Since she first broke on the national scene with the news of Anthony Weiner’s dick pics, Olivia Nuzzi has cultivated a proud reputation as a journalistic assassin. Whether descriptions of Rudy Giuliani fumbling unsuccessfully with multiple cell phones in a NYC cab, or anecdotes of Mehmet Oz’s vast disdain for Pennsylvania voters, her editors can count on Nuzzi for the reputational kill shots.
She has now been assigned a NYMag cover story about a shrunken old Repub capo, skulking in his tasteless golf club, surrounded by D-list grifters jostling to steal whatever unconsidered trinkets they can pry loose. “Inside Donald Trump’s sad, lonely, thirsty, broken, basically pretend run for reelection. (Which isn’t to say he can’t win.)”:
… Since [his campaign announcement], he has barely set foot outside the perimeter of Mar-a-Lago. For 28 days, in fact, he has not left the state of Florida at all.
He is sensitive about this. He does not like what it suggests. So he does not accept the premise. “Sometimes I don’t even stay at Mar-a-Lago,” he told me. What do you mean you don’t stay there, I asked. Where do you stay? “I stay here,” he said, “but I am outside of Mar-a-Lago quite a bit. I’m always largely outside of Mar-a-Lago at meetings and various other things and events. I’m down in Miami. I go to Miami, I go to different places in Florida.”
What he means when he says “Miami” is that his SUV rolls down the driveway, past the pristine lawn set for croquet and through the Secret Service checkpoint at the gate, for the two-hour trip to another piece of Trump real estate, the Trump National in Doral, about eight miles from the airport in Miami-Dade County. There, he meets regularly with an impressive, ideologically diverse range of policy wonks, diplomats, and political theorists for conversations about the global economy and military conflicts and constitutional law and I’m kidding. He goes there to play golf. “He just goes, plays golf, comes back, and fucks off. He has retreated to the golf course and to Mar-a-Lago,” one adviser said. “His world has gotten much smaller. His world is so, so small.”…
He had wanted to be in the movie business. It’s important to never forget this about him. He watches Sunset Boulevard, “one of the greatest of all time,” again and again and again. A silent-picture star sidelined by the talkies, driven to madness, in denial over her faded celebrity. When he was a businessman, he showed it to guests aboard his 727. When he was president, he held screenings of it for White House staff at Camp David…
Why is he doing this now? And Why is he doing this at all? And What is his fucking problem? Few people are certain of the answers. “It seems like a joke,” said one ex–Trump loyalist, a former White House official. “It feels like he’s going through the motions because he said he would.” One month in, the campaign exists more as a half-formed idea than a nomination-securing operation. The $99 NFTs it’s selling as contributions are the most honest advertising Trump has ever engaged in…
On the day he announced his candidacy this past November, the air was heavy with oleander and snipped greenery and sea mist colliding with mold and wood polish and hotel soap and the metallic vapor of Diet Coke and the alcoholic ferment of generations of cougars in Chanel No. 5. The floor was staged for something between a rally and a cocktail party. Rows of tables and chairs formed a press filing in the back, then the risers for the TV networks, then the red velvet rope. “The room was packed,” Trump told me. “Sold out.” Tickets were not sold at all. Guests were invited. The room was full, but it was not at capacity. Chairs remained empty, some more glaringly than others.
“There was a lot of media there. We maxed out,” Trump told me. “We had so many from the media we were not able to let them come into the room. They were outside on the lawn.” At MAGA rallies in recent years, and since the end of his presidency in particular, the press pen has been an odd sight. The identifiable faces from the major networks and mainstream publications show up here and there but not en masse as before. Still a zoo, different captives. The area behind the metal barricades is full of far-right celebrities. When Trump asks his fans to turn around and boo the fake news, they are yelling at themselves. In the Grand Ballroom, Sebastian Gorka stood tall on the press riser, his hair sprayed to the high heavens, arms outstretched, phone angled just so. He flashed a hideous grin and moved slowly in a circle. An epic panoramic selfie. A few feet away, Mike “the MyPillow Guy” Lindell filmed a stand-up…
“It’s not there. In this business, you can have it and have it so hot and it can go overnight and it’s gone and you can’t get it back. I think we’re just seeing it’s gone. The magic is gone,” an adviser said. “When Seb Gorka and Raheem Kassam and Kash Patel and Devin Nunes are your stars, that’s the D-list. It was D-list MAGA. When Brick Man — that freak, Brick Man — is in the VIP seating, we’ve got a problem.” Brick Man is a man who wears a suit made of fabric with — you guessed it — a brick pattern. The bricks symbolize the wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. He wandered around the ballroom offering interviews to reporters. I have a high tolerance for this kind of shit, obviously, and I could not. “If you’re looking for an indication of how bad things are going,” the adviser added, “it’s Brick Man not just being there but being in the VIP section. Don Jr.’s not there!”…
For many people inside, the first half of the administration was about staying there. The second half was about getting out, about how and when and whether they could or would, about what that would be like. On his way to defeat and isolated by the pandemic, the president started to scare even those who had been willing for years to forgive anything.
“I think that really fucked up his head,” the first former White House official said. “He was already on that path, he was so desensitized and emboldened, and then during COVID, his interactions with real people were so cut off. During this tragic time where horrible things were happening, he wasn’t experiencing any of it. It was an ugly cocktail of the pandemic and race — after George Floyd — these things that activated his worst features. He lost touch with what was real, whatever limited ability he had before to connect was just gone.” He was more inclined to crack than others. “Here’s a person who is so untethered as it is, who largely escapes accountability, and there were always weird people around him, but the more the normal people disappeared, and all he’s surrounded by are the cuckoo birds,” the official trailed off. “His brain was vulnerable too because I think he was probably whatever his version of depressed is.”…
Trump’s campaign schedule, described to me as “busy,” involved 11 events over the course of the month. One event was the announcement itself. Five events took place at Mar-a-Lago. Four events were not events at all but taped videos that were aired at events where Trump was not physically present. The endorsements were just as impressive: Kari Lake, Matt Gaetz, Elise Stefanik, Paul Gosar, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Max Miller, the New York Young Republicans, the Texas agriculture commissioner. The most high-profile Trump-endorsed candidate to win in the midterms, J. D. Vance, was not on this list. Neither was Trump’s former press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, now governor-elect of Arkansas. I asked her why she hadn’t endorsed him. She didn’t respond…
Do you remember how Sunset Boulevard ends?…
Chetan Murthy
… so the cops are gonna be fishin’ Deathsanus outta the Merde-a-Lardo swimming pool? Me likey! pay-per-view!
Aussie Sheila
I read it all. Absolutely brutal.
He is finished politically, imo. The establishment repubs must be giddy at the work the J6C did. They have done the work that they couldn’t do.
Even if he runs, which I doubt he really is, he is now beatable by another candidate in their god forsaken primaries. But the movement he set off, and the tempting millions of voters he attracted in 2020, above that of 2016, presents a clear and present danger. That movement lies waiting, silent, until another picks up the banner.
Burnspbesq
It’s easy to imagine that somewhere in his head, a little voice keeps whispering that DOJ has the goods this time and his chances of getting a favorable jury in DC are not good.
Tehanu
I enjoyed this, but I won’t believe he’s really washed up until I see him carried out in a coffin — and buried at a crossroads with a stake through the cardiac muscle he has instead of a heart. It’s probably too much to hope that the sacrificed bodies of his minions will also be arranged around him.
Aussie Sheila
@Burnspbesq: Yeah but I reckon he still thinks that ‘running’ for President confers some protection from the law, even politically, if not legally. But it won’t. Not this time. I sniff a determination in US elite media and political circles to put him out of the way. Too embarrassing on the world stage. A danger to their own illusions.
But the real base he appealed to have no such doubts or circumspections. They just loved someone who would ‘tell it like it is’. They are available for the next smarter, less embarrassing innovation of the type, if they can be convinced that he is finished, and the next one will be the real deal, strong enough to resist the elites and their fancy smancy lawyers , journalists and such like.
Baud
Such a sad state of affairs for someone who once ran to Hillary’s left.
Honus
Sunset Boulevard? He really watches that? “I’m still big, it’s the pictures that got small” Sunset Boulevard? I’m still having a hard time believing that’s not parody…
Sanjeevs
He was written off after Tulsa.
NotMax
Refuse to sully the holiday mood with such tripe.
eclare
@Honus: It’s a bit too on-the-nose, right?
Chetan Murthy
I could be mis-apprehending Ms. Nuzzi, but …. I feel like we’re watching an early-stage Maureen Dowd: a “reporter” who cares more about the veneer, the appearance, than the substance of people, their relations, and events. A court gossip. With a wicked blade to be sure, but fundamentally unserious. I remember MoDo’s brutal laceration of Dubya …. he was in his bedroom crying into his pillow, stuff like that. And sure, it was funny and satsifying in a way. But she fundamentally couldn’t get past that level of analysis, to, y’know, the meat of the man (such as it was).
Maybe I’m wrong about Ms. Nuzzi.
Baud
@NotMax:
Good Santa.
James E Powell
@Aussie Sheila:
“Tell it like it is,” means “Says hateful racist things.” And, you’re right, the great majority of them will move on to the next hateful racist, but there are some who are so wrapped up in Trump – the ones who claim God chose him and the like – that they may stick with him till the very end.
It could work to our advantage. If he’s not the nominee, they might stay home.
Ruckus
@Honus:
Is it possible to be parody and real at the same time?
I mean all things considered, as far as we know he’s still breathing and he’s still an idiot so anything that makes no more sense than a 40 yr old bag of Fritos still being eatable is possible.
Baud
@James E Powell:
Until woke people ruined it.
Ruckus
@James E Powell:
The hard core trumpets will have to be sold on a replacement. And really who else is there that hits all the same low notes? No one rings any bells as being as racist, dumb and vocal.
Aussie Sheila
@James E Powell: Yes I know what ‘tell it like it is ‘ means in that context. And I agree that if he isn’t the nominee a lot of low info voters will stay at home this time. But so will a lot of the Dem base, who came out in eye watering numbers to piss him off the stage in 2020.
I am far more concerned about the normie Republican base and the next charismatic leader of the herrenvolk right than I am about trump. He is political dead meat now imo.
Major Major Major Major
Oh yeah haha I legit forgot he’d announced.
dm
I thought of this place when I came across this:
https://newsie.social/@damemagazine/109564570011862254
Aussie Sheila
@Chetan Murthy: I enjoy Ms Nuzzi’s work. She is a very talented writer who probably would never let political considerations get in the way of a ‘smart take’ that garnered admiration from the people that pay her.
But such is the world.
MoDo is another thing entirely. Not nearly as talented, and decorates the NYT opinion page as their genuflection to their readership in Staten Island and Queens.
Not nearly as entertaining, but a lot more influential unfortunately.
Baud
@dm:
I never got into Twitter but I’m half tempted to try out mastodon since it’s the fresh new thing.
Baud
@Aussie Sheila:
Hopefully, abortion will replace Trump as a motivator.
Chetan Murthy
@Aussie Sheila: I agree with your assessment of her gifts: Ms. Nuzzi is vastly more entertaining than MoDo. But that’s my point: they’re both entertainers, not journalists, and in that sense they’re the same.
It’s like calling for a cake decorator when what you need is a surgeon.
Honus
@eclare: yeah, and also hard to believe he’s that self-aware. If you did make it up it would be over the top but hilarious.
Howard Hughes had Ice Station Zebra, and now Trump has Sunset Boulevard…
Amir Khalid
So TFG’s favourite movie is Sunset boulevard. Does he see himself as Joe Gillis or as Norma Desmond?
David ⛄ 🎅The Establishment🎄 🦌 🕎 Koch
There’s no way this is true. He’s too base, tasteless and stoopid to watch Sunset.
David ⛄ 🎅The Establishment🎄 🦌 🕎 Koch
@Amir Khalid:
he sees himself as the monkey
David ⛄ 🎅The Establishment🎄 🦌 🕎 Koch
This is not the characteristics of person who watches a Billy Wilder movie.
Aussie Sheila
@Chetan Murthy: Even good journalists can’t change the world. Good writers even less so, although both are necessary in any civilised world. Masses of people, in their millions do that. The Ukrainians are changing the world. US voters did their bit in 2020 and 2022. We did our bit in May this year. I trust the Brit’s will do their bit either next year or the year after.
Above all, politically active people need to remember the past in order to change the future, and organise accordingly.
Baud
@David ⛄ 🎅The Establishment🎄 🦌 🕎 Koch:
Don’t we all see ourselves as the monkey?
David ⛄ 🎅The Establishment🎄 🦌 🕎 Koch
As long as we’re on the subject of movies:
David ⛄ 🎅The Establishment🎄 🦌 🕎 Koch
@Baud:
Which why I like banana daiquiris
Amir Khalid
@Baud:
I see myself as the movie director who winds up working as Norma Desmond’s chauffeur.
JoyceH
The Post also recently had an article about how pathetic Trump’s life is now. That one said that Trump played golf six days a week. I knew that Trump played at Doral a lot, but I’d always thought that Doral was quite close to Mar A Lago – and turns out that it’s two hours away? So he does this four hour round trip six days a week? Add in the golf game and that’s pretty much a full time job. Well, I guess at least on this job he can’t get people killed.
Geminid
@Amir Khalid: I read in a biography of Billy Wilder that in the scenes where Erich von Stroheim is driving Gloria Swanson around, the car is being towed. Von Stroheim never learned to drive.
JWR
@JoyceH:
Unless he’s doing the driving. ETA fixed for clarity.
Geminid
@Aussie Sheila: For much of the 23 months since Trump left office many people assumed that he had an easy path to the Republican nomination in 2024. A lot of this analysis was founded on a belief that the Republican base is a monolith and is uniformly pro-Trump. I think he shared that view.
Trump’s campaign announcement last month fell flat though. He was hoping to clear the field but the Desantises, Christies, and Pompeos did not even blink.
So now Trump knows that he will have to fight for the nomination. I do not think he is up to the task, and I think he may know this too.
JWR
I know he’s announced his candidacy, but has TFG actually filed the required paperwork?
Amir Khalid
@JoyceH:
Remember: TFG is the guy who, against all expectation, landed the world’s most consequential job — and then spent his time in office watching TV till noon. To him, that four-hour daily commute for golf and a country club lunch probably feels like a full day of work.
cmorenc
I am curious whether / when the two guys on our street down at Sunset Beach, NC who have flagpoles in their front yard are going to quit flying their “Trump 2024” flags alongside the US flag. I suspect one of them will be a true bitter-ender, but the other one is more likely to jump ship to DeSantis, who hasn’t (to my knowledge) yet adopted the flag motif.
ColoradoGuy
T**** is a lot like Aimee Semple McPherson; a charismatic quasi-religious celebrity who founded a crackpot cult. Without the mighty PR machine of the overheated 1920’s, she would not have caught the popular imagination. Similarly, T**** is a creature of reality TV, bitchy Twitter mean-girl (beating Ann Coulter at her own game), and white-grievance messianism. DeSantis has the last part down pat, but not the first two.
Can the fire be re-lit? Hard to say. With Twitter flying apart and heading for the ground, the mean-girl persona that’s such an integral part of the T**** brand will have to find a new platform. And low-budget reality TV is not the same in the era of streaming television with theatrical production values. Can someone else take over the cult he started? Again, an open question.
Slightly_peeved
@David ⛄ 🎅The Establishment🎄 🦌 🕎 Koch:
He recommended Kate Beaton? The writer of the greatest webcomic of all time, http://www.harkavagrant.com/ ? That Kate Beaton? That’s so awesome.
Michael Bersin
@Honus: Up until they got to the cheesy “on the ice” sets it wasn’t that bad. Then, everything went south.
Anyway
Meh. Yet to see -Sunset Boulevard-
barbequebob
@Aussie Sheila: Not so sure about Queens. Biden got 69% of the Queens vote. Archie Bunker moved to “Long Island”, aka Nassau County.
Geminid
@barbequebob: Queens Republicans probably read the New York Post. Same with Staten Island
Now I’m curious as to the relative circulation among the five boroughs of the NY Times, NY Post, NY Daily News and Wall Street Journal.
The Post and the Daily News probably have little circulation outside the New York state. I usually see the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal at stores like Krogers down here in Virginia and further south in Atlanta. I guess that along with USA Today they are the only newspapers with national circulation
The controversy of Governor Hochul and her judicial nominee got me back to reading City and State-NY, at least yesterday’s article on the subject. That’s a political journal with a sister publication that covers Pennsylvania politics, titled City and State:PA.
NorthLeft
Ghosted by Sarah Huckabee Sanders. OUCH!
Geminid
@NorthLeft: J.D. Vance dropping him has got to hurt too. But Trump is loyal to only to Trump, so he deserves to have people turn their back on him.
kindness
The Trump base is still there. I don’t mean the movers & shakers of this world. I mean the middle (and lower) class WWE fans who still rave about Trump. Those people are shallow as hell. Trump gave their lives meaning and a thrill because Trump told them they were better than others. It perked their self esteem. I guess no one had told them they were special since Mom did when they were kids, so Trump made up for it telling them they were higher up the ladder than blacks, Mexicans, Middle Easterners, and minorities in general. Essentially the same things that turn on racists, which most of them are after all.
raven
@Amir Khalid: Exactly, it’s Norma we’re talking about!
different-church-lady
@Chetan Murthy:
This is Trump she’s writing about: there isn’t any substance.
karen marie
@Aussie Sheila:
We can only wish they’d be silent.
Josie
The question in my mind is, if Trump is yesterday’s news, what happens to those people who based their decisions on keeping him happy, like McCarthy, Stefanik, Graham, Cruz, etc.?
rikyrah
@Chetan Murthy:
Truth
Geminid
@Josie: Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham will have an easy life in the Senate.
Kevin McCarthy and Elise Stefanik, on the other hand, will have to wrangle a fractious and crazy caucus with a very narrow majority. They might get that mess together long enough to elect McCarthy Speaker on January 3rd, but I think it will be all downhill from there.
Miss Bianca
@Slightly_peeved: Yeah, I just saw this book listed in a “Best of 2022” column somewhere.
Kent
@David ⛄ 🎅The Establishment🎄 🦌 🕎 Koch:
he still watches VCRs on his jet? VCRs?
Steeplejack
@Kent:
That’s from a 1997 article.
AWOL
@David ⛄ 🎅The Establishment🎄 🦌 🕎 Koch: Keep in mind that Trump was once a sensitive twink who considered producing musical theater on Broadway with his bestie, Roy Cohn.
Bupalos
@Chetan Murthy: right, Nuzzi is a more talented and honed version of the same phenomena. It’s just the natural evolution of the profession. When dowd did it it was newish and there weren’t competitors so she didn’t have to be good. Now there are like 500 literate people trying to make money catering to the opinionati.
It’s fundamentally worthless fluff, but Nuzzi can craft phrases brilliantly.
Hob
@Slightly_peeved: Obama may or may not have been aware of Beaton’s (great) humor strips– Ducks is a whole other thing, a big brick of a memoir that’s still often funny but also has pretty brutal passages. I haven’t finished it yet but it absolutely deserves all the attention it’s been getting.
Mimi haha
@Geminid: Christie is fucking delusional if he thinks he’ll ever be nominated.
Geminid
@Mimi haha: I think Christie might do relatively well in the Northeast, and I could see him picking up some delegates in Virginia. He probably won’t win many delegates further south though, and I doubt if he’ll be one of the last two men standing towards the end of the nomination contest.
But Chris Christie believes in Chris Christie and he also likes to hear himself talk. I think he’ll run.
Peke Daddy
@Amir Khalid:
Real Autumn Of The Patriarch vibe here.
Darkrose
@Chetan Murthy: Nuzzi was friends with Milo and thought he was hilarious. She’s fangirled Ann Coulter. She’s a better writer than MoDo, but at her core, she’s a Mean Girl who’s more interested in being cool and snarky than in being accurate or insightful.
Geminid
@Darkrose: I think Nuzzi writes to be entertaining, not necessarily to be illuminating. People like that stuff though, and there is a certain amount of reporting mixed in.