Magazine Work

“How are we gonna cover Trump? That’s not something I stay up at night thinking about,” Chris Licht told me. “It’s very simple.” It was the fall of 2022. This was the first of many on-the-record interviews that Licht had agreed to give me, and I wanted to know how CNN’s new leader planned to deal with another Donald Trump candidacy. Until recently Licht had been producing a successful late-night comedy show. Now, just a few months into his job running one of the world’s preeminent news organizations, he claimed to have a “simple” answer to the question that might very well come to define his legacy.

Washington Post reporter David Fahrenthold, who claimed to have an old audio recording of Trump making exceedingly lewd remarks about women, had sent over the alleged quotes and was requesting comment from the campaign for a story that would run later that day. “Wow, this isn’t good,” Reince Priebus said, his eyes fixed on a single line. “This is really, really bad.” The group inside the Trump Tower conference room was paralyzed with silence. Finally, Jared Kushner piped up. “You know, I don’t think it’s all that bad.”

The outcome of the presidential campaign, Republicans believed, was a fait accompli. “Donald Trump was well on his way to a 320-electoral-vote win,” Chris LaCivita told me this past Sunday as Democrats questioned, ever more frantically, whether President Joe Biden should remain the party’s nominee in November. “That’s pre-debate.” LaCivita paused to repeat himself: “Pre-debate.”

Long considered one of Washington’s finest golfers, he is spraying shots left and right with choppy, self-doubting swings. Sensing my surprise, the former House Speaker says his handicap has skyrocketed since leaving Congress two years ago. After he misses a 10-foot putt, and we climb into our cart, I ask why. “You have to concentrate while you hit the ball,” he says. “That’s my biggest problem in golf these days. I just can’t concentrate. I could always concentrate on what I had to do. But these days..."

Inmate No. 15000-030 is released into the frigid January morning at 8:46, a gray custodial suit of sweatpants and long-sleeved thermal clinging to his immense frame, a bushy salt-and-pepper beard wrapping around his face, a guard escorting him with a high-powered rifle slung over his right shoulder. Most politicians would appear hopelessly—dangerously—misplaced in a federal prison. Kent Sorenson is not most politicians.

In 1997, M. H. Reed, the New York Times restaurant critic, called Glenn Vogt “the best front-of-the-house manager in the business.” A year later, he accepted an offer to become the general manager of Windows on the World. “It was like being asked to play center field for the Yankees,” Vogt told me. “Every day was surreal. From the day I walked in until the day I watched it burn.”

Late last year, Nikki Haley had a friend who was going through a hard time. He had lost his job and was being evicted from his house. He was getting bad advice from bad people who were filling his head with self-destructive fantasies. He seemed to be losing touch with reality. Out of concern, Haley called the man. “I want to make sure you’re okay,” she told him. “You’re my president, but you’re also my friend.”

If comedy is a proxy for the mood of American society, Nate Bargatze’s sudden popularity suggests that he’s tapped into something powerful: the discontent with our discontent. He insists that stand-up can be a great unifier, bridging the divides that have emerged within families, among friends, between red states and blue states. “People are worn out,” he said.

We’d outgained the Packers, out-converted them, outplayed them. But we’d lost anyway—in dramatic, dream-shattering fashion. It was too much for my 7-year-old emotions to process. So, I wept. First in the stands as time expired, then in the swarming, beer-soaked concourse as my family searched for the exit, and for the entire hour-long car ride home. Finally, as we pulled into our driveway, my dad spun the radio knob leftward, turning down the postmortem show. “It’s just a game,” he said, smiling gently. “We’ll win the next one.” It was the only lie my dad ever told me.

It was July 29, 2019—the worst day of my life, though I didn’t know that quite yet. The traffic in downtown Washington was inching along. The mid-Atlantic humidity was sweating through the windows of my chauffeured car. I was running late and fighting to stay awake. For two weeks, I’d been sprinting between television and radio studios up and down the East Coast, promoting my new book. Now I had one final interview. After the car pulled over on M Street, I hustled into the stone-pillared building of the Christian Broadcasting Network.

History will record that in the summer and fall of 2020, at the peak of the most unusual and bitterly contested election in modern times, the president and his team made a sport of plucking minor incidents from local news feeds and distorting them into data points of a grand conspiracy to deny him a second term. History will also record that their efforts have been wildly successful.

College is something more than classes and keggers, caps and gowns. It is a process of ripening, of discovering the outer world but also one’s inner self. It is a collection of experiences and memories that shape a foundation for life. It is a gift. That gift was snatched away from Arielle Anderson, Brian Fraser, and Alexandria Verner—and my alma mater will never be the same because of it.