On the menu today: I know. You want to talk about President Trump suddenly reversing course and urging House Republicans to vote to require the U.S. Department of Justice to “publicly disclose all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials in its possession that relate to Jeffrey Epstein or Ghislaine Maxwell.” Or you want to talk about MAGA-minded Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene turning against Trump. Or the Trump administration belatedly conceding that yes, increasing tariffs results in higher prices on the store shelves. But there’s one hideous story in the media world that gives us even more reason to doubt the sanity of a high-profile Trump administration cabinet official, and a reputation-rehabilitating book tour that indicates no sin in the world of journalism is unforgivable.
Olivia Nuzzi’s Unseemly Rehabilitation
It will not surprise you that a certain number of people who are attracted to the world of politics are crazy. I’ll leave it to the professional psychologists to determine if they meet the legal definition of non compos mentis, but I suspect you’ve encountered and interacted with plenty of people and walked away with the impression, “Wow, that guy really has a screw loose.”
The realm of politics attracts crazy people like moths to a flame in part because that domain seems like the easiest path to getting what they want. The world of politics has money, although probably less than you think at the lower levels. It has fame and a certain kind of glamour. Washington is famously mocked as “Hollywood for ugly people.”
And of course, power. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger famously said, “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” Kissinger was, no joke, once called “Washington’s greatest swinger” and had relationships with all manner of women celebrities. I hope the late Kissinger would not be offended if I said the women were not drawn to him by his dashing good looks and Schwarzenegger level physique.
The New York Times recently published a complimentary profile of Olivia Nuzzi, the former political correspondent for New York magazine who had a “digital affair” with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is currently the Secretary for Health and Human Services. Nuzzi has a new book coming out, American Canto, telling her version of the story.
I can hear it now; “I don’t care about Nuzzi.”
You don’t have to care much about Nuzzi herself, although this sordid mess does give us further illumination into the character of the man who currently runs the HHS Department, and who therefore has a major say in how the roughly one quarter of the federal budget managed by HHS is directed. Even by the already-low standards of the Kennedy family, there’s something skin-crawling about Nuzzi’s insistence that she only fell in love with RFK Jr. after he first said “I love you” . . . several times.
Did I mention she is 39 years younger than he is?
It is also less-than-reassuring to hear Nuzzi claim Kennedy told her that he “still uses psychedelics, and even smoked dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, a powerful drug on which people are known to have what feel like near-death experiences.”
DMT is illegal, and “has no approved medical use in the United States” according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. DMT is one of the key ingredients of ayahuasca, a powerful hallucinogen which should only be consumed in extreme emergencies, such as becoming the quarterback of the New York Jets.
So, you don’t have to care about Nuzzi herself, but we probably should care about the cultural waters that Nuzzi swam in, and her rehabilitating book tour in the works.
I think the Times profile of Nuzzi is supposed to make us sympathize with her or relate to her, but there’s something chilling about how Nuzzi can make all the decisions she made — and blow up all sense of journalistic ethics with the calculated determination of J. Robert Oppenheimer — and then walk away describing her experience as a tragic love story, although she concedes, “I had a healthy appreciation for the fact that what had happened was not purely a tragedy.”
Not purely a tragedy! How gracious of her to make that concession.
Nuzzi was engaged; Kennedy was and still is married. (Kennedy’s wife, the actress Cheryl Hines, released her own autobiography this autumn as well.)
Nuzzi emphasizes that she had already written her profile about Kennedy before the affair began. But that doesn’t change the fact that she was in a relationship with an independent presidential candidate while covering the other two presidential candidates.
I was going to ask, “Would you have read 2024 campaign coverage from Melania Trump, Jill Biden, or Doug Emhoff?” but maybe that would actually be interesting to read and you, the reader, would at least know that the author was in a relationship with the candidate.
Let’s take this out of the realm of politics. Imagine you read a series of articles reporting how the Coca-Cola company is terrible — problems at the bottling plant, frustrated workers, doubts about the leadership of the CEO, and so on. And then you find out that the person who’s writing all that coverage is secretly having an affair with the CEO of Pepsi. You’d be pretty irked, right? The accuracy of the reporting is almost irrelevant; the reporter had a personal connection to the industry — a strong incentive to demonize one company and celebrate another — and hadn’t disclosed it to readers.
The Times profile of Nuzzi offers no indication that she recognizes what she did was wrong.
Nuzzi laments her loss of privacy and the paparazzi, while posing for glamorous pictures and short videos for a New York Times profile. She lays out all the wince-inducing details of her emotional non-physical affair with Kennedy but says she has no opinion on how he’s doing as HHS secretary, declaring, “I don’t have any interest in offering punditry.” (She has standards, you see.)
Times reporter Jacob Bernstein writes, “She cannot entirely discount the possibility that being a woman and looking like the modern iteration of a Hitchcock blonde contributed to the access she got.” Ya think?
Nuzzi seems crazy from top to bottom, back to front, from every extremity down to her core. You’d be unwise to trust this woman to run to the store to buy you a gallon of milk, never mind trust her to report for a respected publication.
Back in September 2024, Eve Batey of Vanity Fair wrote:
The reports regarding Nuzzi — which Kennedy has neither confirmed nor denied — come at a dangerous time for the mainstream media, the credibility of which has faced increasing attacks in recent years. It doesn’t help that pop culture depictions of real journalists suggest that unprofessional relationships are stock in trade. . . .
As the American media faces a whole new level of distrust and attacks, the ethical line between journalist and subject could not be more important to keep clear.
[Insert dramatic pause here.]
Guess what Nuzzi is doing these days:
Olivia Nuzzi joins Vanity Fair as West Coast Editor. In this new role, she will be editing stories across platforms and topic areas, with a focus on events, industries, and culture of the Pacific region, as well as writing for the magazine. From 2017 to 2024, she was the Washington correspondent for New York.
Got that? Nuzzi blew up her journalism career in just about as spectacular and high-profile manner as anyone possibly could, and a year later, she gets hired to do the same job on another beat . . . at a publication that published a column arguing that her actions damaged the reputation of the whole journalism profession.
How did that interview go? “Now, we hope you don’t plan on having any more emotional affairs with high-profile political figures. . . .”
Still, I must give credit to Nuzzi for offering one excellent joke:
Sitting under a pine tree in Los Angeles one night last month, Nuzzi gave up the pretense of trying to explain the unexplainable and reached for a joke for the people who simply could not fathom what came over her.
“Maybe it was the vaccines.”
Readers, not only do I hope you have a nice day, I hope you’re having a nice life. I hope you have people who care about you and tell you so. I hope you have other people to care about, and I hope you tell them that regularly. (No one ever minds being told that they matter.)
I hope you have friends and family who will tell you when they think you’re making a mistake — preferably gently but firmly, but let’s face it, that’s not always the easiest tone to hit. We’re all human, and we all make mistakes. It’s very easy to fool ourselves into believing that doing the wrong thing is the right thing in whatever circumstance we find ourselves in. I hope that when you mess up, you recognize it, apologize to those you’ve hurt, try to make amends, and try to learn from the experience.
In short, I hope that you’re sane.
Because I think having a lot of crazy people in politics drives out the non-crazy people.
ADDENDUM: In case you missed it since Friday morning, my podcast co-host Greg Corombos explained exactly what situation would make him put someone into a wood chipper face-first; my colleague Dan McLaughlin has some big book news; an experiment in putting noncontroversial statements on X just to see who gets mad about it; and my prediction of this week’s hot topics among far-right/not-right podcasters.