Tucker Carlson

Tucker Carlson (born 1969, San Francisco, California, U.S.) is an American conservative political pundit who from 2016 to 2023 was the host of Tucker Carlson Tonight on the Fox News Channel. At its zenith, the show was watched by more than four million people nightly, a record for a cable television show. The show is credited with helping to bring far-right perspectives into the mainstream of American politics.

Carlson used the platform to espouse extreme positions on topics such as race, immigration, and authoritarianism and to influence Pres. Donald Trump, who was a regular viewer of the show. He has also been accused of spreading misinformation and disinformation. Despite its continued popularity, the show was canceled in April 2023 after Fox News settled a $787.5 million defamation lawsuit that alleged that Fox News segments—including some featuring Carlson—promoted false claims that Dominion Voting Systems machines were involved in fraud and cost Trump the 2020 election.

Early life and education

Tucker Carlson and his younger brother, Buckley, were born to Richard Warner Carlson, a media executive, and Lisa McNear Lombardi Carlson, an artist. When Tucker Carlson was 6 years old, his mother left the family; she ultimately settled in France, where she died in 2011. Carlson and his brother never saw her again. After their parents divorced, the boys moved with their father to La Jolla, California. When Carlson was 10 years old, his father married Patricia Swanson, whose family had owned the Swanson food company.

The brothers went to high school at St. George’s School, a private boarding school in Rhode Island. It was there that Carlson met his future wife, Susan Andrews, a fellow student and the daughter of the school’s headmaster. He graduated from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, with a degree in history in 1991.

Career in journalism and television

After college, Carlson sought to join the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) but was rejected. On the advice of his father, a journalist who at one time led the Voice of America, Carlson turned to journalism, taking a position as a fact-checker for the conservative journal Policy Review and later writing op-eds for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in Little Rock, Arkansas. In 1995 he joined the staff of The Weekly Standard, a conservative opinion magazine cofounded that year by William Kristol.

He later wrote numerous columns, opinion pieces, profiles, and other articles for publications such as Esquire, The New Republic, Forbes, Slate, New York Magazine, The Atlantic, and The Wall Street Journal. His 2003 Esquire article “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,” which recounted a trip to Liberia he had taken with Al Sharpton and other activists and intellectuals, was nominated for a National Magazine Award.

Carlson first appeared on television in 1995, when he was interviewed by the CBS newscaster Dan Rather about the O.J. Simpson trial. He thereafter appeared regularly as a conservative commentator on various news and political programs. In 2000 he became the cohost of a new CNN show, The Spin Room, which was soon canceled because of low ratings. In 2001 he was invited to cohost Crossfire—another CNN show, which had premiered in 1982—with Paul Begala, a Democratic strategist and political commentator. In a Crossfire interview with Carlson and Begala in October 2004, Jon Stewart, then the host of the political satire program The Daily Show, declared that both hosts were “political hacks” who were “hurting America” by engaging in partisan political theater. Three months later Crossfire was canceled by CNN’s president, who said in an interview that he agreed with Stewart’s assessment of the show.

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Carlson then moved to MSNBC, where his next show, Tucker, ran until 2008. In 2009 Carlson landed at Fox News Channel as a commentator and guest host. There he would find a consistent audience and vault himself onto the national stage. In 2016 Tucker Carlson Tonight debuted and was an immediate success in terms of viewership, eventually becoming one of the most popular news programs in the history of cable television.

In 2010 Carlson and Neil Patel, a Republican political adviser who had been Carlson’s roommate at Trinity College, founded The Daily Caller, a conservative news and commentary website. Seeking to increase its viewership among the far right, the site soon began publishing unsupported attacks on Democratic leaders, false criticisms of liberal causes, and popular conspiracy theories. The site also became known for its promotion of racist and sexist stereotypes. In 2020 Carlson sold his ownership stake in The Daily Caller to Patel.

The rise—and fall—of Tucker Carlson Tonight

Tucker Carlson Tonight premiered soon after Trump’s election to the U.S. presidency in November 2016. The format of the show involved one-on-one interviews with guests in which Carlson discussed current events from a far-right perspective—one that many critics, including some conservatives, considered extreme. Carlson often questioned whether efforts to protect the civil rights of non-white Americans were part of a larger liberal scheme to blame white people for the problems of minority communities. At one point Carlson warned his viewers that protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis, Minnesota, were “not about Black lives, and remember that when they come for you.”

Carlson’s discussion of U.S. immigration policy was similarly controversial, often focusing, without evidence, on Republican claims that immigrants from Latin America were depriving U.S. citizens of jobs, burdening the country’s social welfare system, and increasing the country’s crime rate.

Carlson supported many, though not all, of Trump’s early positions and policies, such as his ban on immigration from most majority-Muslim countries, his plan to build a wall along the border between the United States and Mexico, and his denial of climate change. Carlson also shared Trump’s deference toward, and admiration for, authoritarian leaders of other countries, including Pres. Vladimir Putin of Russia and Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary.

In early 2020, at the start of the deadly COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, Carlson warned his viewers about the dangers of the virus and reportedly succeeded in persuading Trump to take the virus seriously. Soon afterward, however, Carlson began criticizing the public safety measures undertaken to limit the spread of the virus and questioned the safety of the vaccines. At one point he falsely claimed that Anthony Fauci, the director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, had created the virus and was responsible for its spread in the United States.

Following Trump’s defeat in the presidential election of 2020, the president and many Republicans protested that the election had been “stolen” by Democrats through massive voter fraud—a claim for which there was no serious evidence. Carlson endorsed these accusations, though not always in the same terms or in the same detail. In response to the storming of the U.S. Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters on January 6, 2021—an attack that aimed to prevent Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory—Carlson advanced another baseless conspiracy theory, this time alleging that the attack was not a genuine insurrection but merely a “false flag” operation by the FBI.

In 2023, as part of a lawsuit against the Fox News Channel alleging that the network had knowingly aired false claims charging Dominion with rigging the 2020 presidential election to ensure Biden’s victory, hundreds of internal communications by network hosts and executives were made public. Among them were texts by Carlson in which he dismissed the stolen-election theory, expressed his strong dislike of Trump, and strongly criticized the network’s upper management. In April Fox News Channel agreed to settle the lawsuit and cut ties with Carlson.

Other allegations

Always a lightning rod for controversy, Carlson has seen his words and actions come back to haunt him. For instance, in 2019 Media Matters for America, a site that describes itself as tracking “conservative misinformation,” published audio from a Florida radio program that Carlson appeared on as a guest from 2006 to 2011. The audio featured Carlson disparaging Iraqis, Muslims, and women and calling into question the racial identity of Barack Obama. Carlson used his TV show to say he was being assaulted by a digital media mob.

In 2023, after Carlson had left Fox News, the company paid $12 million to settle a lawsuit brought by a former employee on Carlson’s show who alleged that the workplace was rampant with sexism and antisemitism.

Life after Fox News

In the wake of his split with Fox News, Carlson has tried to reach a sizable audience on other platforms, with mixed results. He started a show on X called Tucker on Twitter that featured Carlson’s monologues, the success of which is hard to gauge. But the podcast The Tucker Carlson Show was the most popular new podcast in Apple Podcasts’ 2024 year-end charts. In February 2024 Carlson did a more than two-hour interview with Putin, marking the first time in more than two years that a Western journalist had interviewed the Russian leader. The interview was heavily criticized for not pressing Putin on Russia’s war with Ukraine, human rights violations, and the imprisonment of Aleksey Navalny. Perhaps surprisingly, some of the criticism came from Putin himself, who told a Russian state television host that he was surprised Carlson had not come with more “so-called sharp questions.”

Carlson was again in the spotlight—and at Trump’s side—at the Republican National Convention in July 2024. He delivered a speech in prime time on the convention’s final night.

Personal life

Carlson and his wife, Susan, have four children together, three daughters and a son. In 2025 his son Buckley Carlson was named Vice Pres. J.D. Vance’s deputy press secretary.