The Olivia Nuzzi Story Is Pure Trumpism
The Olivia Nuzzi RFK Jr Mark Sanford story is pure Trumpism; the very thing they told us they were “covering” but never seemed to understand that they had become.
Can you smell the gaslight?
The new revelations in the Olivia Nuzzi/Robert F. Kennedy Jr./Mark Sanford story are everything that’s wrong with our culture: the corruption, the elitism, the deception marketed as truth by a media in bed with the powerful, the excused sexual scandals exposing the media rot of the willing relinquishing of ethical standards — all justified and excused by other powerful people.
The Olivia Nuzzi story is pure Trumpism; the very thing they told us they were “covering” but never seemed to understand that they had become.
They determine elections with a deceptive story — and are congratulated and protected by their peers for it. When the first deception of her RFK Jr. affair was exposed last year, it was excused. We were told it was a mistake but that her “reporting” on him and other presidential candidates “held up.” The narrative she set about Joe Biden was upheld. Questions about her reporting were dismissed.
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Nuzzi’s book “American Canto”, serialized by Vanity Fair, is about how her personal journey (aka, affair with a Kennedy!) mirrors the country’s journey through Trump’s rise to power and how “American reality warped during this transformative period.”
In other words, the person who lied to the country while covering two presidential candidates has written a book about how reality has been warped during Trump’s rise to power and she and this book are being pushed by the paper of record as this era’s Marilyn Monroe.
From the sexism to the sordid revelations that keep coming to the buried scandals to the deceptive reporting and embrace of corruption, this story is covered in Trump slime.
How did we get here?
Misogyny
Misogyny brought us here in so many ways. Trump, who ran and won against two very qualified women even as an admitted sexual assaulter and then an adjudicated rapist, has revealed the pervasive misogyny rampant in our culture. And this story put a cherry on it.
Certain types of men in the media spent weeks scolding women journalists who criticized Olivia Nuzzi for having an affair with RFK Jr. while she was profiling him and while she covered his opponents in a presidential race, even after she was fired from her role as a political correspondent at New York Magazine in 2024.
By the way, RFK Jr. denies this digital affair ever took place.
Like middle school mean girls, they accused women who objected of being “jealous.”
This is a good place to remind everyone that Nuzzi was buddies with the leader of GamerGate harassment campaign against female journalists, Milo Yiannopoulos. But women journalists were not supposed to criticize her.
These men are cheerleaders for patriarchal women who play the game men demand they play. Men who support patriarchal women then use that as a veneer that they champion women, when really, they champion women who do not threaten their own power and who help them maintain it and abuse it. They champion women who go along with them or even think like they do. They champion other predators.
In recent revelations in Part 1, for example, Nuzzi’s ex-fiance wrote that Nuzzi orchestrated a plot with a senior Trump official to have him imprisoned:
After all, she deceived me for a year and smeared me with false allegations. And not just little lies but big fantastical falsehoods—blackmail! (A former child actor, Olivia always had a keen sense for the dramatic.) She orchestrated a plot with the help of a senior Trump official to try to have me imprisoned, and now she’s written what appears to be a largely fictitious and self-serving account about it all.
…
Last year, she asked to negotiate a non-disclosure agreement. Earlier this year, she sent a message to me via a mutual friend: I will never talk about any of this again, and I hope you will do the same. I’m not sure if she delivered that before or after she had a publication date for her book, arranged a Vanity Fair excerpt, and secured a profile in The New York Times.
Either way, it wasn’t true, and, unfortunately, silence no longer seems advisable or even possible.
That is what these men have been supporting, most likely because they recognize in her someone who won’t be upset when they act unethically. Being in the boys club means tolerating and excusing the bad behavior of other men. Feminism kind of “ruins” that, we’ve been told from that bastion of deep thought and respect for democracy the New York Times.
What does this attitude of misogyny get us? It got us Trump, for one. It gets us a repeat of the same patriarchal values enshrined in legacy media because power begets more power and patriarchy has always been about power.
You will almost never find this kind of man defending a woman who has stood up for the rights of women and girls, a woman who refused to have transactional sex with someone for personal profit, or a woman who does not suggest that she is willing and available.
Story continues below.
