Jessica Tarlov Talks ‘The Five,’ Fox News, & Her New Book ‘I Disagree’

Jessica Tarlov was in college the first time she saw a bumper sticker for George W. Bush. She’d grown up in Tribeca in downtown New York and attended an elite private high school on the Upper East Side. Her parents were Democrats. So were most people she knew.

Then she got to college and saw it: evidence of an actual voter for the sitting president. “I was like, ‘What is going on here?’” she recalls. “And my parents were like, ‘Well, there are these things called Republicans, and they run around the country.’”

Tarlov has since become well acquainted. She now serves as the lone liberal on The Five, rotating into the chair that she shares with pundit and former Democratic congressman Harold Ford Jr. The nation’s most watched cable news show finds her in heated debate with four Republicans — including noted provocateurs Jesse Watters and Greg Gutfeld — who spend most of the hour demolishing liberal values and progressive policies. The show airs on Fox News, although Tarlov writes in her new book, I Disagree: Winning Arguments Without Losing Friends, that its audience is more varied than the breakdown of the roundtable implies. About 50 percent of viewers are Republicans, 20 percent are Democrats, and 30 percent are somewhere in the middle. Whether those people watch to develop their own political instincts or because it is exhilarating to see credentialed people vivisect each other on national television is an open question.

Still, Tarlov too — as the meme goes — wonders how she ended up in this situation. At 42, she has somehow been a presence on Fox News for a decade. She’s never been an obvious fit, and not just because she is pro-choice. She keeps her dark brown hair in a short bob — a sleek crash helmet for her on-air skirmishes — and pairs her late father’s black-frame glasses with a riotous rainbow of pantsuits sourced from brands like Veronica Beard, Elie Tahari, Argent, and Chiara Boni while her coworkers wear pencil skirts and stilettos. Also, she never meant to be on television.

After graduating from the all-women’s college Bryn Mawr just outside of Philadelphia, she moved to London where she earned a Ph.D. at the London School of Economics and dabbled for the first time in politics, working for Boris Johnson’s campaign. Then she moved back to New York, where she got a job with the Democratic political pollster Douglas Schoen. That spurred an interest in behavior and marketing, which she turned into a gig in consumer insights at Bustle Digital Group — which owns this website. She parsed numbers and wrote papers about consumer behavior, helping to devise strategies to reach women nationwide. She loved it.

But a taste for showmanship burbled in her blood. Her father, Mark Tarlov, was an attorney who became a filmmaker. He died from a 9/11-related cancer when she was 20 weeks pregnant with her elder daughter, the now-4-year-old Cleo. Her mother, Judith, is a screenwriter, who wrote the 1999 Sarah Michelle Gellar vehicle Simply Irresistible (Mark directed) and still frets when her daughter is berated on national television. Both raised her to be an independent thinker and a master of her own fate. The word she uses in the book to describe herself is “relentless.”

Dressed in a periwinkle pantsuit and sneakers when we meet at Fox HQ in midtown Manhattan the week before her book hits shelves, she smiles when I point out that she has an undeniable knack for eviscerating her tablemates on The Five. “That’s more aggressive terminology than I would use,” she tells me. But she’s smiling. The show has been number one for 19 consecutive quarters, and her contract was just re-upped because the sparring and the banter and the bickering are electric. Each episode has to strike the balance of the best Bravo franchises: a mix of camaraderie and conflict that keeps millions of Americans hooked.

Tarlov started making regular appearances on Fox in the aftermath of the 2016 election, but in 2022 she was upgraded to a seat on The Five, where most Fox viewers got to know her.

Tarlov and her ideologically opposed colleagues don’t just keep it cordial on set. She and Jesse Watters used to ride the subway home together, and she and Dana Perino, whom she considers a mentor, text about loafers and Atlantic articles. Even former co-host Jeanine Pirro has come to Tarlov’s defense.

One in particular. In 2023, Donald Trump took to Truth Social to air his grievances: “Her jittery presentation is horrendous and, forgive me, her VOICE is grating and unendurable.” In 2025, Tarlov’s invocation of a series of bad polls on air drove Trump to call her a “disgrace to television broadcasting.” He suggested she should lose her job. (In the same post, he praised Watters and Gutfeld as “terrific.”) The personal invective did not make her feel powerful. It made her sob. The actual President of the United States — not an AI-generated slop post — had come for her livelihood.

Later, she recovered. But the awareness of just how enormous her platform has become is still dawning on her. “I’m big on the internet,” she tells me, sounding bewildered. “I had no idea.””

The attention has been as intense as it has been legitimizing. She’d long observed the sinister side of the partisan media — which she identifies as “places where people go to get intravenous injections of political torture” — from various perches. “But it was not until I started doing The Five that I felt like I understood the impact that it was having or that doing this could feel important and substantive,” she says.

For a long time, she maintained her “real job” in data analytics. But in 2024, she shifted into media full-time, and Tarlov is the first to acknowledge it has been an uncomfortable process. Her husband, the hedge fund executive Brian McKenna, still ribs her when she is asked at parties what she does and she tells people she is a… researcher or a podcaster. (She cohosts the podcast Raging Moderates with the professor Scott Galloway, who credits Tarlov’s “ability to wade in dangerous waters” for her success.)

“He’s like, ‘You suck. No one wants to talk about how you still see yourself as a data professional that sits in an office and finds trend lines,’” she recalls, quoting McKenna. “‘They want to know what it’s like to fight with Gutfeld about trans issues in front of 4 million people every night.’”

“These are serious and weighty issues that have implications for millions of people, and I take that really seriously. I also get to have my hair and makeup done every day and wear cute pantsuits and be myself on TV, which is enormously special.”

“We are all at least subconsciously aware of that,” Tarlov says later, referring to the show’s delicate high-wire act. “That it is the back-and-forth that doesn’t just make it more fun, but that people feel connection to.” So in between Watters castigating her for her opposition to Trump’s handling of the war in Iran and Gutfeld hammering her on the leftist perpetrators of political violence, she works to maintain genuine relationships with her professional antagonists.

“I’m conscious of the importance — especially as the ideological outlier — that it not feel like I’m just coming into their house and stirring sh*t,” she says. She and Watters used to ride the subway home together, and she and Dana Perino, whom she considers a mentor, text about loafers and Atlantic articles. Even former cohost Jeanine Pirro has come to Tarlov’s defense. Before the show starts taping at 5 p.m. on weeknights, the program’s titular five spend a few minutes chitchatting about their families and their pets. It helps lower the temperature.

“And if there are times that are very tense or hard, I will push myself to continue to be friendly because I don’t want it to sit,” Tarlov continues. “And it sits more with liberals than it does with conservatives. They’ll be like, ‘OK, cool. See you later.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh my God, no, this was actually deeply emotional for me.’ Because Jesse is so impervious to feelings sometimes, I have had to tell him, ‘No, I’m actually upset about this. This is not a bit. I’m going to cry, and I don’t know what you’re going to do with that information.’”

Tarlov knows that people — perhaps people reading this article — wonder what keeps her coming back for more. The truth is she is a believer. In the power of television. In her convictions. And in her own brand of center-left politics, which sets her apart from the Democratic Socialist crowd that has toppled incumbents in recent Democratic primaries. “This is rarefied air, and I’m so aware of that,” she says. “These are serious and weighty issues that have implications for millions of people, and I take that really seriously. I also get to have my hair and makeup done every day and wear cute pantsuits and be myself on TV, which is enormously special.”

Also — and this is subtle — it is not just undecided voters who watch Fox whom Tarlov has been able to influence. With a laugh, she claims her own cohosts’ brains have been “infiltrated.” In a recent viral clip, Watters praised Democratic senator Jon Ossoff for his assiduous constituent services in Georgia, and he has admired Maryland’s Democrat governor Wes Moore’s tailgate game. “You don’t get the opportunity to have that impact unless you’re actually spending time with these people,” she says. She hopes it’s a model for liberal Americans who want to win elections and not just dunk on their detractors on Twitter. You have to engage. She wrote a whole book about it.

Tarlov tries not to make election predictions but is “quite optimistic” about the imminent midterms. She thinks it’s going to be a good night for Democrats, despite deep divisions within the party and a brand that remains intensely unpopular with voters. “People don’t just want, they need something different,” she says. “It doesn’t mean they love Democrats, as I always try to remind leadership.” Still, it pleases her.

If Democrats prevail, it’s possible Tarlov will get a reprieve around the table. Even a moment off her back foot. But she knows it won’t last long. The next presidential election is on the horizon, and it promises to be another brutal season in American politics. One that will make for great TV.

Tarlov sees I Disagree as an extension of her work on The Five. To readers, though, it strikes as a bit of a corrective. It’s a manual for better and more civilized disagreement at, say, the Thanksgiving dinner table as opposed to the cable TV podium. “I hope that the book helps people be braver in the conversations they want to have,” she says. “I get that what I do for a living feels like having a mental breakdown to most people. But I do know that people want more conversations in their lives and that they’re really hankering for a toolkit to be able to do it better.”

The job, she says, has changed her. Not her politics, which remain more or less consistent, although she did have to “eat crow” after Donald Trump won the election in 2024. Nor her values, which motherhood has only sharpened. (She now has two daughters.) But her expectations. She relishes debate more than ever and revels in opportunities to make her case. Another thing? She has learned to appreciate the power of a glam squad.

“Now I’ve been in the most remote destinations, being like, ‘Where can I get a blowout?’” she says. The medium is the message, after all.

“You can’t hear the content if you’re distracted by a messy presentation,” Tarlov tells me, tapping her cheerful animal print manicure on the table between us as our interview wraps up. “I’ve begrudgingly accepted that.”