When Donald Trump made his triumphant return to the spotlight on Monday night after surviving an assassination attempt just days earlier, the first person to greet him in the VIP box at the Republican National Convention (RNC) was Tucker Carlson.

The former president offered Carlson a firm handshake and put his left arm on the former television host’s shoulder. Carlson nodded, leaned in and smiled. It wasn’t a bad place to be for a guy who 15 months ago received his pink slip from Fox News, losing the biggest platform in conservative media.

“I guess they thought at Fox they would limit his reach” by cancelling his show, said Roger Stone, the longtime Trump adviser and self-described “great friend” of Carlson, as he cleaved through a gaggle of reporters on the convention grounds. “If anything, they have boosted his reach and his influence 20 times.”

Carlson is having a moment at the RNC. He’s being followed by a documentary crew. He’s expected to give a prime-time speech before the festivities come to an end on Thursday. And to top that off, he gets to celebrate the fact that his friend and fellow nationalistic conservative, Senator J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), got the nod to be Trump’s running mate – an outcome Carlson had been lobbying for privately. (According to a report from The New York Times, Carlson had warned Trump that if a ”neocon” – a Republican with an interventionist foreign policy – were vice president, deep state forces would be more likely to try to assassinate Trump.)

Carlson or Vance “would have been the two people I would have loved to see as VP”, Donald Trump Junior said in a live event hosted by Axios at the Republican National Convention after Vance became the nominee.

Carlson did not elaborate when asked by The Washington Post via text to explain his presence and purpose in Milwaukee this week. Instead, he replied with a 93-word tirade against The Post.

Both Carlson and Vance share an anti-elite ideology (despite their status as elites), with isolationist and populist tendencies that can, at times, seem xenophobic.

Carlson told an audience at a convention event hosted by the Heritage Foundation that he didn’t want to come at first, but was now glad he did.

Now, the hesitant attendee seemed to be everywhere. At the Trade Hotel, Carlson was spotted walking past his former boss, Rupert Murdoch, with a smile, according to Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News. There are college-age clones of Carlson, with the same moppy head of hair and khaki pants, drinking free beer at the after-parties. On Tuesday, he followed his buddy Don Junior into the Fox News green room, uninvited by the network but welcomed by at least some of his old colleagues, according to NOTUS.