Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson is pushing back on claims in a new book that Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had pushed and may have even kicked his dog.
Mr. DeSantis’s alleged assault on Mr. Carlson’s canine is described in the forthcoming book “The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty” by author Michael Wolff. Mr. Wolff described the alleged incident in an excerpt of his book, published by New York Magazine on Wednesday.
According to Mr. Wolff’s book, Fox News had urged Mr. Carlson—then still with Fox News—to stay “open-minded” about Mr. DeSantis, whom the book describes as Fox News founder Rupert Murdoch’s favored candidate. Mr. Carlson reportedly had the Florida governor over for lunch, but the experience reportedly caused a rift between the Fox News host and Mr. DeSantis. According to Mr. Wolff, the Florida governor “had a total inability to read the room,” and drew the ire of Mr. Carlson’s wife, Susie Carlson.
According to the excerpt from the new book:
“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.'”
The former Fox News host was quick to dispute Mr. Wolff’s claims.
“This is absurd,” Mr. Carlson said in a statement to Insider. “He never touched my dog, obviously.”
Mr. Carlson disputed the alleged incident in yet another statement he shared with Daily Wire. “It’s totally made up. Ridiculous actually.”
The DeSantis campaign has also denied Mr. Wolff’s claim.
The totality of that story is absurd and false,” DeSantis campaign communications director Andrew Romeo told RealClearNews on Wednesday. “Some will say or write anything to attack Ron DeSantis because they know he presents a threat to their worldview. But rest assured that as president the one thing he will squarely kick is the DC elitists in both parties either under or over the table, and that’s why they are so desperately fighting back.”
Author’s Past Work Challenged
The sourcing for the alleged altercation between Mr. Carlson’s dog and the Florida governor is unclear. In its official blurb for Mr. Wolff’s latest work, publisher Macmillan indicates Mr. Wolff’s latest work comes as the result of his “unprecedented access to the Murdoch family and key players in the world of Fox,” and yet the excerpt Mr. Wolff published with New York Magazine provides few clues about how he came by this disputed account of the meeting between Mr. DeSantis and the Carlson family.
NTD News reached out to Mr. Wolff for comment, but the author did not respond by the time this article was published.
Mr. Wolff’s past work has come under scrutiny. In January of 2018, following the release of another of his book “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” the fact-checking site Politifact noted some basic factual errors in the book, such as that House Speaker John Boehner resigned from Congress in 2011, rather than when he actually stepped down in 2015. Mr. Wolff also wrote that President Donald Trump didn’t know who Mr. Boehner was in 2016 despite having disparaged Mr. Boehner in a 2015 tweet.
Trump White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee-Sanders criticized “Fire and Fury” in a January 2018 White House press briefing, saying the book is “completely tabloid gossip full of false and fraudulent claims.”
President Trump also said in a January 2018 post on Twitter (know called X), that “Fire and Fury” is “full of lies.” President Trump also insisted he never authorized Mr. Wolff to have White House access and personally turned him down for the book idea on multiple occasions, an assertion at odds with Mr. Wolff’s own claims that President Trump was full of flattery when he asked for White House access to work on the book.
President Trump’s legal team sent a letter demanding a stop to the release of “Fire and Fury” and threatening to sue for libel. The 2018 letter (pdf) states Mr. Wolff’s 2018 book “appears to cite to no sources for many of its most damaging statements about Mr. Trump.” In response to the 2018 lawsuit a lawyer representing Mr. Wolff and his publisher wrote (pdf) that Trump’s legal team could point to no specific false claim and wrote “my clients do not intend to cease publication, no such retraction will occur, and no apology is warranted.”
NTD News reached out for comment from Henry Holt and Company, the Macmillan subsidiary that published “The Fall.”
Marian Brown, a spokesperson for Henry Holt and Company, said “We stand by what’s in the book.” Ms. Brown did not answer specific questions about what steps the publishing company took to verify the claims in Mr. Wolff’s latest book.