Tucker Carlson is doing just fine post-Fox News — sort of. Instead of slick, exciting, tinfoil hat broadcasts powered by Fox News might five nights a week, he now occasionally drops low-energy, underwatched rants without any music or talks to sleepy autocrats about the beach. Still, he’s doing better than he was in late April, when he was abruptly fired. In fact, in his final stretch there, he was so uncertain about his future he figured his only possible next step was to run for president.
New York Magazine released a segment from Michael Wolff’s new book The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty, which features a fun little insight into Carlson’s mindset in his final stretch at the conservative news network. In a bit teased out by Raw Story, Carlson, Wolff writes, was “aware that voices in the Murdoch family were relentlessly campaigning to have him fired — and that there was a not-small chance he would be.”
At the same time he was being pressured by Fox News to go all-in on Meatball DeSantis. It was then that he came up with an outside-the-box choice for who to support for the 2024 GOP presidential ticket.
“If the field was Trump, DeSantis, and various hopeful brand builders and gadflies, then Carlson, the second-most-famous person on the right — with that new political X factor, a television persona — might realistically become a true MAGA-friendly Trump alternative himself,” Wolff writes. “Once you saw it, the logic was undeniable.”
And so, while examining the underwhelming post-Fox News careers of superstars who’d left or been fired — among them Bill O’Reilly, Megyn Kelly, Glenn Beck, etc. — his “only alternative,” he decided, “might be to run for president.”
Wolff adds, “There it was, absent a note of irony: He could be unemployable but for the presidency.”
Alas, Rupert Murdoch was nonplussed when he learned of Carlson’s presidential aspirations, however inchoate. He blamed his son Lachlan for not properly controlling the increasingly conspiracy theory-friendly Carlson, telling friends bitterly, “My son wants his own president.” Murdoch even summarized Carlson’s chances with two words, the same he long ago used on Trump: “Won’t happen.’