Tucker Carlson may be the most divisive man in America, a human tuning fork vibrating at frequencies that delight half of the country and drive the other half demented. Few public figures inspire such simultaneous loyalty and loathing. To his admirers, he’s a truth-teller with a preternatural instinct for cultural anxiety. To his critics, he’s a fabulist with a talent for setting fires and selling the smoke. This tension – this strange mix of menace and magnetism – is what Jason Zengerle captures in Hated by All the Right People, a biography that becomes, almost inevitably, a portrait of the contemporary conservative movement itself.
This is Carlson’s gift: to move with the current while insisting he is swimming against it
The book opens with a scene almost too cinematic to believe: Carlson slipping quietly into Mar-a-Lago through a side entrance, determined to get Donald Trump to take Covid seriously. It’s Carlson as unlikely statesman, warning the President about ventilators and viral spread. The detail is both absurd and telling. This was a man who had spent years mocking elites, suddenly auditioning as their emergency conscience. And yet the moment lands with a kind of melancholy because Carlson realizes, after two hours of earnest pleading, that he has failed. Trump is unmoved. Carlson walks out knowing the mission has failed: a mission that may have been impossible from the start.
That moment becomes the hinge of Zengerle’s narrative. The Tucker who tries to save Trump from himself soon becomes the Tucker who pulls away – only to return during Trump’s second rise, no longer conflicted but fully committed. In private, on January 6, 2021, he fumes that Trump is “a demonic force, a destroyer.” Four years later, he’s not merely back at Mar-a-Lago, but broadcasting from it on election night, waving through guests as they file past a giant portrait of a young Donald in tennis whites. This is Carlson’s gift: to move with the current while insisting he is swimming against it.
One of Zengerle’s sharpest insights is that Carlson’s political evolution has always been entwined with his professional one. The book’s title comes from Carlson’s admiring comment to Hungary’s right-wing Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán: “You’re hated by all the right people.” That line, tossed out with characteristic swagger, becomes an operating principle. Carlson builds a persona calibrated to provoke. A populist who lives among the powerful; an anti-elitist who dines with billionaires; a champion of forgotten Americans who broadcasts from private clubs. Zengerle lays out the contradictions and lets the reader enjoy the dissonance.
Zengerle, a New York Times journalist, is also unexpectedly generous when it comes to Carlson’s early life. Long before he was the smirking face of prime-time cable, Carlson was a genuinely gifted magazine writer with a sharp wit and an enviable work ethic. The young Tucker, bow-tied and mischievous, wandered Washington with a contrarian’s delight. He treated politics as pure performance, filling his early pieces with bright, curious portraits rather than battle cries. He was Hunter S. Thompson by way of prep school – rebellion in a blazer and loafers that never saw a scuff. His colleagues liked him. His talent was obvious. His trajectory seemed one of literary prestige, not fire-breathing monologues at 8 p.m.
Then television came calling. And as Zengerle shows, it didn’t transform Carlson overnight. Instead, it wore him down slowly, like Chinese water torture. He’d once mocked cable news as shallow and silly, a playground built for intellectual lightweights. But the pay was excellent, and the attention was addictive. The path wasn’t paved so much as booby-trapped. His show on CNN sputtered, and his experiment on MSNBC didn’t fare much better. He eventually found himself doing weekend cooking segments on Fox, a humiliation so ridiculous it could have aired on SNL.
And yet failure shaped him. It forced him into corners he might never have explored at the height of his confidence. When Trump arrived, Carlson recognized his opportunity instantly. He understood the populist mood, not abstractly but instinctively. He reinvented himself once more, this time successfully. Tucker Carlson Tonight became the most-watched cable news show in the country, powered more by the Californian’s provocations than by any promise of moderation. Carlson had found the perfect ecosystem for his talents: a medium that rewarded distrust, drama and dark humor. Zengerle’s writing is clear and measured, but he allows himself moments of amusement. His description of Carlson’s later years is particularly acute, whether it’s advising Trump on potential assassinations by intelligence agencies, comparing America to a “hormone-addled 15-year-old girl” or mocking Kamala Harris with lines so offbeat (he called her the “first Samoan-Malaysian, low-IQ, former California prosecutor”) they feel like political vaudeville.
Still, the book resists easy conclusions. Zengerle doesn’t call Carlson a hypocrite, though the evidence warrants it. Nor does he depict him as tragic. Instead, he presents him as someone enabled and galvanized by the same forces that transformed American politics: grievance, nastiness, the loss of shared narratives and a media world that rewards maximum outrage with minimum respect for facts. Carlson is less a rogue actor than a symptom, a signpost showing where a fractured system tends to lead.
What makes the biography compelling is its sense of proportion. Zengerle neither flatters nor demonizes. He pays attention to the machinery around Carlson: the billionaires who fund him, the audiences who adore him, the critics who amplify him by reacting exactly as he intends. He understands that Carlson’s influence isn’t simply a matter of rhetoric but of resonance. People respond to his tone – pleading, mocking, conspiratorial, amused – because it feels like a release valve for a pressure they can’t name.
What makes the biography compelling is its sense of proportion. Zengerle neither flatters nor demonizes
By the end, Hated by All the Right People reads less like the story of one man and more like the chronicle of an era in which the public learned to crave entertainment above all else, with Carlson playing a modern-day P.T. Barnum. A master craftsman of the modern political monologue, Carlson is part preacher, part provocateur, part late-night storyteller.
Zengerle’s book leaves you unsettled not because of what it reveals about Carlson, but because of what Carlson reveals about America: a country so polarized that being “hated by all the right people” now counts as a résumé boast – and perhaps even a political philosophy.
In the end, Carlson emerges not as an enigma but as something more potent – a reminder that influence in America is no longer measured by agreement but by animosity, and that the man who courts the most outrage often wins the game. And Carlson, as this compelling and persuasive book makes clear, has always played to win.
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