Update, September 20, 2024: The news broke last night that Olivia Nuzzi has been having an affair with RFK Jr., one of the subjects of her many interviews and profiles. NY Mag has said that Nuzzie “is currently on leave from the magazine, and the magazine is conducting a more thorough third-party review.” I suspect nothing will come of it, because Nuzzi brings eyeballs to their site, and that matters more to NYMag than any kind of journalistic integrity. I’ll have more on the story in the next fortnight.
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I just got my latest copy of New York magazine, the one with Stormy Daniels on the cover, and featuring her interview with Olivia Nuzzi.1 I’m old-fashioned—I like print, having grown up reading several newspapers and magazines—and I was looking forward to a report that could tell me something new, about what might be behind the otherwise fairly boring story of a politician (Donald Trump) paying off a porn star (Daniels).
It took all of seven minutes to read the piece, over lunch (so eager was I that I broke my rule about never reading at a meal). It began…unpromisingly, with Daniels shuffling a Tarot deck and pronouncing that “Nobody can predict the future. We all have free will.” I could swear I’d seen those sentences on those tags attached to tea bags, but I resolved to continue. Surely, I thought, this is a joke and Nuzzi will have something interesting to say.
But, no. It all devolves into Nuzzi—ostensibly the reporter—melting into tears. The first 695 words are all about this reading, one that apparently triggered strong emotions in someone sent by a significant publication at what I will assume was considerable expense. In a day and age when most newspapers and magazines are either laying off their staff or refusing to cover major events because they’re so understaffed, New York magazine makes this bold choice: “Let’s send Olivia Nuzzi to talk to Stormy Daniels and girlbond over Tarot or something.” At one point, Nuzzi writes, “I was bewildered by the wave of emotion that seemed to wash over both of us at once.”
As was I, Olivia, as was I.
There was, of course, more than Tarot here. There’s a doll, and here’s how we are introduced to her:
Across the room, on a small highchair in the corner, was Susan, a doll possessed, [Daniels] said, by the spirit of a child from the 1700s, a friend of another child who had died of cancer.
Reader, I have fretted over this sentence, reading it over and over again because it’s so confusing. Is the doll possessed “by the spirit of a child from the 1700s” or possessed by “a friend of another child who had died of cancer”? I assume the former, but how and why Daniels would know about the second child is perplexing. Did she somehow teleport herself back to the 18th century? Did she have a seance with the child that now possesses this doll? Was it the child who told her about her friend dying of cancer or was it the doll, and if the latter, surely Daniels is putting her life in danger by keeping the thing around (I say this as an avowed fan of all the Chucky films: one does not, willy-nilly, bring possessed dolls into one’s house without suffering several consequences). We’re also informed by Nuzzi, who is allowed to hold this creature, that the doll’s eyes “startled” her and that they are “blue and alive.” 2
Run, Olivia, run.
If I seem to dwell needlessly on a minor point, it’s only because there’s no there there: the possibly demonic doll is at least vaguely entertaining but nothing else in the article, over 6000 words, is either engaging or informative or tells us much that’s new. As for the indictment itself (ostensibly a reason for Nuzzi being sent over to talk to Daniels): it’s not likely to amount to much, least of all the much-anticipated imprisonment of Trump. Over at The Daily, the New York Times’s news podcast, even veteran journalists Michael Barbarro and Maggie Habberman are unable to provide any definitive sense that, yes, all of this is really important and Portends Doom. The April 12 episode, with Charlie Savage, admits that the prosecution strategy, such as it is, is “risky.”
And yet, here we are, awash in more Trump news than we can handle. But all of it is flat, like this piece: a supposedly exclusive-ish interview with Stormy Daniels is really about little more than her famous friends (they include Kathy Griffith and, surprise, Mary Trump,) her weird and creepy doll, that doll’s dead friend, and Daniels pressing the air between her hands in some theatrical gesture that tells me nothing.
This piece is of indeterminate genre: somewhere between a worshipful profile, sloppy Southern Gothic fiction, and material on Trump that, by now, is widely available anywhere. It only exists to solidify Nuzzi’s status and reputation as a Trump-hunter. In tales about demons and monsters, there’s always a central character who is the designated killer of the Evil One. In Jaws, it’s Quint. In Dracula, it’s Van Helsing. In Trump: The Long American Farce, the play that’s currently riveting this country, the role of hunter is taken up by people like Nuzzi, whose last piece for New York was also about Trump, and just as uninteresting.
While Trump is vile in many ways, he’s also not exceptionally so, in the realm of politics and celebrity. An entire faux-movement, armed with silly pink hats, made a point of marching against him for his sexual assaults but had curiously neglected to do so over past years despite all the stories told, repeatedly, of Bill Clinton’s rapes and assaults. It was so eager to have anyone-but-Trump that it quietly avoided a key story about Joe Biden, as detailed by Nathan J. Robinson.
In a particular slice of the American media landscape, Nuzzi is Harry Potter to Trump’s Voldemort but, honestly, can we just be done with her work on the matter? It’s unimaginative and uninspired, and we learn nothing new.
I know this plea will go unheeded: as media outlets die by a thousand cuts, Trump is a galvanising force, bringing eyeballs to websites. Publications like New York desperately need the views. At this point, the magazine will continue to pay for Nuzzi’s vanity pieces because, I assume, she has a cultish following that will read every useless piece that she writes about Trump. As evidenced here, none of it has to be very good. Or, really: good, at all.
I fear the worst, a sequel, given these concluding lines in Nuzzi’s piece: “Daniels had said Susan might decide to talk to me, to come and find me. I’ll admit I waited to hear. I wanted to believe. Don’t you?”
No, I don’t, Olivia. I really, really don’t.
Yasmin Nair is a writer, academic, and activist who writes often and in depth about politics and culture, without resorting to card-reading or talking to dead children stuck inside dolls. She writes independently, without magazines to fly her around. If you like this and her other work, and would like to see more of it, please support her in any way you can.
See also: “Every President Is A Sociopath.”
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