- Trump's executive order on Critical Race Theory was inspired by Fox News, a new book says.
- Trump's former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, writes that a Tucker Carlson segment turned the boss onto it.
- "This wasn't the first time we had been tipped off by a good report on 'Tucker Carlson Tonight,'" Meadows writes.
The morning after former President Donald Trump saw a Fox News segment about Critical Race Theory on Tucker Carlson's primetime show, he issued an executive order about the controversial subject, according to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in his new book.
In "The Chief's Chief," Meadows writes that his old boss was inspired several times by Carlson's show.
"On September 2, sitting in his private office off the Oval around nine thirty p.m., President Trump saw an interview on Tucker Carlson Tonight with a journalist named Christopher Rufo," Meadows writes.
Rufo, a former documentary filmmaker turned activist, has been behind much of the recent nationwide push among Republicans targeting how racism is taught in schools and seeking to minimize racial sensitivity trainings among employers.
Meadows goes on to describe how the Trump White House took notes right from Carlson's show and turned them into executive action.
"Whatever it was, it needed to stop," Meadows writes. "Rufo ended his segment on Tucker Carlson Tonight with a direct address to the president of the United States. 'I'd like to make it explicit,' he said. 'The president and the White House—it's within their authority to immediately issue an executive order to abolish Critical Race Theory training from the federal government. And I call on the president to immediately issue this executive order—to stamp out this destructive, divisive, pseudo-scientific ideology.' And that's what we did."
The morning after the segment aired, Meadows describes getting Rufo on the phone and beginning work on the executive order he outlined on Fox News.
"This wasn't the first time we had been tipped off by a good report on Tucker Carlson Tonight," Meadows wrote later.
Unabashedly detailing the feedback loop between Fox News and the Republican administration, Meadows demonstrates a case study in what has made the network such a singular force in American politics since its founding by the late Roger Ailes in 1996.
"In a few days, [Rufo] would be flying out to Washington to help us fine-tune the wording, along with a few other respected scholars and journalists," Meadows writes. "It would be done and ready to sign by the end of September."