WASHINGTON, D.C. — It’s four hours until “The Ingraham Angle” goes live, and Laura Ingraham is sitting in her office on the fifth floor of the Hall of the States, the TV to her right tuned to Fox, responding to a very important text.
“My daughter needs detergent,” Ingraham says, typing a rapid-fire response that reminds her oldest child, a college freshman, that she gets an allowance for precisely this sort of thing. “It never changes. They always need something.”
In this moment, Ingraham could be any other working mom with three kids, two dogs and an Instagram account populated with photos of gourds, mums and other autumn decor.
She’s anything but.
At 61, Ingraham is one of the longest-reigning media stars of the right, a woman who can get almost anyone on the phone that she likes, regardless of the era of the GOP they were in — from Pat Buchanan and Newt Gingrich, to Clarence Thomas to President-elect Donald Trump, who is pictured with Ingraham in a photo hanging on the wall of her modest office. Even wrestling star Hulk Hogan told Ingraham recently, “You might not be a fan of sports, but we are a fan of yours.”
Of course, there are also people whose blood pressure spikes at the mention of her name.
In a media career spanning more than three decades, Ingraham has been saying and writing provocative things since she was in college, and like other prominent hosts at Fox, she often makes news for controversial takes, such as a harsh social media post about Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg (which resulted in an advertiser boycott and an apology), remarks about immigration and COVID-19 restrictions, and a “dumb jock alert” in which she told basketball stars LeBron James and Kevin Durant to “shut up and dribble” after they criticized Trump.
On an episode of “Beat the Press” in Boston after the Hogg incident, former broadcast journalist Dan Lothian said, “If you went through all of her shows, you could probably find 10 things that could get people all riled up and cause advertisers to potentially pull out.”
On this particular day, however, there are no calls for a boycott. The election is in the nation’s rearview mirror, and tonight’s episode of “The Ingraham Angle” will focus on the trial of Daniel Penny, the New York man charged with manslaughter after a homeless man on a subway died in his chokehold. Ingraham will call him “an American who refused to sit back and do nothing when others were threatened,” and write on the the social media platform X, “The left sides with thugs over patriots,” pronouncing the case an example of “what’s wrong with the Democrat-run justice system.”
It is the sort of bellicose language that makes Americans who prefer nuance and politeness more than a little uncomfortable, but it’s gold for ratings. In the 5 p.m. MT slot on Fox, just ahead of Jesse Watters and Sean Hannity, Ingraham is thriving. In November, she garnered Tucker Carlson-esque numbers, more than 3.3 million viewers, making “The Ingraham Angle” the third-most popular program on the most popular network in cable news. In the current quarter, the show is the most-watched cable news show in her time slot, according to Nielsen Media Research data provided by Fox News.
Equally significant, Ingraham enjoys the respect of the man who is about to inhabit the White House again. They met nearly 30 years ago at a luncheon, and Donald Trump was a frequent guest on Ingraham’s radio show during his “The Apprentice” years. (”He was a hilarious guest,” she says.) Earlier this year, Trump said he’d like to see Ingraham as a presidential debate moderator, even though her sharp questioning of Trump and other conservatives at times makes for happy Democrats and Trump opponents.
DePauw University communications professor Jeffrey McCall said that despite the occasional controversy, Ingraham’s background brings an “intellectual heft” to her commentary.
“Laura covers most of the usual boilerplate right-leaning agenda items, but handles them without the rage sometimes found in conservative commentary. She does engage in snark and sarcasm, but maintains control, and even uses humor at times in making her points,” McCall said. He added that Ingraham has shown “staying power” over the years, with her long tenures in radio and at Fox. “My sense is that FNC is happy with her in her time slot and will be happy to leave her there for a while.”
I met with Ingraham at Fox’s D.C. bureau, which is in the same building that houses numerous other media outlets, including C-Span and NBC, and is in sight of the U.S. Capitol. Later that day, she’s agreed to let me watch the taping of her show in her private studio.
As on the air, Ingraham has a briskness about her that is endemic in the Northeast, and she comes by it naturally, having grown up in Connecticut and gone to college in New Hampshire. Then there’s the fact that she was trained as a litigator and was a rising star in a prestigious New York law firm before jumping off that train once she realized that she could make as good a living — and as it turns out, substantially better — in conservative media. Her Fox colleague Sean Hannity told the Deseret News in an email that Ingraham is “brilliant.”
“She has a lawyer’s analytical mind combined with a great sense of humor. Just a natural talent in every way imaginable,” Hannity said.
In a parallel universe, maybe another version of Laura Ingraham spends her days in a courtroom and her evenings hunched over briefs, like a more principled version of Kim Wexler on “Better Call Saul.” But in this one, Ingraham, wearing slacks and a sleeveless red top, is having her already perfect hair and makeup touched up just before she goes on the air in a strangely silent studio. It’s just her, a few guests and a producer in jeans who gives hand signals to count down to the instant when Fox viewers can see her. Ingraham will interact with her off-site guests via a television monitor and ear piece. Five, four, three, two, one.
The path to Fox
Ingraham grew up in a family of six in Glastonbury, Connecticut, and credits her parents — “Goldwater, old-style conservatives” who flew the American flag year-round — with instilling the conservative values that she has never veered from. But she was also paying attention to the larger world from childhood, and didn’t like what she saw under the Democratic leadership at the time.
“I lived through the Carter administration,” she said. “I remember the gas lines. I remember what a struggle that was. And we were very middle class, so all of that affected us as a family.” Ingraham’s mother was a waitress, her father owned a carwash; both have passed.
She remembers her father complaining about the bias of media outlets, back when there were only three major networks, plus public broadcasting. “Remember Walter Cronkite used to say, ‘And that’s the way it is’? I remember being little and hearing my father say, ‘No, Walt, that’s the way YOU say it is.’” She remembers her father also had a bumpersticker that said “Rather Not,” referring to broadcaster Dan Rather.
But although she grew up hearing contempt for mainstream media, before mainstream media was even a term, Ingraham says her parents weren’t overtly driven by partisanship. “I’m not sure they thought about (issues) as Republican and Democratic, but as just common sense,” she said.
Ingraham was in high school when Ronald Reagan was elected, and she remembers getting up on a table at the school “whooping it up” — “I might have gotten in trouble for that” — even though her hometown was largely Democratic and the Reagan supporters at Glastonbury High School then were pretty much just Ingraham “and a couple of kids from the math team.”
From there, she went to Dartmouth, where she became the first female editor of The Dartmouth Review, a conservative student publication founded by a National Review editor. (Dinesh D’Souza was the first student editor.) Her work with the Review opened doors that proved consequential. She interviewed future Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas (for whom she later clerked), conservative pundit Pat Buchanan and people in the Reagan administration. Even then, Ingraham said she was conscious of a “rank liberal bias” among many in Dartmouth’s faculty, and the Review staff saw themselves at battle with the “liberal status quo.”
After Dartmouth, and a stint as a speechwriter in the White House, she went south to the University of Virginia Law School, where she drove a car with a license plate that said “FARRIGHT.” It was a joke, she told me, and didn’t provoke the ire that it would today, in a world where “far right” has, for some, become synonymous with hate. (Sure enough, the Southern Poverty Law Center has called Ingraham “Right-Wing Radio’s High Priestess of Hate,” and one of her own brothers, from whom she is estranged, has turned into her most notorious troll, referring to her work as “bully commentary.”) Today, she doesn’t describe herself as far right, as some of her detractors do, but as a “pragmatic conservative” or “populist conservative,” neither of which fits on a license plate.
After law school, in her late 20s, Ingraham clerked for Clarence Thomas and on the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan before joining the prestigious New York law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom.
“I fancied myself as a young criminal defense attorney … and I liked it,” she said. But she was also writing columns (including one for The New York Times in 1995, in which she and a co-author argued that Gen. Colin Powell was bad for the GOP) which were getting a good bit of attention and helped land her on the cover of The New York Times Magazine. In that story, Ingraham was spotlighted as one of five promising young conservatives, along with David Brock (now a liberal and the founder of Media Matters for America, a harsh critic of Fox) and James Golden (aka Bo Snerdley), Rush Limbaugh’s longtime producer.
Much was made of the outfit that Ingraham wore to the photo shoot, with some people even saying it’s why she was so prominently featured. Actually, the skirt wasn’t even hers, Ingraham told me. She only had “lawyerly clothes and not a lot of money,” and so a friend offered to lend her an outfit. “So I get to New York, and I get to the hotel — I was just so clueless back then — and I take it out of the bag and it’s a leopard-skin miniskirt. That is not what I wear. At all.”
It still isn’t — Ingraham is one of the most conservatively dressed personalities on Fox.
I asked Ingraham if she has the cover framed on a wall somewhere. “Of course, you bet,” she said, laughing. “I’m never going to look that good again.”
Television bookers took notice, and she started getting lots of offers to appear on shows as a commentator. She did commentary for both CBS and a fledgling network called MSNBC, which offered her a show. She taped “Watch It with Laura Ingraham” in the same building where she now works for Fox. “And it was off to the races after that.”
Television led to a nationally syndicated three-hour radio show, which lasted 17 years and eventually led to Fox, where she said she immediately felt at home.
“It felt like the bar at ‘Cheers’ — we’re all on the same team.”
‘The hardest thing I’ll ever do’
Ingraham is reluctant to talk about her family — a question about where her children go to school causes her to hesitate and look at a Fox public relations representative before answering — and she has, in the past, held a photo shoot at the home of a friend in order not to reveal where she lives. (She does, however, post photos of her children on Instagram, as well as carefully edited photos of her kitchen and garden, and her daughter recently made a brief appearance on the show.) Even going outside the Hall of the States for a photo session requires a security guard.
Suffice it to say that the Ingraham home in northern Virginia is close enough to the Hall of the States that mom can run home between an interview and her live broadcast to tend to a family matter. As driven as Ingraham is professionally, she’s never disconnected from her three teens. Sometimes, when Ingraham says “Good evening” to Fox Viewers, she’s just put down the phone on which she was texting a kid.
While Ingraham is famously protective of her personal life, her decision to adopt three children as a single parent — her daughter from Guatemala and her sons from Russia — has been widely written about, and she told one interviewer that she was led by the Holy Spirit to adopt. A Catholic who often wears a gold cross necklace from Rome given to her by her godfather, Ingraham wrote about the early years of parenting for Today, saying, “Overnight I went from carefree social butterfly to a working mom, regularly fried.”
In that essay, Ingraham wrote about the need to push back against a parenting culture in which people spend thousands of dollars to baby-proof their homes and compete with each other in the “birthday-party Olympics.”
“I might be a little crazy for taking on three children under the age of six, but I’ll never be crazy enough to let the culture adopt my children,” she wrote.
Her youngest son, an eighth grader, still doesn’t have a cell phone, she told me, and isn’t happy about it. Her kids are now 19, 16 and 14.
In an interview in 2021, Ingraham spoke about the challenges of international adoption, and said that her youngest child was among the last group of American adoptions Russia allowed before shuttering that program.
“I knew it would be hard to go through the adoption process — and it was, with too many ups and downs to recount — but until you’re a parent, you have no idea how challenging it is to be one. Even as someone with financial means, raising children as a single parent is the hardest thing I’ll ever do,” she told The Wrap.
But it’s also clearly one of the most fulfilling — and perhaps more important than even politics.
When I asked Ingraham what she still wants to accomplish professionally, she paused and thought for a moment before saying that what she wants to do is produce something “that withstands the test of time.”
“I’ve written a number of books, and they’ve done pretty well, which is great, but I think probably the next thing I do will be maybe a little bit removed from politics, and perhaps be more centered on the culture and parenting, and what I’ve learned as a single parent in this complicated world of ours.”
But politics remains front and center right now, and as a backer of Donald Trump, Ingraham is as ebullient about the most recent election as she was when Reagan was first elected. She was part of the Fox coverage on election night and couldn’t stand on a table, but on “The Ingraham Angle” the next night, she celebrated, saying “Bravo, Donald Trump. No one else could have pulled this off. And now the hard work begins.”
Why Trump won
There’s something about Ingraham that screams “no nonsense,” and she is something of a perfectionist, ad-libbing and rewriting the script that comes to her from a Fox producer in New York, even as she is on the air. This is not the TV studio of the broadcasters that her father derided when she was in high school, but one in which even Ingraham’s presence is optional. She has a home studio, which was especially useful during the pandemic, and sometimes broadcasts from there; other times, here at the Hall of the States, where her office is next to Bret Baier’s, and sometimes from the road. (A town hall with Trump earlier this year was in Greenville, South Carolina.)
But when I spoke to her a second time, while she was traveling on Thanksgiving week, she was more relaxed and clearly in a good mood, as she says much of the country is, now that the election is behind us and the holidays are here.
“I think right now the country’s in a mood to have fun. Everything’s been so hot for so long. I think people just want to go off and enjoy themselves, and enjoy their families. People just want to relax a little bit. That’s what I’m seeing.”
Ingraham said she had expected Trump to win, believing that the momentum had belonged to him since the June debate, despite Democrats’ jubilation about the prospect of President Kamala Harris.
“You can have joy and love and all that, but in the end, people either have more expensive groceries or not, gas is either more expensive or it’s not, the border has been too porous or not, and we’re getting increasingly entrenched in another war. None of those things were going to change from the time Joe Biden dropped out to the election. I was always very optimistic, but cautiously so, because anything can happen in politics. But the factual predicate for Trump’s election was very strong, and that never changed in my view,” she told me.
Any sense that Harris might win, she says, came from the “pure propaganda” that came from the legacy media, which Ingraham says has discredited itself, along with government agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health, to the point where Americans have lost faith in these institutions. The distrust grew during the pandemic, she said.
“I was leading the coverage of the skeptics, more so than anyone else, not trying to toot my own horn, but I was out there very early on against mask mandates, against vaccine mandates, against closing down really anything, and I made it clear to President Trump that I believed he should reopen the government on Easter Sunday (2020), not three weeks later. ... Not that it wasn’t dangerous for some people, not that it wasn’t deadly for some people, but you cannot shut down the United States of America. Period. End of story. You cannot shut it down. You can’t do it to kids, you can’t do it to minorities, you can’t do it to the elderly, who languished alone. You can’t do it. It doesn’t work. And it really destroyed kids’ education.”
She describes herself as a “ferocious opponent of forcing experimental shots on people,” and says Biden might have saved his presidency if he had returned the country to pre-COVID-19 normalcy sooner. But Biden’s pandemic response ultimately helped Trump’s rebound, she says.
“It set things in motion to get people to look at these institutions differently. Not to say that there’s not good people in them, not to say that nothing good ever comes of them, but to just say, maybe we need to get back to first principles.”
In conservative circles, the country’s mood is similar to what it was when Reagan was elected, particularly in terms of the excitement of young Republicans, she added. “It’s a big cultural and political shift happening where the elites are once again told ‘Oh no you won’t. ... You’re not going to do this to the country.’”
Of course, the mood among Democrats — and those Republicans who opposed Trump — isn’t nearly so ebullient.
‘The core of American thought’
I asked Ingraham, who has known Trump for nearly 30 years, what the GOP should do to reconcile with those in the party who opposed Trump, people like Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney and the founders of the Lincoln Project.
“I reject the question, and the premise of the question,” she said. “I think this election shows (the GOP) is not splintered at all. Trump has a 54% approval rating right now. This is after they called him Hitler, called him fascist, after Jan. 6, how many indictments, civil judgments, (charges of) insurrectionists. I mean, literally, what else could they have done, and he has a 54% approval rating.
“That’s going to change, it’s going to get harder, it’s going to be difficult, there’s going to be a lot of opposition. But I don’t think the party has been this united behind anyone since 1984. Not in my lifetime. No way. Not even close. I have no idea what those individuals are going to do, but I wish them luck. It’s going to be a rough go.”
Similarly, she pushed back at the idea that Fox has become more mainstream in recent years. “In all seriousness, I think Fox has always been mainstream,” she said. “The opinion makers on the left who run most of the major institutions, from the universities to the entertainment industry to legacy media, they’re the ones who have been out of step with America. I think Fox has well reflected the core of American thought, which is why it’s been so successful. If it hadn’t been, Fox would have gone the way of some of these others. ... Fox has been pretty consistent, through thick and thin.”
Not that the network hasn’t changed. When Fox debuted in 1996, Ingraham was still working for MSNBC, and she remembers laughing about the new network with her then-colleagues. “It didn’t look like it does today. ... We were thinking that’s not going to work, and I’m a conservative.” She’s still laughing, but for much different reasons now.
As we crossed the street together in D.C., a car stopped at a light, music booming from an unrolled window, and Ingraham broke into spontaneous dance as the driver laughed.
“I think we’ve lost a sense of humor in politics. We take ourselves too seriously,” she told me later, having just disembarked from a post-election JetBlue flight where everyone seemed to be in a good mood. “Not that the issues aren’t serious — they are. But sometimes you’ve just got to have fun.”