From prime time to lurid tales in a shed: the rapid descent of Tucker Carlson
For years, Tucker Carlson seemed untouchable at Fox News. His position as the channel’s most popular host allowed him to wield power over viewers and the Republican party alike, his political influence reinforcing his position as the king of rightwing cable TV.
That changed in April, however, when Fox News, after settling a defamation lawsuit for $787m, gave Carlson the boot.
The move was as unexpected as it was sudden, and left viewers and pundits wondering what Carlson, who had used his position to push far-right conspiracy theories and elevate rightwing figures, would do next.
So far, the answer has been: use a new Twitter show to push even more conspiracy theories and give a platform to even more bizarre people, which culminated with a new low this week, as Carlson revived a debunked claim that Barack Obama smoked crack and had sex with a man many years ago.
It seemed to confirm something that many observers had predicted: deprived of the prime time platform of Fox News, Carlson – once seen as a powerbroker in Republican politics and even a possible presidential candidate – has spiraled into extremism and growing irrelevance.
The interview about Obama was widely panned – it even proved to be a bit ripe for Elon Musk – but it symbolized the depths to which Carlson will sink to generate attention.
“I think that he’s doing this because he thinks it will get him the attention and thus viewership that he’s lost since he left Fox News,” said Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters for America.
Carlson launched his Twitter video show earlier this year. Hosted mainly from what appears to be a toolshed, it lacks Fox News’s snazzy graphics and teams of researchers and writers.
“He doesn’t have the Fox News bells and whistles anymore. And so the result is that he’s basically just Alex Jones in a jacket and tie, trying to concoct conspiracy theories that he thinks his audience will be interested in,” Gertz said.
“He’s really dropped in relevance pretty quickly.”
Carlson’s firing from Fox News, where he had long been its most popular primetime host, came as a surprise to many – including him.
“We’ll be back on Monday,” Carlson told viewers on Friday, 21 April.
He wasn’t. On Monday morning Suzanne Scott, the CEO of Fox News, called Carlson to tell him he was being put out to pasture, Vanity Fair reported. At 8pm on Monday it was Brian Kilmeade, one of Fox News’s breakfast
show people, who greeted an angry audience.
After a period of silence, Carlson popped back up in June with his Tucker on Twitter offering. That early output consisted of Carlson sitting in what could be generously called a wooden lodge.
“It was just a man in a suit and jacket ranting about conspiracy theories direct to the camera,” Gertz said.
Since those early videos, Carlson has shifted tack. Since July his videos have generally consisted of longer-form interviews, apparently with anyone prepared to say yes to a Carlson media request.
The first of Carlson’s new oeuvre dropped on 11 July: a two-and-a-halfhour interview with Andrew Tate, the rightwing misogynist influencer who in June was charged in Romania with rape, human trafficking and forming an organised crime group to sexually exploit women.
Since then, Carlson has spoken to a former general accused of pushing Russian propaganda over that country’s war in Ukraine, and in August, Carlson hosted Andrew Tate’s brother, Tristan, who like Andrew has been charged in Romania with rape, human trafficking and forming an organised crime group to sexually exploit women.
“His hold on the rightwing media ecosystem that he had for the last several years has really dissipated very quickly,” Gertz said.
For years, Gertz said, “Republican politicians really feared being on Tucker Carlson’s bad side”.
“There doesn’t seem to be that sort of impact happening now that he is just effectively a rightwing podcaster like any number of others,” Gertz added.
The interview with Obama’s accuser marked a new nadir for Carlson and his fledgling show.
Carlson dredged up Larry Sinclair, a convicted con artist who repeated longsince-discredited claims about having sex with Barack Obama, and nudged him into repeating the allegations.
Carlson presented the interview as simply Sinclair telling his story. “Assess for yourself,” Carlson told viewers in a tweet. But in the interview, Carlson presented Sinclair’s nonsense as fact.
“You’re the only person on this set who’s had sex with Barack Obama,”
Carlson said to Sinclair at one point.
While Carlson may publicly believe Sinclair, whether he privately believes him is a different issue.
Documents released as part of the Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit against Fox News – the voting machine company settled with Fox News after the channel aired conspiracy theories about the election – showed that for all Carlson’s on-air praise for Trump, behind the scenes he felt differently.
“I hate him passionately … What he’s good at is destroying things,” Carlson said of Trump in a text revealed as part of the Dominion lawsuit. “He’s the undisputed world champion of that. He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong.”
On Fox News Carlson was largely free to promote far-right conspiracies, including the “great replacement”, the racist notion that white Americans are being deliberately replaced through immigration. But on the cable news channel there was still a small element of censorship, said Heather Hendershot, a media professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies conservative and rightwing media.
“He’s not going to feel like he should self-censor. And he’s going to have on guests who aren’t self-censoring at all, just by virtue of the fact that they’re not on cable news,” Hendershot said.
Under Musk, Twitter has “increasingly” become a rightwing environment, Hendershot said. The number of posts containing racist slurs soared after the billionaire’s takeover, while in June a report by Glaad, the LGBTQ + advocacy organization, found that Twitter was “the most dangerous platform for LGBTQ people”.
“Twitter seems like a place where he can both build and amplify his base, and also amplify the environment around him, which has so much hate speech,” Hendershot said.
Even without the platform of Fox News, Carlson has shown an ability to still get big names.He conducted a soft-soap interview with Donald Trump in August – Carlson used it to push a burgeoning conspiracy theory that there is a plot to assassinate the former president – and Hendershot said Carlson still has enough influence to bring more rightwing users over to Twitter to watch his show, and listen to his ideas.
“Carlson is now in this ecosystem that’s already gone very bad. And he is going to amplify and exacerbate that problem and make it worse in terms of it being a white supremacy kind of environment,” Hendershot said.
“So I’m concerned. I think it’s already gone in that direction and it would keep going that way without Carlson. But does he bring more traffic, does he bring more eyeballs to Twitter? Absolutely. And that’s something that is very concerning.”
“Regardless of whether or not the Arizona supreme court is correct – and I don’t think they are, I think they are dead flat wrong – but if I go against a standing rule in Arizona, is that something I can do? Or that I should do? So really these are the kinds of questions that we’re trying to answer and we’re being very deliberate and we’re being very judicious in our approach.”
Maine’s secretary of state, Shenna Bellows, a Democrat, said she had been studying the issue, but said her office wouldn’t address it before a candidate officially filed for the ballot. “While people outside of the business of running elections are free to speculate and inquire, debate, that is not our job. Our job is to follow the law and the constitution and not to make premature conclusions or speculation about what might or might not happen,” she said.
One left-leaning group, Free Speech for People, has urged several secretaries of state to unilaterally say Trump is ineligible from being listed on the ballot. But such an idea may be a non-starter for officials who know that they’re likely to face intense backlash over such a decision.
“For a secretary of state to remove a candidate would only reinforce the grievances of those who see the system as rigged and corrupt,” Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, wrote in an op-ed in the
Wall Street Journal under the headline “I Can’t Keep Trump Off the Ballot”. Raffensperger acknowledged there was a legal process to remove candidates from the ballot in Georgia – an effort to disqualify Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene failed last year – but said voters should decide the issue.
In an alarming signal of the minefield that secretaries are stepping into, many offices have started receiving threatening and harassing phone calls and emails about Trump’s eligibility. In New Hampshire, the office of the secretary of state, Dave Scanlan, a Republican, was flooded with phone calls after the conservative personality Charlie Kirk falsely said Scanlan was planning to remove Trump from the ballot. (Scanlan had merely said he was studying the issue.)
“We’ve been getting a lot of input, literally hundreds of inquiries, not all of it friendly. I’ll leave it at that,” Arizona’s Fontes said.
“We all have been buried in an uptick of visceral vitriol and threats from people on both sides – people who want us to remove him from the ballot, people who don’t,” Benson said. “We’re also seeing this as the beginning of the rancor that we expect to go through the next 19 months.”
Regardless of the pressures elections officials face, Fontes said he wouldn’t shy away from making an uncomfortable decision.
“We live in a land where the rule of law is the rule of law. And when a determination gets made, a determination gets made,” he said. “If people are dissatisfied with their decisions, if I choose to run for re-election, they’ll be able to speak their voices in a free and fair election to decide whether I should stay in office or not.”
Questions about Trump’s eligibility need to be resolved not just for this election, but for future ones as well, Fontes said.
“This is a question that I think needs to be answered broadly and certainly. I’m looking at this as far more than just about one person and one office,” he added. “This is a systemic sort of thing and it is as big as the constitution itself.”