press clips, special edition: save the jokes, and save The Cut
On the 15th anniversary of the most fun, deranged, and supposedly consequential weekend in American history (that people believe was responsible for our current mess), and the fate of The Cut.
IF THE PEE TAPE EXISTS, it’ll pale in comparison.
15 years ago Trump got humiliated. Really, posterized. Not just once, or twice, but three days in a row, each successive humiliation worse than the next. By, of all people, a Black man, and the one he hated more than anyone else on the planet.
And guess who was there:
It indeed me, making the same “you believe this shit?” face I made in all my bar mitzvah photos.
Yeah, true story: 30 pounds heavier and a decade-plus lighter — such as us Older Singles and Childless age — it is I, a 27-year-old idiot. Newly, a 27-year-old idiot senior editor at The New York Observer, a title/position I was comically unqualified for. And I was there reporting on a long-time dream assignment: The White House Press Correspondents Dinner. And, as many have incorrectly suggested, the most consequential one in history. It was, at the very least, the most poetic of them all, if not the funniest.
And that’s how we wrote it. Imagine Sorkin-on-crack-era West Wing meets In The Loop, with shit-talk from The New Yorker editor-in-chief David Remnick, NYT top dog Bill Keller, and cameos from Rachel Maddow, R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe, Sean Penn, Sarah Palin, and The Rock. Also, an incident involving a spilled tray of room temp butter and its victim I still giggle at, years later. To this day, the story we wrote — myself, Kat Stoeffel (now a features editor at G.Q.), and some reporting by Nate Freeman (now America’s preeminent art reporter at Vanity Fair) — stands as one of the best pieces of reportage I’ll ever have my name on.1
And next weekend, Donald Trump will attend — for the first time as President of the United States — the White House Press Correspondents Dinner. It comes on a special anniversary for the dinner, and Trump’s special history with it. But as we close in on next weekend — and as Karlie Kloss2 is rumored to be in talks for The Cut, an American treasure of a media property and perhaps our last bulwark against the robots3 — I’d like to remind everyone of two things:
1. That history’s view of that weekend — Trump’s Great Humiliation Ritual — is slightly distorted. And
2. Some perspective on why we should continue to do our best where it concerns members of the Kushner family not getting the chance to own any more media properties.
Shall we?
A month before that photo up there, I got a call from a former mentor-type, Elizabeth Spiers, the founding editor of Gawker and Dealbreaker (i.e. the original proving ground of all-stars like Bloomberg’s Matt Levine and Vanity Fair’s Bess Levin). Spiers told me I needed to take a pay cut and leave the job I’d just started at Esquire to join her at the New York Observer, where she’d just taken the editor-in-chief job.
I thought she was insane. For taking the job, sure. But especially, for asking me to take one with her — given my relationship to her new boss: Jared Kushner. “Uh, pretty sure Jared must fucking haaaaate me,” I reminded her/laughed. “Do you know what I’ve run on him, let alone Ivanka?”
A few years before that conversation, Jared bought the Observer, New York City’s legendarily adored pink weekly newspaper. He immediately proceeded to ruin it. A brief quiz:
Know what the New York Observer is? Probably not.
Know what Sex and the City is? Right.
Did you know Sex and the City was an actual newspaper column, by Candace Bushnell, which then resulted in HBO’s global phenomenon? It was.
Know where it originated? The New York Observer.
That this would qualify as a $2000 Jeopardy question instead of a $200 one — i.e. a fact lost to all but the deepest annals of media history — tells you all you gotta know about how well Jared, as its new owner, carried this torch4. After he bought it, many of the best writers and editors to ever breathe this city’s air ran from him and that paper like it was a smoking backpack in the middle of Times Square. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen plenty of people fuck up media businesses. But my god, did Jared make an art out of it.
In America, at that time, Jared Kushner was no household name, simply the lanky adult failson of a felonious father, whose parents bought his way into Harvard and then NYU, and who — in just the span of a few years — had his parents buy him a respected newspaper5 at 25 years old, and not too much later, acquired a famous wife with an equally ignominious last name (what a shidduch!).
So you could see why, in my tenure as a “media critic” at the Village Voice, Jared Kushner was a frequent soft target subject, as was the chaos at the New York Observer. As was the family to whom the Kushners had recently congealed.
Pal, don’t flatter yourself, you might think. ‘Couldn’t have been that bad. For more on why I assumed Jared might not want me in his employ, look no further than just one of my Voice columns from back then, a throwaway riff on a Financial Times profile (with one of the funniest accompanying photos I’ve ever seen) of Jared’s new wife, the freshly-converted Ivanka Trump:
Look, I know. Howard Zinn, it isn’t.6
Anyway. Spiers, that new editor-in-chief, said Jared could take a joke. I figured she was lying, or Jared didn’t read any of my shit, or he was illiterate, or forgot about it. Or all four. I also loved the Observer and be the change in the world you whatever. Spiers also told me that she had Jared under control, and that he wasn’t gonna fuck with the newsroom.
[This, in retrospect, should’ve been my first sign. Why would Jared come to heel for a 5’2” woman (with, albeit, an occasionally unsettling Alabama mudgrumble) when a guy like him already didn’t respect the significantly taller white men to come before her? It’s Jared.]
But like I said: 26-year-old idiot! I took the job. It ended two years later with Jared constantly fighting Spiers over coverage (especially over his father-in-law). It got to the point where Jared was trying to order hit pieces on his real estate rivals from the newsroom. He was so desperate for these hit pieces that he even turned to people like me — the actual last person he should be asking for help outside, of, like, Chris Christie7 — who would obviously, in turn, make an entire joke out of the entire thing (and Jared). Then, of course, write about it.8
To be fair to Spiers, she fended him off often enough to the point where plenty of really good work squeaked through in those two years, by too many great journalists to count, who are now among the best in America: [NY Mag politics writer] David Freedlander, [ex-Washington Post tech writer] Nitasha Tiku, [Vanity Fair art reporter] Nate Freeman, [Variety TV critic] Daniel D’Addario, [New Yorker staff writer] Emily Witt — the list goes on.
Those before us included Alexandra Jacobs, Max Abelson, John Koblin, Irina Aleksander, Leon Neyfakh, Jim Windolf, Peter Stevenson, Doree Shafrir, Choire Sicha, Ben Smith — and if any of these names mean anything to you, know this: Tip of the iceberg. The alumni list is absurd. One of the greatest incubators of writing and reporting talent New York City has ever seen: That’s the paper Jared ruined.
Which, if nothing else, was pretty good foreshadowing for, uh, America.
And no, Karlie Kloss isn’t Jared Kushner. And she is by any reasonable measure married to the Better One, but her own record as an owner of independent media started off much the same. And while I.D. is fine enough and has great talent in it — low bar, but she has yet to install a felon at the helm of I.D. — Jim Bankoff, I am begging you:
Do not make the same mistake Arthur Carter did, lest the same fate as the other Kushnered media properties of the world befall The Cut. It deserves a great home, one that without question is gonna preserve its independence, and among its nobles roles, the one it occupies as a counterweight to the celebrity and fashion and beauty cultures Kloss herself rose to fame on, and to this day, has plenty of incentives to protect.
Anyway! The Observer’s how I ended up in that photo, taken in the bowels of the Washington Hilton, in the hour before that year’s White House Press Correspondents Dinner. Trump was there as the “date” (basically, a ceremonial plus-one) of Fox News anchor Greta Van Susteren9.
Here’s how the weekend went for Trump:
Friday: After months of Trump baselessly crowing, Obama gets out his birth certificate and holds it up on national television, to prove that he was, in fact, born in America. Obama gets the one thing Trump covets, attention — every network broke in — and makes a joke of the entire thing, which, to be fair, it is.
Saturday: At the dinner, then-SNL head writer Seth Meyers and Obama proceed with a litany of jokes at Trump’s expense. Trump stews, red-faced, for the entire dinner, believing he’d be above the very obvious public roasting he was about to get.
Sunday: The networks break in, yet again — and during The Apprentice, LOL — for Obama around 9PM on Sunday night. He announces: Osama bin Laden is dead. No military action a president has taken since has come even remotely close to the favorable polling on it, upwards of 90% of Americans. It casts a halo over the Obama administration that made any GOP candidate (let alone Mitt Romney) effectively worthless in 2012, to say nothing of Trump, who in the span of three days went from the center of the national conversation to the other thing he hated the most: Something nobody gave a shit about.
When he won the election five years later, plenty of people pointed to that weekend, and said: Look, this is what we get for making fun of Trump! THAT was THE MOMENT he DECIDED TO RUN. Obama and Seth Meyers and their neoliberal yuk-yuks, look what they did!!! Most of the people running that narrative were impotent, sullen, still embittered Bernie Bros: White, male, hairy-knuckled, probably didn’t even vote for Hillary, don’t have any Black friends, secretly wish they wrote for SNL. Some were smart enough to know better, Adam Gopnik. But I get it. You can’t blame them for, like much of the rest of America in early November 2016, wanting an easier, more comfortable explanation than “this is our country.”
Couple things, here: First, Trump’s been desperate for the presidency since 1987, when at 41-years-old, he took out full-page ads in newspapers airing out his foreign policy views right before the New Hampshire primary. This, objectively, is a funny thing to do when you have a ton of money, and I’m now fantasizing about what I’d do with cash to burn and a graphic designer.10 He actually ran in 2000, and scored Reform Party primary wins in Michigan and California (but wasn’t crazy about being associated with David Duke, so he split — innocent times!).
Meanwhile, late-night hosts, newspaper and magazine publishers, comedians — many, many people have been making fun of Donald Trump for a long, long time. He didn’t try to buy Spy or Vanity Fair every time they called him a short-fingered vulgarian. And yeah, as he sundowns and gets bored, he’s gone after late-night — but letting a rabid FCC chair off the leash and quid-pro-quo’ing with the Ellisons is all in a day’s work now, and it took him two presidential administrations to do it. Same with bombing Iran and beefing with the pope. The sequel was always gonna be weirder.
But this is the most validation-hungry and attention starved person in American history we’re talking about. While it’s true that he can’t take a joke, I assure you: The jokes weren’t it. Maybe the Osama hit inspired him, who knows. But let’s be real: Trump had his eye on being the center of attention long before that weekend. Even Trump himself has shrugged at that dinner, to the Washington Post, and in a Times story proffering (then negating?!?) that whole “the jokes did it” thesis. Let us please, fifteen years later, retire that narrative. For the love of god, don’t blame the jokes.
There’s that Oscar Wilde line: Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow. Trump didn’t run because he got clowned on. He ran long before the jokes, and well after the jokes, every time motivated by money, power, narcissism, and the ability to capitalize on the pee11 stains deep in the fabric of the American soul. Trump was registered as a Democrat from 2001 to 2009. I’ve always thought that if, at any point in history, Trump could’ve galaxy-brained his way into winning on a Democratic ticket, he would’ve rather done that, if only because the celebrities would’ve been more famous.
As for this year’s dinner? There won’t be a comedian, just a mind-reader. Which is funny, in and of itself, given that anybody with a working brain will be thinking the same thing: Any celebration of the press in 2026 that’s attended by Trump is, as far as they go, an absolute joke. God knows we should all enjoy at least one.
Class dismissed. This was a one-off! Press Clips will not return anytime soon, because (as longtime readers know) I get in some kind of trouble everytime I do this shit. That said, FOSTERTALK Presents: Summer Fridays will return. Anyway: Thanks, as ever, for taking any time with me at all. Long live The Cut.
More soon,
-f.
I’ll go to the grave arguing that, outside of Stephen Colbert’s astounding, world-burning performance at the 2006 dinner, it stands as one of the finest indictments of Beltway press dynamics to ever exist. Don’t take my word for it. Many years later, for example, here’s [The New Republic deputy editor] Jason Linkins, then at the Huffington Post: “No one is going to write a better story about the dinner than the one Foster Kamer and Kat Stoeffel wrote back in 2011 for the New York Observer.” I don’t know about you, but at least for me, rarely are the ones I love the ones other people love, and most of my writing, just days or weeks later, I’d like to torch to the ground. And so: I’ll forever be grateful to Kat, Nate, and Spiers for at least one thing I can look back on, and go: Okay, fine — that one was pretty good.
Supermodel, wife to Josh Kushner, and, uh, benevolent steward of I.D. Magazine.
I know: link to my own Tweet, don’t worry, I put $20 in the jar.
He used it to burn the fucking paper down!
Incidentally, the very same newspaper that kicked off the reporting leading to Jared’s father going to prison (for attempting to blackmail his uncle with a prostitute)! Shout-out the legend Tom McGerveran.
ngl: laughed again, though.
….who prosecuted Jared’s father, and was later subjected to his own humiliation ritual once Trump was elected, but to his credit, has since become a god-tier gossip queen.
…with whom he aired the idea of running for president in 2012 during an interview two months prior to that year’s dinner, and who eventually (like all of his first and second wave collaborators) had her own “what hath we wrought” moment.
…..-tape.
yesssssssss