Does Olivia Nuzzi Make Good Copy?

"By now, it is a truism that Donald Trump is a showman: a President who lauds appointees with talk of "central casting," and workshops his riffs onstage while gauging the crowd's reaction. "He succeeded in making all political and media actors into actors," Olivia Nuzzi writes, near the end of her much anticipated new memoir, " American Canto." Nuzzi evidently includes herself among these figures, which strikes a note of surprising passivity. If she's an actor, it's because she made herself into one."

"Nuzzi is a political journalist whose clear ambition and ability, in the course of roughly a decade, powered her swift professional ascent. In 2017, at the age of twenty-four, she was named the Washington correspondent at New York magazine; there, she published a series of stories that helped to define the first Trump Administration as a circus of comic dysfunction, dominated by the infighting of outsized personalities and prone to gossipy disclosures toward which she maintained a pose of knowing amusement."

"In 2024, she was covering the campaign trail (a headline: "I Examined Donald Trump's Ear-and His Soul-at Mar-a-Lago") when news broke that she'd had a "personal relationship" with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. She had written about Kennedy's Presidential campaign the previous year, and later produced an influential piece that aired insiders' misgivings about President Joe Biden's fitness to remain in office. The news of her entanglement cast doubt on the objectivity of such reporting."

Olivia Nuzzi rose rapidly in political journalism, becoming New York magazine's Washington correspondent at twenty-four and producing defining coverage of the Trump era. Her reporting portrayed the administration as chaotic and personality-driven, often with a tone of knowing amusement. While covering the 2024 campaign she was linked to a reported personal relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., after having written about his campaign and publishing work questioning President Joe Biden's fitness. The revelation prompted doubts about the objectivity of her reporting, triggered a tabloid frenzy, and coincided with her leaving her employer and fiancé and relocating to California.

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