The president, an avid Fox viewer, has not been not shy about registering his displeasure with critical coverage. What will he think of Ms. Ingraham?

“You know, he’ll probably, uh, be irked,” Ms. Ingraham said, staring straight ahead. “We are friends, but friends tell friends when they go off course. And I’m sure he’ll tell me when he thinks I’m deviating from what’s proper and thoughtful. And I’ll do the same with him.”

Ms. Ingraham lives in Virginia with her three adopted children. She grew up in Glastonbury, Conn., the daughter of a waitress and the owner of a carwash. Media criticism began at home: She wrote in her book that she could remember her father deriding the anchor Walter Cronkite and his famed signoff, “That’s the way it is.”

“No, Walt, that’s the way you say it is!” her father would reply.

Ms. Ingraham honed her craft in college at The Dartmouth Review, the undergraduate right-wing journal that earned national recognition (and some revulsion) for stunts that, in hindsight, presaged the antics of Breitbart reporters.

“All the way back to Dartmouth, I was part of the insurgency,” she said.

In an era before mainstream acceptance of homosexuality, Ms. Ingraham assigned a reporter to attend a meeting of the campus gay students’ alliance and published a transcript of the proceedings, naming names. Years later, she apologized, citing in part the experience of her gay brother and his partner, who had AIDS.

In law school at the University of Virginia, she drove a Honda hatchback with the license plate “FARRGHT.” In Washington, as a young conservative on the rise, Ms. Ingraham worked in the Reagan White House, clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas, and founded a right-wing retreat cheekily dubbed “The Dark Ages.” (Arianna Huffington was on the steering committee.) A New York Times Magazine article described her joy-riding in Washington in her green Land Rover, blasting zydeco music at midnight.