina. For Carlson, and for much of Fox News, Trump’s misdeeds are never the story; it’s always the reaction to Trump that gets the ink.
That’s a tricky line to walk when the president has been acting as recklessly as he has this summer. Carlson, though, can get himself into trouble all on his own. As the Charlottesville controversy continued, he began a show by trying to explain that Robert E. Lee wasn’t as bad as he seemed because slavery, while evil, used to be widely accepted, citing Jefferson, Muhammad, and the Aztecs as slave owners. That night, Bill Kristol, the founding editor of The Weekly Standard, tweeted, “They started by rationalizing Trump. They ended by rationalizing slavery,” along with a screen cap of Carlson. (On his show the next day, Carlson hit back by saying, “Washington is littered with formerly impressive people who now just shout and preen on social media.”)
It’s difficult to know which is the real Tucker Carlson: the guy carrying water for Trump or the more thoughtful guy who used to work for Kristol in the ’90s. His takedowns of the president’s opponents have certainly been good for ratings: 3 million viewers a night, the biggest audience in cable.
Carlson, for his part, doesn’t seem bothered by the prospect of keeping Trump supporters happy, no matter what contortions the president forces upon the Washington establishment. “There’s this illusion, and it’s created by the people who live here, that everything is meaningful, everything important,” Carlson says. He then lets me in on a secret: “It’s not.”
I want to avoid the grenade-throwing Carlson for a while, so we arrange to meet in Andover, Maine, where his family has had a vacation home since he was a kid. He is just five days removed from an appendectomy, but he bounds out of his car at the Little Red Hen Diner with a manic hail-fellow-well-met energy, aided by his decade-long addiction to Nicorette imported from New Zealand (it’s cheaper) that he chews like Chuck Yeager used to chew Beemans.
Carlson is clad in a button-down and Bermuda shorts that give you a glimpse of his boxers. He projects stiff-upper-chin Waspishness because that is exactly who he is. He was raised in La Jolla, a posh part of San Diego, but his father, Richard, who ran the Voice of America during the Reagan administration, shipped him east to a boarding school whose luminous graduates include John Jacob Astor V and Billy Bush.
The Carlsons have never done touchy-feely: Tucker learned his dad had prostate cancer when Pops blithely dropped into conversation at dinner that he needed a ride to the hospital the next morning. His biological mother abandoned him and his brother, Buckley, when he was 6—his father remarried an heiress to the Swanson frozen-dinner empire—but he insists it has had no impact on his life.
“There’s almost nothing I like less than people who whine about their childhood,” Carlson says. “The majority of successful people I know had childhood trauma.”
After we order some eggs and bacon, he tells me his privileged upbringing makes him uniquely qualified to take on the “elites,” a word Carlson uses with as much frequency and relish as “preening.”
“I’ve lived in that world my entire life, so I know how those people feel,” he says while some locals work up the courage to tell him how much they like his show. He accuses the elites of having “contempt” for the population of the country they govern: “My operating feeling is that a prerequisite for leadership is empathy for the people you’re commanding.”
Carlson’s legion of critics would say this is hilarious coming from a man who lunches at private clubs, has lived in D.C. most of his adult life, and just put his home on the market for $2.2 million. But Carlson has merely pulled off the same rhetorical trick that Trump did during the 2016 campaign: He will tell you he has thrived playing the insiders’ game, so he knows what the insiders are up to.
He calls his time in Andover “the pivotal experience of my political life.” The town is nearly all white, and unemployment has been high since most of the manufacturing jobs left 30 years ago.
“It’s been a longitudinal study of the same place. It had stores and a barbershop, and a car-repair place, and I used to get my hair cut there as a kid.” Carlson pauses for a second and sighs. “And I’ve watched the town collapse.”
Last year, Carlson tried to track down a local contractor for some work he needed done on his house but couldn’t find him. So he called a mutual buddy and asked what happened to the guy.
“He’s a junkie,” reported the friend.
Carlson sees a direct link between American immigration and trade policies and the death of towns like Andover. Jobs are being lost either to foreigners overseas or to foreigners on our own turf.
“Everything I say on immigration is totally sincere,” says Carlson. “That’s not a subject that I’m demagoguing on. Our immigration policy is insane and really hurting the country.”
He cites a recent battle between CNN’s Jim Acosta and Trump official Stephen Miller over the meaning of the Statue of Liberty as a prime example of media fecklessness: Acosta isn’t likely to lose his job to an undocumented immigrant, so he can support open borders without consequences.
“It’s the fastest way for everyone in the media, like Acosta, to feel like ‘I’m a virtuous person. These people are hurting, and we’re helping them.’ ” Carlson spits out his last words. “It’s just moral preening.”
One of Carlson’s favorite pastimes in Andover is taking the back roads that are lined with forgotten cemeteries. “People say, ‘Why don’t you just move somewhere else?’ ” says Carlson. “Well, if your great-grandparents are buried here, it’s more complicated.”
He has a bit of an obsession with death—he survived the crash landing of a Pakistan International Airlines plane in Dubai shortly after 9/11—and starts each day by reading the obits in bed with his wife of 26 years, Susie Andrews. “I think if you confront death right away, it sets a mood for the day,” Carlson says.
After we leave the diner, we drive over to his cabin—not his primary vacation home—on the Ellis River, which he uses as a fishing camp. Carlson bombs his car down a kidney-rattling road for a mile before we arrive at an unheated wooden structure with his kids’ names carved into the beams. The walls are lined with fishing books and framed copies of another era’s Field & Stream.
It’s blackfly season, and they twirl across the overcast sky like tornadoes. We take a short walk to the fish shed, where Carlson shows me his true passion: the construction of fly-fishing lures.
“When I’m on the road, I now tie flies instead of drinking,” says Carlson, who boozed hard from college into his early 30s. He puts on some reading glasses and shows me a tiny fly that looks like a wolf’s head. Over the years, he’s made more than a thousand of them.
We trudge down to the water’s edge. I ask if he ever runs into locals trying their luck. “Oh, I’ve never seen another person down here,” says Carlson as he works his rod up and down with a fluid motion.
We talk about his interview with Teen Vogue writer Lauren Duca, who came on his show last December to discuss Ivanka Trump. At one point during the interview, Carlson mentioned that Duca had also written about Ariana Grande and thigh-high boots. He ended the segment with “Stick to the thigh-high boots.” Duca mouthed “You’re a sexist pig” as her mic was cut.
“This was something where this woman didn’t have an argument, didn’t have superior knowledge, wasn’t impressive,” says Carlson. “I was kind of rude to her. Okay, I’m sorry that I did that. But I didn’t think it was that interesting or revealing a moment.”
Carlson has a similar assessment of his 2004 interview with Jon Stewart on CNN’s Crossfire, in which Stewart called Carlson a “dick” and asked him to “stop hurting America.… You’re doing theater when you should be doing debate.”
“He’s a talented guy,” Carlson says of Stewart, letting the compliment stand for a second before thrusting the knife. “I think he’s a deeply unhappy guy. I learned something deep and valuable, which is, you’re not graded on the merits, you’re graded on who’s more popular.”
Crossfire was canceled shortly after that show, and Carlson wandered the TV side streets for several years. He briefly hosted a show on MSNBC and did an appearance on Dancing with the Stars. Just four years ago, he was co-hosting the weekend version of Fox & Friends, which makes Good Morning America look like a debate between Bill Moyers and Susan Sontag.
“When you have four kids in private schools, you don’t get to be choosy,” Carlson tells me.
Carlson is unquestionably loyal to those he works with. At The Daily Caller, which he and Patel founded in 2010 with partial funding from right-wing activist Foster Friess, he responded to criticism of his reporters with a succinct “Go fuck yourself.” When I ask him about a book he wrote in which he called Bill O’Reilly’s tough-guy persona an act, Carlson turns red. “I’ve learned since that not every thought has to be expressed,” he says.
At Fox, he has a resolute policy of see no evil, hear no evil. “I have few rules, but ‘Don’t criticize the boss’ is one of them,” says Carlson. He offers platitudes of thanks to Roger Ailes, who, like O’Reilly, left the network following widespread accusations of sexual harassment.
“He was an amazing guy,” says Carlson. “He was one of the most interesting people I’ve ever met, a really insightful, deep person and a great guy to talk to.”
For a smart man, Carlson can play dumb with the best of them—he is well informed, except when it doesn’t serve him. Call it Tucker Disassociation Syndrome. Ask where he sees Fox News going after a year of chaos and he chuckles. “I’ve been so busy with my show, I haven’t thought about it at all.”
He professes to know little about Sean Hannity’s ludicrous charge that nefarious killers somehow connected to the Democratic Party had murdered Seth Rich, a low-level DNC staffer. I ask Carlson about his take on the Hannity-Rich fiasco.
“If I attack Hannity for being a right-winger, I would be adding my voice to a chorus,” says Carlson. “I’d rather express opinions that aren’t being expressed elsewhere.” (The deference works both ways. Hannity tells me simply, “Tucker is one of the smartest, best people I know.”)
In 2009, Carlson was heckled at the Conservative Political Action Conference for praising the accuracy of The New York Times. On Fox, he seems to have embraced factual flexibility, especially when it comes to stories about immigration. He devoted several shows this spring to two teenage immigrants who had allegedly raped a 14-year-old girl in the bathroom of a high school in Rockville, Maryland: “The Rockville rape atrocity may have been a rude awakening for some government officials that sometimes when foreign countries send their people here, they are not sending their very best,” said Carlson, echoing a Trump applause line.
When the charges against the boys were dropped, Erik Wemple, a media reporter for The Washington Post, asked Carlson if he planned to do an on-air apology. He never did. “Tucker is always looking to arrange facts and rumors to make it appear far more egregious than it ever was,” Wemple said, “and that’s just his game. He’s a great polemical gladiator.” When I ask Carlson about Wemple, he deflects with a dose of Tucker Disassociation Syndrome: “Erik Wemple? I don’t know the name. I don’t think Erik Wemple is a real name.”
Carlson seems boyishly at ease out here on the river in a way that makes the studied calm of his television persona appear superficial. Recently, he had been projecting an air of cautious wisdom regarding what he called the media’s “Russia hysteria.”
“The core of journalism is skepticism, right?” asks Carlson. “Where is the evidence? Journalists are supposed to be skeptical because the rest of us don’t have time to be skeptical. ‘We’re going to pre-masticate this information for you.’ And we’ve just stopped doing that—we’re just vomiting on the public.”
If that’s the case, I ask, why isn’t he covering the Russia story directly, addressing the evidence rather than the media response to it? He was happy enough to dig deep into Bill Clinton’s scandals back in the ’90s.
“I think the time we’re living in now are much more serious,” says Carlson. “I mean, that was about a dress, and this is about how the country is going to survive.” Some of his approach, he says, is driven by the fear that if Trump is forced out of office, the country will descend into chaos.
“It sends a very clear message to the middle class, to the people who voted for Trump, ‘You don’t get to choose your own guy,’ ” says Carlson. He points to the drift of the investigation of Bill Clinton as a sign of trouble ahead.
“That was an investigation into Whitewater that wound up impeaching him over lying about sex with an intern,” says Carlson. “Yeah. I’m against that.”
This was not Carlson’s view 20 years ago, I point out.
“No, I didn’t feel that way at the time,” says Carlson. “I’ve learned a lot in 20 years.”
After we get back from Maine, I meet with Carlson in Washington to watch him on the set of Tucker Carlson Tonight. He seems unusually edgy, and I discover that he’d been up late trying to finish writing a book he wants to call The Last Liberal. The premise is that Carlson’s current ideology of unlimited free speech, limited military escapades, and curtailing open-ended investigations is the position liberals held a generation ago.
“I’d forgotten how hard writing was,” Carlson tells me. “It’s miserable. I’ll never write another one.”
But it is Trump’s tweets rebuking Attorney General Jeff Sessions that have Carlson pawing the carpet in his office. “This is disgusting,” says Carlson. “I’m going to say that.” (He doesn’t exactly say that.) He’s been trying to get an interview with Sessions all day. “They’ve gone dark,” he says, taking off his suit jacket. He sends a camera crew to the A.G.’s office just in case he decides to talk. “Sessions was the first senator to endorse the president, one of the only sitting members of Congress who actually understood the dog whistle,” says Carlson, becoming the first person to ever use the term dog whistle in a positive sense. “He got the Trump program. He was a Trumpist before anybody else, and I mean that in the best sense.”
Carlson leans back in his chair. I ask if he can understand why having someone as impulsive as Trump with his finger on the button unnerves a large part of America.
“Sure, I was always much more impressed by what Trump said than I was by Trump. So was Sessions.”
A few hours later, it’s time for the live broadcast. Alas, there is no Sessions. Instead, the panel consists of the usual suspects: former senator Jim DeMint and conservative lobbyist Matt Schlapp. Trump is giving a speech in Youngstown, Ohio, that drones past the start of the show, so Carlson makes small talk with the panelists.
“I’ve never seen an administration who won’t help you out even if you’re arguing their side,” says Carlson mournfully.
Trump stops talking, and Carlson ad-libs an opener on a speech he hasn’t heard. He chats with DeMint and Schlapp for a segment about poor Jeff Sessions. Between segments, Jackie Wilson’s “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher” blares. Carlson rocks out in his seat.
“Hey, Steve, I want this song playing at my funeral. Do you have your funeral all planned out?” (I do not.)
Then an odd thing happens. He greets Democratic congressman Eric Swalwell with a playful slap on the shoulder and asks to see pictures of his newborn. The red light goes on. Carlson mocks and denigrates Swalwell’s position on the future of the Democratic Party for a few minutes. Swalwell exits, and he is replaced by Congressman Tim Ryan, a Democrat who represents Youngstown, where the president just spoke. The segment begins, and Carlson roasts Ryan about the Democrats’ need for a new generation of leadership. The show cuts to commercial, and Ryan hands his phone to Carlson.
“It’s my wife.”
Carlson is all smiles. “Were you at the rally?” he asks her. “C’mon, you can tell me. Okay, nice talking to you.”
Carlson’s two sides—Dr. Jekyll the charmer, and Mr. Hyde the takedown artist—seem to coexist without one knowing about the other. That duality is present even in the most trivial parts of his life: Back in Andover, Carlson told me he always does catch and release when he’s fishing but that he loves to hunt with his dog, Meg. “I don’t kill the bird for me,” he said, “but she loves it so much.”
In his Fox News office, Carlson confides that after we parted ways in Maine, he almost couldn’t make it home. He was in excruciating pain, from what was later diagnosed as a herniated disk. He never let on. Tucker Carlson just kept smiling.
This story originally appeared in the October 2017 issue with the title “Tucker Carlson Is Sorry for Being Mean.”
Stephen Rodrick is the author of the memoir The Magical Stranger: A Son’s Journey into His Father’s Life.