The Disappearing Tucker Carlson

For Tucker Carlson, it has to be the ultimate good-news, bad-news moment: A major publishing house has canceled a prominent political journalist’s upcoming biography of the far-right media figure.

The good news, for Carlson partisans, is that the book in question — Hated by All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unravelling of the Conservative Mind, by Jason Zengerle — was likely to be a less-than-fawning look at the former Fox host’s journey from establishmentarian to conspiracy theorist.

The bad news, though, is that the cancellation stems at least in part from the belief that Carlson, once the biggest name on cable, no longer has the kind of cultural footprint to warrant a pricey, complicated book by a top-shelf writer. According to several sources in the publishing industry who have followed the project, a combination of delays and the changes in Carlson’s once dominant media presence caused a loss of enthusiasm on the part of a publishing house going through its own internal tumult.

It’s a far cry from the situation in 2021, when Carlson was zooming past Sean Hannity to become cable’s top talker, with a legion of fans on the right and an army of detractors in the center and on the left — and even speculation about a possible presidential bid. That’s when Little, Brown and Co. tapped Zengerle, a New York Times Magazine contributor and one of the leading magazine writers on contemporary politics, to do a book on the political-media titan.

At the time, with Trump-driven fury selling books all over the place, the contract seemed like a no-brainer. For editors interested in enriching readers’ minds, understanding the Carlson phenomenon was seen as key to understanding American politics. For publishers interested in enriching shareholders’ wallets, there was potential gold in a tome on the man blue America loves to hate.

Since then, it’s been a rocky ride for both Carlson and the political-book business.

Carlson was famously bounced from Fox last year, soon after the network spent $787 million to settle a defamation lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems. A racist text message and derision of Donald Trump had been uncovered as part of the discovery process, and he had been expected to testify in court. The spectacle would have riveted the media.

After the shock firing, Carlson quickly reestablished himself on Twitter, now X, finding a devoted audience. But his programming — including a softball interview with Vladimir Putin — has rarely generated the kind of sustained attention or outrage of the closely monitored Fox monologues he did when he was the highest-rated host in history. Like Oprah Winfrey or Howard Stern, becoming his own brand made him less relevant to the broader conversation.

This week, he announced plans for a 15-city arena tour alongside figures like Alex Jones and Marjorie Taylor Greene, a classic example of the sort of thing that can draw huge throngs of the devoted but not register on the media radar of a fragmented country. (Janet Jackson and blink-182 are also on arena tours this summer.)

Publishing, meanwhile, saw the political book boom of the Trump years turn into a Biden-era bust. The 46th president and his circle have spawned almost no bestsellers, and neither have their cast of rivals. And to the chagrin of booksellers, the return of the 45th president to electoral contention has not yet brought about another “Trump Bump” of interest in political influencers.

Zengerle, my colleague a decade ago at The New Republic and a former POLITICO Magazine writer, declined comment. So did Carlson. Representatives for Little, Brown and Co. did not respond to multiple requests for comment. But sources at other houses tell me that Zengerle’s agent has been shopping the title to other publishers.

Of course, publishers cancel books all the time, for all sorts of reasons. Many Washington classics, even bestsellers such as Mark Leibovich’s This Town, were marooned by their initial publisher. Writers blow deadlines, and that includes Zengerle, who got an extension to do more reporting after Carlson left Fox, but still missed a subsequent due date. Editors leave for other jobs, and top brass exit in corporate shake-ups — both scenarios that also apply to Zengerle’s book. It’s a fickle business. Little, Brown, which is undergoing a restructuring and layoffs this month, may be particularly tumultuous.

But plenty of projects that face these issues don’t get shelved. The travails of the Carlson book also say something about the publishing and intellectual climate in Washington and in the political world more generally.

I got a peek at a 60,000-word chunk of draft from Zengerle’s reporting, and it presents a nuanced portrait of a generation of conservatives who grew up in the Reagan era, came to Washington in the 1990s, and were pulled in wildly different directions as the Bush administration floundered and the new GOP embraced Trump. That’s fascinating stuff — if not exactly the kind of scathing hate-read whose scandalous allegations will send books flying off shelves in blue-city bookstores.

In a polarized country, fury sells. Beyond attracting readers hungry for outrage, it also snags the attention of the TV bookers and podcast hosts who can put a book on the radar screen. Complexity doesn’t work as well: The lefties who loathe Carlson might not want to spend 400 pages with a three-dimensional version of the guy, and the righties who hero-worship him still won’t want to shell out for something from a non-fan.

There’s a possibly even bigger challenge when chronicling a figure like Carlson — and it’s a challenge that is becoming more common as the worlds of politics and media collide: Many of the biggest outrages happen in plain sight, which makes the investigative biographer’s role feel less crucial.

Shortly before Carlson’s firing, for instance, The New York Times published “American Nationalist,” a sprawling investigation of the TV host’s rise to a leading role in the political right. But few of the three-part, 20,000-word story’s most talked-about details involved digging up dirt. There weren’t jaw-droppers about Carlson secretly mistreating puppies or misbehaving around his Maine home. Rather, the juiciest stuff was gleaned from rewatching 1,100 episodes of his Fox News program — i.e., things that were said in front of millions and millions of witnesses.

For a lot of people, the video clips were the story.

Which brings us to the current challenge, for Carlson as well as those who would attack him. When those video clips are no longer connected to a dominant outfit like Fox, they start to feel a lot less vital. Carlson may have a vast audience on X, but for a lot of casual observers, the formerly most powerful figure in conservative media just looks like another random person streaming angry content into the ether.

That goes for a lot of the professional observers who report on his content, too, and in the process help boost awareness. Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple used to write frequently, and scathingly, about Carlson. But he’s scarcely covered Carlson’s X programming.

“I wrote about him when he was at Fox News for the simple reason that Tucker had bosses,” Wemple — a former colleague and longtime close friend — told me. “And those bosses weren’t accountable. They weren’t really journalists, as we discovered in the Dominion suit. But they were sensitive to criticism, and my role as a media critic was to play all this stuff out and seek accountability from Fox and seek explanations from Fox.”

Untethered from larger institutions, a bomb-thrower attracts less attention, even if plenty of people are still influenced by his opinions.

Paying less attention may be sound logic if your business is media criticism, or even the daily news cycle. But it’s a shame if that logic affects book publishing decisions, too.

In fact, a thoughtful look at how the bow-tied CNN preppy became the immigrant-baiting Putin admirer also gets at the biggest question in American politics: What the hell happened to that guy?

Whether we’re talking about a Trump-venerating senator like (onetime John McCain acolyte) Lindsey Graham, an election-denying attorney like (onetime Al Gore lawyer) Kenneth Chesebro or just some random converted MAGA acolyte in the St. Louis suburbs, the journey from comfort in the mainstream to aggrievement on the margins is one of the most fascinating evolutions in today’s society. Carlson still may be the highest-profile example, even without 3.21 million nightly Fox viewers.

In our gridlocked country, there are few people who seem willing to change their mind — and even fewer actual players who ever change their brand. Is the new incarnation real, or just convenient? Were its antecedents always present, hidden beneath the conventions of an earlier day? Did something trigger the evolution? And what has the change done to the person’s relationships? It’s a story I’d like to read, whether or not its subject was a big shot, and whether or not the book was a bestseller.