Tucker Carlson Denies Report That Ron DeSantis Got Inappropriate With His Dog, Does Not Deny Claim He Thinks DeSantis Is a “Fascist”

In his new book out this month, The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty, veteran reporter Michael Wolff not surprisingly devotes a significant amount of time to the topic of star prime-time host turned unceremoniously fired guy Tucker Carlson. For instance, what does Carlson think of 2024 presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis and would he and his wife, Susie, ever willingly spend time with the governor of Florida? According to Wolff, the answers to those questions are (1) Carlson thinks DeSantis is a “fascist” and (2) the former TV show host and his wife would rather socialize with literally anyone else on earth, and given the choice between being in a room with DeSantis and being in a room with, say, Pol Pot, would choose Pol Pot. 

Yes, in an excerpt published by New York magazine today, Wolff writes: 

There had been quiet urgings at Fox for Carlson to be open-minded about Murdoch’s favored candidate. By early spring 2023, this had culminated in the DeSantises coming to lunch at the Carlsons’ home in Boca Grande, an exclusive community on Florida’s Gasparilla Island…. Carlson put DeSantis’s fate to a focus group of one: his wife. When they lived in Washington, Susie Carlson wouldn’t even see politicians. Carlson himself may have known everyone, dirtied himself for a paycheck, but not his wife. In her heart, it was 1985 and still a Wasp world, absent people, in Susie Carlson’s description and worldview, who were “impolite, hyperambitious, fraudulent.” She had no idea what was happening in the news and no interest in it. Her world was her children, her dogs, and the books she was reading. So the DeSantises were put to the Susie Carlson test.

They failed it miserably. They had a total inability to read the room—one with a genteel, stay-at-home woman, here in her own house. For two hours, Ron DeSantis sat at her table talking in an outdoor voice indoors, failing to observe any basics of conversational ritual or propriety, reeling off an unself-conscious list of his programs and initiatives and political accomplishments. Impersonal, cold, uninterested in anything outside of himself. The Carlsons are dog people with four spaniels, the progeny of other spaniels they have had before, who sleep in their bed. DeSantis pushed the dog under the table. Had he kicked the dog? Susie Carlson’s judgment was clear: She did not ever want to be anywhere near anybody like that ever again. Her husband agreed. DeSantis, in Carlson’s view, was a “fascist.” Forget Ron DeSantis.

In a text to Insider, Carlson insisted, of the dog story: “This is absurd. He never touched my dog, obviously.” Yet it does not appear that he denied Wolff’s claim that he thinks DeSantis is a “fascist” or that he and his wife were so repulsed by the governor that their takeaway from the lunch was that they never “want to be anywhere near anybody like that ever again.” Which suggests that Wolff got that detail exactly right. 

Of course, the idea that Carlson—who has used the words “moderate,” “sensible,” and “wise” to describe aspiring authoritarian Donald Trump—would take issue with DeSantis’s fascist tendencies is extremely rich. In March, not long before he was fired, the Fox News host was devoting large parts of his show to the lie that January 6, i.e. an attempt to overturn the results of a free and fair election, was much ado about nothing, and that the rioters who attacked the US Capitol, “were not insurrectionists” but “sightseers.” (To be fair, as we learned via the Dominion case against Fox, what Carlson thinks and says in private and what he says on air are two very different things.)

Elsewhere in the book, according to the Daily Beast, Wolff reports that Fox boss Rupert Murdoch, when told of Sean Hannity’s on-air defense about the network’s postelection coverage, responded: “He’s retarded, like most Americans”; that Murdoch’s fourth wife, Jerry Hall, accused him of being a “homophobe” during lunch with friends; and that eldest Murdoch son and Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch, wipes his ass with Trump’s face—literally. “In the run-up to the 2016 election, the bathrooms at [Lachlan’s] house featured toilet paper with Trump’s face,” Wolff reportedly writes.

In a statement, a Fox News spokesperson told the Daily Beast: “The fact that the last book by this author was spoofed in a Saturday Night Live skit is really all we need to know.” Speaking to Insider, a spokesman for DeSantis claimed the anecdote about the governor’s lunch with Carlson “is absurd and false,” adding: “Some will say or write anything to attack Ron DeSantis because they know he presents a threat to their worldview.”