Carlson has a knack for making any view, no matter how widespread or advantageous, seem like a brave rebellion. Photograph by Philip Montgomery for The New Yorker

Tucker Carlson started wearing a bow tie in 1984, when he was in tenth grade at St. George’s, a Rhode Island prep school with a dress code. He stopped wearing a bow tie on April 11, 2006, acknowledging the change in the final minutes of the show he hosted on MSNBC. “I like bow ties, and I certainly spent a lot of time defending them,” he said. “But, from now on, I’m going without.” The affectation had come to define him: Carlson was primarily known—and, in no small number of television households, reviled—as the self-assured young conservative who dressed like a spelling-bee champion. MSNBC advertised his program with posters that read, “The Man. The Legend. The Bow Tie.” He had been wearing a bow tie when, in 2004, Jon Stewart paid him a visit on CNN, to tell him that “Crossfire,” which Carlson was then co-hosting, was “hurting America,” and to call him a “dick.” And Carlson wore one again during a disastrous appearance on “Dancing with the Stars,” in which he was eliminated after his first routine, a semi-stationary cha-cha.

At MSNBC, the producers had spent months asking Carlson to abandon the tie, because they felt that it encouraged the audience to view him as a character, or perhaps a caricature. But the change in wardrobe wasn’t enough to save the show, which was cancelled two years later. It wasn’t even enough to alter the public perception of Carlson, who seems like the kind of guy who would wear a bow tie, even when he doesn’t. Unemployed at forty, Carlson launched a scrappy Web site, the Daily Caller, which published exposés, conservative opinion, and clickbait, such as “Jennifer Love Hewitt’s Cleavage: A History.”

What followed is one of the most unlikely comebacks in the annals of cable news. While Carlson was running the Daily Caller, he also served as a contributor to Fox News, where he became increasingly visible. On Fox, his disdain for liberal piety was less anomalous than his manner. He had begun his career as a waggish writer for the conservative Weekly Standard, and his television segments tended to be wittier and shrewder than his competitors’. The job required some amount of partisan invective, which Carlson was happy enough to supply, but he did not always manage to hide his opinion of politicians in general, which is rather low—or, as he might say, in his unplaceable high-preppy accent, rawther low.

Last fall, he once again became the host of his own show, “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” which began its run at 7 P.M. and then, in January, moved to 9 P.M., to fill the space formerly occupied by Megyn Kelly, who had defected from Fox News to NBC. The promotion was a surprise—Carlson had been hanging around the cable-news industry for far too long to be considered a rising star—and so, too, was the result. Buoyed by the election of Donald Trump, and the attendant explosion of interest in political news, Carlson drew even better ratings than Kelly had. Where Kelly had conducted a long and lopsided feud with Trump—she was relatively skeptical of him, he was absolutely cruel toward her—Carlson thought Trump was refreshing, not least because of his habit of making enemies on the left and the right. Carlson’s show was a success both on television and online, where clips of his segments, which are frequently and sometimes obnoxiously disputatious, are reborn as viral videos. The format is simple: Carlson prefers to talk to one person at a time, eschewing the “Brady Bunch” grids that many cable-news shows use to fill the screen with noise and drama. Often, watching the segments feels like stumbling into a Twitter argument, even though Carlson himself dislikes Twitter.

In many ways, Carlson is a throwback, and a contradiction: a fierce critic of the political and cultural establishment who is also, unapologetically, a member of it. He has endless disdain for the Washington élite and its conventional wisdom, including the belief—widespread among political insiders—that Washington stinks. He moved there in 1992 with his wife, Susie, and they have lived there, happily, virtually ever since. “Everyone I love is here,” he says. Carlson broadcasts from the drab Washington office of Fox News, halfway between Union Station and the Capitol, and one night he was accompanied by the sound of heavy machinery. “You may hear construction noise behind us during this show,” he said. “That’s because there is construction going on. There always is, in Washington, the richest city in America. We want to thank you for that, for sending your tax dollars here.” He smiled. “Still, it’s a pretty nice place.”

Carlson is forty-seven, and though he was formerly what one friend calls a “pretty heroic” drinker, he says that he quit in 2002, having decided that neither the pleasant nights nor the unpleasant mornings were improving his life. A few years earlier, he had given up smoking—cowed into submission, he once wrote, by “the dark forces of Health.” There is, alas, no substitute for alcohol, but for cigarettes there is nicotine gum, a product that Carlson buys, in bulk, from New Zealand, where it is sold in satisfactorily easy-to-open packaging. He chews constantly, stopping only to be filmed or to eat; he likes long lunches, during which he observes a not-entirely-strict proscription against carbohydrates.

One recent afternoon, he settled into a booth at the Monocle, a Washington establishment distinguished chiefly by its proximity to the Senate buildings. He seemed pleased to be accosted by staff and patrons alike, feigning surprise at every compliment.

One woman told him that she loved his show, and that she worked for Senator Marco Rubio. “Will you tell him to come on?” he asked.

“You’re scary, though,” she said.

“I’m not scary,” he said, brightly.

Once she was gone, Carlson said that he really does struggle to book politicians, especially ones—like Rubio, perhaps—who maintain an artful ambiguity about some of their positions. “I think you should say what you think,” he said. “I understand the practical reasons why you wouldn’t, but I still think it’s cowardly.” This, of course, is another reason that politicians might want to avoid Carlson’s show: he knows that one easy way to look courageous is to call someone cowardly, especially on television. As the show’s profile has increased, so has a certain reticence among potential guests. “It’s very hard to get people to come on,” he says. “I would love to have senators every night. I only want to debate people who are more powerful than I am.”

Like most of the big names at Fox News, Carlson is known for criticizing Democrats, but, with Republicans in control of the White House and both houses of Congress, there are fewer obvious targets than there used to be. On many nights, Carlson’s viewers watch what looks like a mismatch, as he interrogates some liberal opponent who seems unfamiliar with television—and, sometimes, unfamiliar with politics. (During one surreal segment, in February, he tried to debate the merits of an anti-Trump protest with an actor from Los Angeles who had no substantive connection with the organizers.) Part of the appeal of Carlson’s show is its tendency to generate knockouts rather than split decisions. His unofficial Reddit page features pictures of guests judged to have performed especially poorly; over each face is written “Wasted,” the word that signals total collapse in the Grand Theft Auto video games. Andrew Ferguson, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard, remembers once marvelling at Carlson’s ability to turn out well-wrought magazine prose, but he is not a fan of the show. “He’s on a network that I think is kind of disreputable, and I think he’s better than that,” Ferguson says. “To me, it’s just cringe-making. You get some poor little columnist from the Daily Oregonian who said Trump was Hitler, and you beat the shit out of him for ten minutes.”