Opinion | The Strange Afterlife of Tucker Carlson

On Saturday night in Hershey, Pa., JD Vance will participate in one of the more unusual political events of this presidential campaign. Several thousand people — almost all of whom have paid for the privilege, some as much as $1,600 — will pack into a hockey arena to watch the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson interview Mr. Vance, the Republican Party’s vice-presidential nominee.

The money made from the event will not go to the Trump campaign but to Mr. Carlson’s new media company, which made headlines earlier this month when Mr. Carlson aired — and praised — the views of a Nazi apologist historian who has argued that concentration camps were a “humane” solution to widespread hunger. “Didn’t expect Tucker Carlson to become an outlet for Nazi apologetics, but here we are,” the conservative talk radio host Erick Erickson wrote on X.

Even as Democrats and Republicans denounced Mr. Carlson, Mr. Vance refused to join the chorus, declaring that he would still appear with Mr. Carlson in Hershey because “we believe in free speech and debate.”

But Mr. Vance’s decision to stand with Mr. Carlson isn’t about free speech or even loyalty. Instead, it’s a stark reminder of where power resides in the Make America Great Again movement, and where it will likely stay in the years to come. And it’s not with JD Vance.

Mr. Carlson had the highest-rated show in the history of cable news, and when he was abruptly fired from Fox News last year, it was widely assumed he would fade from relevance. He did — for many Americans, especially liberals. After his disappearance from Fox News’s lineup, the army of liberal media monitors devoted to chronicling his every provocation and outrage turned their attention elsewhere. The Tucker Carlson content farm went fallow.

But he didn’t go away. Six weeks after leaving Fox News, he debuted a new show on the social media platform then known as Twitter (now X); last December he launched the Tucker Carlson Network, a streaming service that today claims to have over 400,000 paid subscribers. Mr. Carlson’s podcast now regularly sits in the top five of Spotify’s weekly podcast rankings and occasionally even beats “The Joe Rogan Experience” for the top spot.

The people who are still paying attention to Mr. Carlson are getting an even more extreme version of him than the one they saw on Fox News. No longer subject to the guardrails of a publicly traded media company or even nominal corporate supervision, Mr. Carlson has further descended into the fever swamps. He’s described Ukraine’s Jewish president Volodymyr Zelensky as “ratlike” and a “persecutor of Christians,” accused Harvard of advocating “white genocide” and alleged that Jeffrey Epstein was murdered and former Attorney General Bill Barr covered it up.

Unlike Alex Jones and other prominent promulgators of conspiracy theories and unhinged rhetoric, who began their careers on, and still present themselves as, the fringe, Mr. Carlson, who looks and sounds exactly as he did when he was on Fox News, possesses a certain trustworthiness, even gravitas. That makes him much more persuasive — and dangerous. In the days after Mr. Carlson interviewed Darryl Cooper, the Nazi apologist whom he praised as “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States,” Mr. Cooper’s own podcast surpassed Mr. Carlson’s as the top-ranked show on the Apple podcast chart.

Mr. Carlson also continues to exercise power and influence in less public ways. When Donald Trump was president, Mr. Carlson was the rare Fox News host who didn’t luxuriate in easy access to the Oval Office. Wary of getting too personally close to Mr. Trump — whom he considered a “demonic force,” as he wrote in one text message that was later revealed in the Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit against Fox News — Mr. Carlson sometimes refused to take Mr. Trump’s phone calls. Instead, he wrote his monologues and booked his guests with the intention of influencing Mr. Trump, knowing full well that the president would be watching. Through his Fox News show, Mr. Carlson nuked multiple cabinet and sub-cabinet appointments, goaded the administration into sending federal troops to Portland, Ore., to crack down on antiracism protests, and at one point even managed to stop a planned missile strike on Iran.

Today, Mr. Carlson recognizes that Mr. Trump does not have the wherewithal to listen to a two-hour-plus podcast. Whatever personal distaste he may have once have felt toward the former president, he now communicates with him more directly — by text message, on the phone and in person. Mr. Carlson was a crucial advocate of Mr. Vance when Mr. Trump was deciding on a running mate. In June, after receiving word that Mr. Trump was leaning away from Mr. Vance and toward Senator Marco Rubio of Florida or Governor Doug Burgum of North Dakota, Mr. Carlson reportedly called Mr. Trump from Australia, where he was on a speaking tour. He warned Mr. Trump that Mr. Rubio and Mr. Burgum were neocons who supported military adventurism overseas. If Mr. Trump chose one of them for his running mate, Mr. Carlson said, U.S. intelligence agencies would try to assassinate him. And it was Mr. Carlson who connected Robert Kennedy Jr. with Mr. Trump on a three-way text chain in July; six weeks later, Mr. Kennedy dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump has returned these favors. Mr. Carlson was invited to speak at the Republican National Convention, and Mr. Trump has given Mr. Carlson’s production team full access for a behind-the-scenes docuseries about the Trump campaign that will stream on TCN. Far from fading away, Mr. Carlson has managed to remain at the center of the MAGA movement.

When Mr. Trump added Mr. Vance to the G.O.P. ticket, it seemed as if he was not so much picking a running mate as anointing an heir. Mr. Vance, just 39 years old, with a populist, pugilistic streak that matches Mr. Trump’s own, but with an intellectual heft that the former president has never possessed, appeared poised to lead the MAGA movement once the 78-year-old Mr. Trump exits the stage. But Mr. Vance’s bumbling performance as the party’s vice-presidential nominee — doubling down on the phrase “childless cat ladies” on one day, trying and disastrously failing to make small talk with a doughnut shop employee on another — has revealed him to be a surprisingly poor political athlete.

Mr. Carlson, by contrast, displays no such shortcomings. As he crisscrosses the country on a 16-city tour that stops in Hershey on Saturday, he remains a charismatic presence. Just as crucially, he appears to be one of the few people who’s capable of knitting together the disparate groups of anti-establishment and disaffected Americans that Mr. Trump has been trying to bring into the Republican fold in his third presidential campaign. Special guests on Mr. Carlson’s tour, in addition to Mr. Vance, include Mr. Jones, Mr. Kennedy, Tulsi Gabbard, Kid Rock and Russell Brand. Other than Mr. Trump himself, it’s difficult to imagine these figures uniting behind any other person; likewise, it’s easy to imagine them (and, more important, their followers and fans) turning to Mr. Carlson once Mr. Trump is gone.

On Mr. Vance’s last visit to the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania in late August, he drew a few hundred people to a rally in Erie. On Saturday in Hershey, he’ll speak to thousands. But it will be Mr. Carlson, not Mr. Vance, whom the MAGA faithful are there to see.

Jason Zengerle is a contributing writer at The Times Magazine.

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