Caller was paid $150,000 by Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign for its list of subscribers, whom the Trump campaign then emailed at least 25 times. The CMD said Carlson had a conflict of interest and had violated journalistic standards. In June 2020, Carlson sold his one-third stake in The Daily Caller to Patel for an undisclosed amount and said “Neil [Patel] runs it. I wasn't adding anything. So we made it official". Writing Carlson authored the memoir Politicians, Partisans and Parasites: My Adventures in Cable News, published by Warner Books in September 2003, about his television news experiences. It received favorable reviews from Publishers Weekly and the Washingtonian, who both complimented the book for its humor. In May 2017, Carlson, represented by the literary and creative agency Javelin, signed an eight-figure, two-book deal with Simon & Schuster's conservative imprint, Threshold Editions. His first book in the series, Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution, was released in October 2018, and debuted at No.1 on The New York Times Best Seller list. His second book, The Long Slide: Thirty Years in American Journalism, was released in August 2021. Political views Carlson has been described in the media as a conservative or paleoconservative. In 2021, Time magazine said Carlson "may be the most powerful conservative in America". Writing for New York magazine's Intelligencer in 2019, Park MacDougald called Carlson a "Middle American radical", which he described as someone who holds populist economic beliefs; hostility to corporatocracy; fervent positions on nationalism, race, and immigration; and a preference for a strong U.S. president. MacDougald identified this form of radicalism as the ideological core of Trumpism. Carlson is noted for circulating white nationalist views and terminology into mainstream political discourse, in particular, repackaging the fringe racist "replacement" conspiracy theory into a version that accuses Democrats and "elites" of forcing demographic change. More virulent versions of the conspiracy theory have been cited by gunmen in several mass shootings targeting minorities; Carlson has denounced the attacks. Carlson is a Republican. He was previously registered as a Democrat in Washington, D.C., from 2006 to 2020. In 2017, Carlson said his registration as a Democrat was to gain the right to vote in the primaries for mayoral elections in the district, and that he nevertheless "sincerely despise[s]" the Democratic party and "always vote[d] for the more corrupt candidate over the