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.”

Fox News host Laura Ingraham at the TV office in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, Nov. 20, 2024. | Carol Guzy, for the Deseret News

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.

Fox News host Laura Ingraham at the TV office in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, Nov. 20, 2024. | Carol Guzy, for the Deseret News

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.”

Fox News host Laura Ingraham at the TV office in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, Nov. 20, 2024.