The Moment Tucker Carlson Entered His Joker Arc

Part of the appeal of the book was, for folks who only know Tucker Carlson post-2017, introducing them to this guy who you probably would’ve liked a lot if you had read him back in the Weekly Standard days, or knew he was the person who made Rachel Maddow’s television career. I liked presenting a fuller picture of him that is not a caricature.

Tucker and Kristol are sort of like the tale of two conservatives.

Yeah. I think that’s right. I mean, Kristol’s not a conservative anymore.

He’s a Biden voter.

Yeah, and there’s something about that.… I don’t necessarily think that’s a positive, to change your whole worldview that dramatically just because of Donald Trump. The Steve Hayes, Jonah Goldberg project to me is pretty interesting because they’re still conservative, but they’re not Trumpy, and maybe there’s no such thing anymore as being a conservative without Trump. And maybe the thing they’re trying to do is completely impossible and kind of a fiction. But I think it’s noteworthy that they haven’t abandoned all of their conservative views and principles just because they don’t like Donald Trump.

By the end of the book, Tucker basically becomes the type of far-right person he may have once derided. Do you think in another world, Tucker could have become a very far-left liberal or had a completely different set of beliefs if that’s what he was incentivized to do?

I really think if he was born like 20 or 30 years earlier, he would’ve been a George Plimpton type. He was a really good writer and reporter and he’s very curious and extremely charming. I think he had the talent to be one of those writers he idolized, whether it was Tom Wolfe or Hunter S. Thompson.

I think he just came along too late because the status that those people had and the influence and power and money they had, it wasn’t achievable anymore through writing. He recognized a lot earlier than others, including people like me, that writing was not the way to go, print was a dying industry, and he had to move out of it.

I don’t know about his politics. He was a contrarian, that’s sort of the throughline in his career. I don’t know where that takes you politically. I mean, god—he could be like Walter Kirn now, right, like still writing. I would hope that’s not where he would’ve ended up.

Do you think there’s any limit to this contrarian streak, any line he wouldn’t cross?

I wouldn’t see him starting to support DEI and stuff, he’s not gonna swing back to the left for the sake of contrarianism. I mean, his contrarian takes have become federal policy basically, and [that] makes his contrarianism a lot less attractive and charming. It’s one thing to muse about closing the borders and deporting people, and now you have ICE arresting people.

At the same time, he does show interesting flashes of humanity. I thought the way he responded to the Renee Good shooting was admirable, honestly. Talking about this as a person who was killed, like that’s not something you should celebrate. It’s a really low bar that I’m setting here. But he’s not as bloodthirsty as some of the people on the right these days.

I wanted to ask you about the part of the book where he gets rejected from Ezra Klein’s Listserv of journalists, which leads to him exposing it at The Daily Caller. Do you think he was genuinely bruised and felt excluded, and this was the start of some sort of Joker arc? Sort of related to him getting bashed by Jon Stewart on Crossfire? Or was it just a chance to expose this liberal “conspiracy”?

I think the Joker arc is legit when it comes to the Jon Stewart thing. That is a real formative moment of him being humiliated. Going back and talking to some of the people in the elite political media circles who he was all very friendly with, I didn’t get the sense that people backed away or disowned him after the Jon Stewart thing, but I think he felt they did. And that started to breed some resentment that, mixed with his contrarianism, curdled into this thing we see today.