The Press Box - Covering the Campaign and Trump’s Third Run for the White House With New York Magazine’s Olivia Nuzzi. Plus: Thoughts on O.J. Simpson and 'Civil War.'

Episode Date: April 11, 2024

Hello, media consumers! Bryan kicks off the show by discussing O.J. Simpson, who passed away this week (1:24). Later, he is joined by Olivia Nuzzi of New York magazine, who discusses Arizona's status as a swing state (5:16), covering Donald Trump’s third run for the White House (18:05), and more! Before he says goodbye for the weekend, he shares six non-spoiler thoughts on the new movie 'Civil War' (39:08). Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: Olivia Nuzzi Producers: Brian H. Waters Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Nathan Hubbard, spring has sprung, the birds are chirping, and the pop girls are pop-girling. Oh, and you know what that means, Nora Princiotti. Every single album is back. This spring is packed with new releases from some of the biggest pop stars in the world, including our girl Taylor Swift, and we'll be covering it all. We'll, of course, break down every angle on the tortured poets department, and we'll also cover new music from Beyonce, Duolipa, Maggie Rogers, Casey Musgraves, and Ariana Grande. It's Pop Girl Spring on every single album.

New episodes starting March 28th. On Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, media consumers. Welcome to Press Box. Brian Curtis of the Ringer here, along with producer Brian Waters. Coming up in just one second, Olivia Nutsi from New York Magazine is going to join us to talk about the political climate in Arizona, the 2024 presidential race, and her career covering Donald Trump and many other subjects. Plus, I've got some thoughts for you on the new movie Civil War, which has journalists as the heroes. You know, any movie that can be classified as a media movie gets me excited.

I've got takes. But first, before we go any farther, we have to acknowledge the big five-alarm sports story that is leading ESPN and just about everywhere today. OJ Simpson has died at age 76, according to ESPN.com, the family and national. announced on Simpson's official ex account that Simpson died Wednesday after battling prostate cancer. He died in Las Vegas officials there said on Thursday. There are many, many, many things to be said about O.J. Simpson. Many things have been said about O.J. Simpson. And that's where I'd like to start because I'm not sure how many people in my lifetime have been more of a media figure, a figure of coverage, a figure of obsession.

for decades like OJ was. I mean, if we made a list of the people whose careers were made or greatly enhanced by covering OJ. Simpson, it would include Ezra Edelman, director of the great movie Made in America. It would include Chris Myers, who had that memorable up-close interview with OJ Simpson on ESPN years ago. It would include Jeffrey Tubin, the former New Yorker writer, who covered. his trial. Greta Van Sustrin, who became this sort of media legal commentator during that trial, and then goes off and becomes part of the Fox News universe and a big political media figure in her own right. I was of the age that I first got to know who O.J. Simpson was. I'm of the age where I first

got to know O.J. Simpson in the early 90s, maybe the late 80s. His movie career by that point had flopped, minus the memorable turn as Nordberg in the naked gun movies. He was still a major presence as a commentator on football. He was on NBC. He'd called Monday night football on ABC before that, before being memorably left out of ABC's coverage of the Super Bowl. Trivia question, trivia answer, I should say. He was replaced by Joe Thysman on that coverage,

who was actually an active player at that time. Then, of course, comes the murders, the Bronco Chase. I still remember being at a Texas Rangers game. A bunch of people had brought those old-fashioned portable televisions

because the rockets were playing in the finals. And I'm sitting there and all of a sudden NBC goes to this split screen. And we can see on the one hand, on the one side,

the NBA finals and on the other side the Bronco Chays. And anyone who was not alive during that period is unable to describe how much O.J. Simpson and his subsequent trial, trials, captivated everybody.

When David Shoemaker and I were in high school in Fort Worth, Texas, we were herded into the library so that we could see the verdict of the trial, of the first murder trial rendered live. That's how big it was. In recent years, we've seen O.J. Simpson trial become television show, become the documentary, as I mentioned. He has become this strange figure once he got out of prison who was on Twitter, who was occasionally giving interviews, who was more talked about in his absence than actually talked to. But this concludes a period in American life in which people spend a huge, huge amount of their time thinking about OJ Simpson, writing about OJ Simpson, getting book deals based on OJ Simpson, taking him and going off and having big careers, partly because of the way he covered them.

OJ. Simpson dead at 76. We'll have more to say about him on the press box with Shoemaker on Monday. All right. Let us bring in Olivia Nutsi. She is the Washington correspondent for New York Magazine. She has a new piece out this week called Arizona's split reality in which she got to watch Steve Bannon write a speech on the fly or maybe not actually write it as it turned out. Olivia, welcome to the press box. Thank you for having me. All right, so we know Arizona is going to be a big swing state in November.

What in particular interested you about going there this winter? Well, I love Arizona and I love to visit Arizona. So it didn't really, no one had to really twist my arm. to convince me to take this assignment. But I, you know, I knew it was going to be very important. And I think Ruben Gallego is a fascinating character and, frankly, a really good guy. And I was interested in Carrie Lake. And I sort of, I wanted to figure out if there was like a human being there beneath the schick with Carrie Lake.

And I didn't, if there is one there, I did not locate her after all of that. So let's start with Ruth McGeago, the Democrat, who's running for Senate. I know him mostly through these now ubiquitous tweets where a Democratic Senate candidate tweets out, hey, look at the polls. I'm way behind. Please send me money now. You got to spend some actual time with him. What did you make of him?

Yeah, I know him from D.C. I actually think I met him like on Twitter years ago. and he's an interesting character because, you know, besides just all the genuinely fascinating data points about his life and career, he grew up in poverty, Colombian, Mexican, American, grew up spending, you know, his summers in Chihuahua, Mexico, working on a family farm, raised by a single mother, made it to Harvard, then served in the Marines during the Iraq War, got pretty fucked up from that. most of the people that he's not most of them, but a huge percentage of the people that he served

with and an unusually large percentage died. He wrote a good book about kind of the survivor's guilt and all of the PTSD that he deals with. And then, you know, during, I remember around the insurrection, talking to members of Congress who were there that day, it kept coming up that because Rubin is a veteran and because he knew how to, you know, put on a gas mask or, or how to case the joint looking for ways to escape. He kind of became like the platoon leader that day when everyone was panicking. And so, you know, I've stayed in touch with him over the years

and he, you know, keeps coming up in relevant ways. But when I first talked to him for a piece, it was in the 2020 election when the question was, is Arizona going to be a swing state officially, right? Are they going to swing for Democrats for the first time since 96? And I loved to talking to him then because he was a political operative before he was a member of Congress. He worked in like left wing politics in Arizona. And so he's able to sort of like speak as a candidate and as a politician and then speak as an analyst and as someone who's kind of just obsessed with this shit and really interested in it.

So he's a he's like a great hang and a great person to talk to. And the political profile he cuts in Arizona is what? it's a pretty low profile guy. I mean, he breaks through here and there for his like social media presence. But, you know, he's he's served in the Phoenix area since 2015. He's not Carrie Lake. You know, he's not someone who's like known statewide because he's on television every day and in people's homes. So I think, you know, it's going to be a big turnout effort for for both sides in this election, as it always is. And his, His struggle will just be to, you know, increase his name ID. And I guess, you know, trying to define himself to use, like, you know, political strategist jargon, try and define himself on his own terms before Carrie Lake has an opportunity to define him negatively. And the way she's been defining him negatively besides actual political issues involves

the way he left his first wife? Allegedly. Yeah. I mean, it's very icky. I was, I was sitting in Carrie's office. for this interview and she was kind of bitching at me about my coverage of Donald Trump. And she asked me who else I was going to be speaking to for this piece. And at the time, Kirsten Cinema had not yet dropped out.

And I said, you know, I think she asked me if I'd be interviewing her. And I said, I was trying, but I wasn't very hopeful. But as it happened, I was scheduled to sit down with Gallego the following day in Phoenix. And she said, well, I have a couple questions for him. And I was really expecting, I think I wrote this in the piece, but I was expecting her to ask me about. the border, to ask me some challenging questions about inflation, perhaps, you know, something tethered to policy and to the, to the Biden administration's record. And instead, she just launched

into this tirade about his personal life. And I had no idea what she was talking about. And I was just sort of sitting there, you know, aware of the fact that I'm on camera because her husband has a camera in my face trying to, trying to figure out, you know, do I take the bait on this now or do I think about it for a few minutes and then return to the topic later in the interview, which is what I decided to do. But yeah, she is attacking him as essentially like a deadbeat. She's claiming that he he left his first wife and she was pregnant at the time. It's all pretty grotesque and unseemly stuff. And, you know, he's by all accounts on great terms with his first wife or whatever it's worth. She's the mayor of Phoenix. She has endorsed his campaign that does

not strike me as like the type of thing that you do if you hate somebody or if you hold a grudge. And they've got an adorable son together that they're raising, Michael. And he's got a new baby with his current wife, Sydney, who's lovely. And, you know, it's very difficult to find people who have negative things to say about Ruben Gallego that are not named Carrie Lake. Go back to that interview with Lake for just a second. So you're there with her. And this is different than a PR rep throwing another recorder on the table, which is an experience. I don't like that either.

I mean, but we're all used to that, right? Right. This is an upgrade in which her husband is filming you, like filming you with a camera. Yeah. And I had read some coverage of Carrie Lake and I'd watched as, you know, as many of her television interviews as I could. And I knew that it was sort of, you know, theater and that her goal is to sort of, to bait you as her interrogator into a fight so that she can attempt. to humiliate you.

Or at the very least attempt to say, see, I'm a victim of a liberal mainstream media conspiracy, just like Donald Trump is. And so I was prepared for her to be very combative, and I was prepared above all for her to not be a good faith communicator with me. It's not as if we were going to be having a real legitimate exchange. But I was going to try. And then you get there, and, yeah, her husband is filming. and that's just part of the deal.

And in fairness, you know, you're recording. Like, by all means, I guess, if you want to do that, you can record. But when you introduce a camera, you introduce this element of like, when it's being wielded by someone who is out to get you. You know, it introduces this kind of terror to the situation and this stress. And it makes it, you know, completely impossible to have an honest exchange. I was interested with you in particular because you talked about this when you interviewed Trump in the Oval Office in 2018 or were yanked into the Oval Office to interview Trump in 2018. You were at least wary of the fact that you might be being recorded in that instance as well.

Yeah. And I always assume, you know, if I'm doing an interview, you should always assume that you're being weird. I assume that, you know, the NSA or some foreign government is in my phone probably. I mean, we should all assume that, right? there are no private spaces when we're dealing with the cloud. And with Trump, I figured there was some Nixonian apparatus, you know, in that office. And, yeah, it's whatever, it's fine. It's just a reality of the way that our politics function and the way of the modern world.

But, you know, as a print journalist, you're trying to, you know, when you're doing kind of profile material, you're trying to get a sense of a human being that you're writing about and you're trying to understand them. And that's quite difficult to do when somebody is always performing. Sure, on camera. And I understand the theory that having a viral moment with a reporter can make you into a national MAGA star. I don't totally know if it tracks that that will get you votes to help you win a Senate race in Arizona. Yeah, I don't really know. I mean, I think Arizona is difficult to poll by all accounts.

You know, there's a huge contingent of independent voters. I think it's about a third of voters identify now as, as undeclared or, you know, as independent. It's sort of like an idiosyncratic, libertarian, leaning-ish place that's difficult to poll. And for now, you know, the survey suggests that Ruben Gallego is ahead, even though the surveys for the presidential race suggest that Donald Trump is ahead by roughly the same margin. But, yeah, I don't know how much that type of national, extremely online mega celebrity counts in a statewide race like this. But I guess we'll figure it out on election day. Here's something that probably will count.

The day you publish your story, the Arizona Supreme Court upheld a law from 1864 that banned just about all of abortions in that state. What did you make of Kerry Lake's reaction to that ruling and also Donald Trump's? Well, I mean, we should say this is before Arizona was a state. Arizona became a state in, I believe, 1912. This is before women had the right to vote. I mean, this is like not a, this is, there's no reason to think that a law like this ought to apply. Her reaction was interesting because initially earlier in the day, she issued this sort of this very Trump-like statement where she said that she did not agree with this law and that, you know, she wanted the legislature

to, you know, find some other solution that would be satisfactory. And then it emerged later in the afternoon that during her gubernatorial race in 2022, she, in fact, had endorsed this law. It seemed like she, you know, from what it sounded like on the debate stage, like perhaps she did not know what she was talking about.

And I did find that to be the case seeing her out on the trail when policy would come up. It did not strike me that she had, you know, anything beyond a very shallow understanding of the issues. And in her defense, I guess, you really don't need to know that much to be a mega celebrity. You know, you just sort of need to make the right noises in the right direction and have the right aesthetic. And that's enough. And it has been enough for her for now up to this point. I mean, it wasn't enough to get elected government. contrary to what she says. But it's been enough to sort of make her a fixture of the MAGA

movement surrounding the former president. But there was this one moment in, we were in Green Valley, Arizona. She was doing an event with the organizers of CPAC who had endorsed her. And someone in the audience asked a question about inflation. And she just sort of froze and didn't want to answer it and kind of nudged the co-moderators of this event to take the question for her and eventually someone spooked in and saved her. And I was thinking about that yesterday when the footage of her resurfaced on the debate stage talking about this law from the 1800s. This is someone who is not a true believer and does not have a real understanding, a real grasp of policy. This is the third presidential campaign you've covered.

Oh, God. Yeah, I guess so. 16, 20, 24, also the third Trump presidential campaign. What's different so far about covering 2024? That's a good question. I mean, in 2020, it was, you know, everyone, for the most part, was on lockdown. There was not really a campaign trail to speak of. Joe Biden, obviously, famously, did not get out much during that race.

and then President Trump, you know, eventually started holding these airport hangar rallies around the country and, you know, trying his best to be out there because he really needs that, I think, psychologically. And, but it was strange. It was sort of like you had to find your own campaign trail. You had to choose your own adventure. And 2016, I mean, was just mayhem. You know, I struggled to, I think I blacked out a lot of it. I'll unpack it in 30 years in therapy or something. But this one, it's interesting because it's like, it's a rematch, but then it's not because you have the third party factor that we didn't have in 2020, but that we did have, you know, to a lesser degree in 2016.

You, Trump is sort of just doing the same thing that he's always done. the ensemble around him is just getting bigger and bigger and bigger and none of these characters ever go away and then he's you know campaigning in between court dates it's like ridiculous it's insane that like getting indicted seems to really help him politically I keep reading that the Trump campaign this time around this ensemble is more quote unquote disciplined what does that mean practically speaking so you're not you disagree with the notion I mean It's funny. It's like funny to give the, I'm, they are, it's not wrong that they are a professional operation in the sense that like they, um, in terms of like, like, organizationally, it functions.

It, it, it, this was really, this came into sharp relief during the Republican primary, um, where you had all of these candidates like Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis who were, casting themselves in some into varying degrees in Trump's image, right? And they were sort of, they were making the classic mistake of taking him literally, instead of taking him seriously,

where, you know, Trump hates media, he says, right? And, you know, the press is fake news. But in practice, there's sort of a pleasure to work with compared to the other campaigns. Whereas, you know, Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis

were completely impossible to work with completely inaccessible. It was horrible trying to deal with their comm staffers and trying to get a comment or trying to get some sort of helpful information for a story. And they both seem to realize at different times, but too late, that that strategy was not working for them and that, in fact, they did need to make themselves accessible to the mainstream press. Whereas Trump, whatever Trump says publicly, I mean, it's just pro wrestling. It's all bullshit. They are, professional, they are responsive. Typically, they send out like advisories and the type of information that you need to plan your coverage in a timely fashion. So I think when people are talking about

them being kind of like them working well, that's what they're referring to. And it is true that so far is not the type of like rampant knife sighting that was happening in the White House or on the previous campaigns. But it's early yet. And there is some of that. There's always some of that. It's just, you know, I think they also are dealing with, like, the existential threat of the various legal challenges. And I think that maybe has a way of organizing everyone's mindset in there right now. And Donald Trump being the candidate, the ultimate knife fighter being the guy on the ballot, would suggest that there will be some kind of knife fighting at some point within Trump world. Yeah, I mean, there always is. And you already, I mean, already there is chatter about all of these great villains of Trump campaigns passed coming back. You know, Paul Manafort, Cori Lewandowski, did bossy people like that. And typically, you know, what you have is sort of people angling for proximity to Trump or angling for Trump to perceive them as being worthy of credit for things going well or. or not to blame when things go poorly. And that leads to a lot of elbowing and a lot of leaking to fuck people over

or to try to elevate someone as a means of killing them off. I mean, it's all very grim stuff. You wrote this story about Trump in December of 2022 right after he declared he was running a third time. And you found him at that point in time to be very isolated. An advisor told you it felt like he was going through the motions that he had lost some of the magic, whatever that magic was from previous campaigns. What changed between then and now? Is it just the indictments that did something change with Trump himself? I mean, I don't know. I guess part of it is just like he was correct that there was nobody who

could come close to matching him in that primary. I mean, I guess, you know, Nikki Halley tried her best and she certainly performed better than I thought that she would when it came down to. it in some of those states, crucially, Washington, D.C. But he, I know, it's interesting. I went back and I watched those 2015 or early 2016 Republican primary debates. And it is astonishing to behold the sight of these many, many candidates, some of whom I completely forgot about on stage with him, just sort of receding into the background. He's the only person who really commands your attention and, you know, your eyes just go to him.

And everyone is sort of reduced to these mumbling, pathetic, sad saps in his presence. And in retrospect, I mean, it's easy to say this in retrospect, but in retrospect, it's like, well, yeah, of course he was going to win. everyone looks so boring and pathetic next to him on stage. And I don't know, his kind of old school, like, do you remember Joey's agent on Friends with the Raspie voice? Like, his old school showbiz analysis of politics often does bear out. Like some people have it, as he would say, and he's one of those people. It's been interesting to me how we've gone through different periods

where readers have been just intensely engaged with any story about politics, any story about Trump in particular. We've heard things in the last few months about there's some kind of news burnout among people. How have you found reader engagement to be during this campaign? Oh, that's interesting. I haven't been covering the kind of daily churn of the race yet. I assume that will come as it heats up. But I haven't found that to be, I haven't found the news cycle war instead yet from my perspective. And so I haven't really run into the kind of like, oh, God, you know, why are we doing this type of reader response? But, you know, I deal with the same thing.

I deal with news fatigue and Trump fatigue as well. I will sort of retreat and take a breather, go cover some Democrats or something, and then come back and get back into it again. But it's the same story over and over again in a lot of ways, even when we have these big dramatic plot twists like a new indictment or a trial or whatever it may be. none of it feels that's surprising, right? I mean, he broke the law in front of the world, so, you know, it seemed like a pretty good bet that that was going to rear its ugly head for him at some point. I like that you retreat by covering Democrats or RFK Jr.

I don't know if that's much of a retreat, psychologically speaking, but I guess it's totally is. I mean, it's very interesting. There's a lot of interesting stuff happening politically in the country that, you know, when you just focused on Trump, you're at risk of completely missing. I heard you talking about this in 2020 right after Trump's defeat. And you say, look, this was the biggest story of my lifetime. It's a fascinating story, Donald Trump getting elected president, also an awful story at the same time.

How could I not want to cover this? Do you still find yourself in that space like Donald Trump gets elected again in November? This is absolutely the story I want to be covering. I don't want to be covering anything else? It's not that I feel like I want to be doing it, but I do. I feel like a civic duty to do it, honestly, and I feel like I committed to do it in 2015. I've been doing it for a third of my life, which I didn't know I was committing to that, but, you know, that's commitments for you, I suppose.

But I said I would see it through, and at no point has it occurred to me to not see it through, even if I do often respond with sort of a knee-jerk dread to the idea of another, you know, another four-year deployment in the Trump White House. But that's not a given that that would happen, right? I mean, a lot could change between now and Election Day. You know, a year ago, we didn't know that there would be a war, a new war. We have no idea what's going to happen between then and now that's not, you know, particularly insightful comment, but it is true that, you know, the entire dynamic of the race

could change between now and then or some, you know, AI troll could completely fuck everything up for everybody and decide the fate of the election. So I'm not, you know, I'm not like mentally preparing myself for anything prematurely. But yeah, I will definitely be covering it if that is what happens. And a commitment to see it to the end feels like a lifetime commitment, potentially, or at least commitment through Trump's lifetime. Like his political career could go way beyond this, no matter whether he wins or loses in November.

Yeah. I mean, who knows? I mean, I don't, again, I don't do like daily churn coverage. So it's, I think it's, I'm in a very privileged position in that respect. I think if I were, there were periods of time during, especially like the first year of the Trump White House, or I guess it's like, this all time actually, where it just felt like I was standing in front of a fire hose every day

and there was so much information coming out. And I'm sure news consumers felt like this as well. And I spent, I mean, I had to, at a certain point during the day, my mind would just sort of snap and I could not absorb information by reading it anymore. I would have to switch to audiobooks or podcasts, which I retain information better that way anyways. It's probably for the best. best. But I had to kind of devise all of these strategies to absorb all of the information that I needed to absorb every day. And even then, I mean, I still, I don't know if I ever recovered from the Russia investigation, sort of immediately giving way to the first impeachment. So an entire cast of Russian characters became a whole new cast of Ukrainian characters with all sort of similar sounding

names. And I don't think I ever got over that gigantic confusion that that caused for me. The TV networks wrote a letter to both campaigns this week asking them to agree to a debate. What is there to learn from a presidential debate this year, do you think? That's an interesting question. I mean, I think I am always in favor of more access to the candidates, to them being more visible, to them having to answer questions in a public forum. And so I think in that regard, it is. is beneficial to the public, to all of us,

to have a scheduled time and place where that can happen. However, political debates, the way that they're run, the way that the networks handle them are often just a complete fucking disaster. So I hope that, I don't know, I hope that there's some effort to make it less of a disaster if it does happen this time. But I think even when they are a disaster, they're useful.

A few quick questions about your career before we go. When did you first decide you wanted to be a journalist? No, I didn't really. I grew up in a working class family. You know, everyone in my family, like, worked with their hands. You know, it was not, I didn't know anybody who wrote books or who wrote anything for a living. And so it didn't occur to me. I knew I loved to write.

And I knew I was really interested in politics. And I was really interested in, you know, I started following the news because I used, I loved late night comedy. And I loved comedy. And I, but I would get very frustrated if I didn't, like, understand a joke, like, Letterman or something. And so I started, this is not a noble reason for becoming a news consumer, but I started reading the news regularly so that I could understand what the hell Letterman was talking about. And then I thought maybe I wanted to be a speech writer.

and I started volunteering in local politics in New Jersey. And what I found was just this embarrassment of riches, just this incredible universe of characters and people who were so delightful and amusing. And I loved being around them. And I thought it was so fascinating. And so I think that's when it may be sparked that I was interested in it.

And I started writing a column for an alt-weekly based in Esbury Park, New Jersey, where I'm from Red Bank, New Jersey. where I'm from Red Bank, New Jersey, but based in Nesbury Park called the Tri-City News. And I loved doing it. And I loved, I would like go to political events for, you know, whatever campaign I was volunteering on. And people would come up to me to, like, yell at me about something I had written. And I thought it was just the most exciting thing that anyone could ever do with their life, basically.

I would think the job you have at New York Magazine has gotten harder as the media sped up. There are now approximately 90,000 political newsletters being published every day. Washington, D.C., seemingly a new startup every week. What's the trick to covering a campaign, covering politics through profiles? I don't think it's gotten harder. I mean, I think maybe you feel like this with audio as well, when there is such a churn and so much content that's ephemeral, there is sort of an appetite for something slower

and more considered and with much more context. And so I kind of, I don't know, I guess I feel like the way that there is always going to be a community of people who are really obsessed with vinyl records or, you know, with classic film, I hope that there will always be a community of people who are dedicated to long-form storytelling, whether... whether or not that, you know, is in print or it's in audio or it's in, you know, documentary series. I think that there is an appetite for that type of thing. And I think the market kind of confirms that if you look at, you know, either in documentary or podcasting or books, you see that people do kind of yearn for that.

Slightly bigger than vinyl records, I hope. Yeah, yeah. That was maybe not my best. I'm just part of that community. It matters a lot to you. I'm always fascinated by this looking back, the early years of the Trump administration, where the people covering Trump, people at newspapers, people at magazines, became not only famous, at least famous for media people, but became like players or they were perceived as players in the game of politics. Yeah, disgusting, right? Right. Everybody's Twitter follower account went up. There were book deals being handed out.

just journalists felt very big. How do you look back at that period now? You know, it's, I think the incentive structure of that time was so, um, uh, off kilter and there was this, um, you know, I knew I could say anything about Donald Trump. I could say the meanest shit imaginable about Donald Trump. I could call him ugly. I could say anything.

and I would be, you know, applauded by a certain faction of the internet or of the, you know, resistance left. And, you know, you, it's not like that writing about Joe Biden or writing about, you know, basically any other politician. And that's good. That's fine. I mean, I think if you're doing your job as a journalist, like, you know, everybody's going to be mad at you at a certain point on, you know, every side of the ideological

spectrum. But it was a weird time and I kind of think, I don't know, it's created this sort of like permanent class of media figure who is sort of like tethered to Trump and locked in this symbiotic, toxic relationship with Trump turning out books about him or his campaigns or his movement or the, you know, the chaos around him. Even if that reporting is good and even if it's quite critical. There's just uncomfortable, you know, mutually beneficial aspect to the relationship. And it makes me feel uncomfortable. It made me feel uncomfortable to be a part of it. It makes me feel uncomfortable when I kind of dip back into that and I know that I'm a part of it again, you know, when you report critically on him and he attacks you, in some way, I think he

thinks he's doing you a favor. And it's a strange, it's a very strange, strange, dynamic. And, I mean, like Carrie Lake, right, he views this as theater and he, he views the media as sort of a character in, in this ensemble of his performance. And whether or not you want to, and whether or not you are willingly participating, you know, you're dragged into it. And there were some people who were much more eager performers than others. And those people profited, I mean, literally and in the attention economy and in all manner of ways. So he's very aware that if Olivia writes a piece about me that's critical and then I attack her on Twitter, that she's winning from this in some way with her audience. Yeah, because I think, I mean, I think that he views it as, he views all attention as good.

I think it's a little more complicated than that. I think he genuinely does get upset, and I think he is sort of shockingly, astonishingly, an optimist when it comes to media coverage still. I mean, he's inclined to talk to Bob Woodward still, right? He's inclined to talk to me. I'm sure he'll talk to Maggie Haberman again. Like, there is this sort of belief in him

that he will win us all over one day. but even if he doesn't, he still gets something out of it and he thinks that we get something out of it. And, yeah. All right, Olivia Nutsi. Indeed. All right, Olivia Nutsi, the new piece in New York is called Arizona's Split Reality. Thank you so much for coming on the press box. Thank you for having me.

Before we go, I got some thoughts for you on the new movie Civil War, which opens today. There were some laughs when the trailer for Civil War came out a few months ago. and we learned the term the Western forces of Texas and California. Now, as a native Texan who watches political commercials from that state, I don't totally see the basis for that tag team. But I wanted to see Civil War

because fantasy tipped me off that the heroes of the movie are reporters, including a photographer named Lee Smith who was played by Kirsten Dunst. Lee Smith and three other journalists, played by Stephen McKinley Henderson, Kaylee Spaney and Wagner Mora, who you know from Narcos, cover a civil war that's raging right here in America.

I got to see the movie this week at the Chinese theater in Hollywood. It was a big screen. It was a packed house. I had my large popcorn and my Diet Coke. And I have for you six non-spoilery press box observations about Civil War. Observation number one. The movie begins with four journalists traveling in a van to Washington, where the embattled three-term president is clinging to power.

Now, the Curtis test for any journalism movie is, do I believe these people and I share the same profession? In the case of Civil War, the answer is a kind of surprising yes, especially Kirsten Dunst, though I kind of wish we'd learn more about her backstory. We just see these glimpses of her taking photographs during conflicts around the globe, but she is very believable as an ace photographer, as are the other three lead actors. I believed that they could be members of our embattled profession. Observation number two, I loved how writer-director Alex Garland took scenes we know from previous media movies,

where reporters are following wars in foreign countries and transpose those scenes to America. So instead of that stock scene where the correspondence are gathered in a foreign press club, swapping stories. Here they're in an American hotel that looks a lot like a Marriott courtyard. Instead of a scene of urban warfare, we see a crashed helicopter, and it's outside a J.C. Penny. Observation number three, my favorite line from any recent journalism movie comes from Jesse Plymins in Civil War. Jesse Plemons plays a paramilitary type, very, very scary. He says and I quote, I know what Reuters is.

That is amazing stuff. Just because I'm fighting a civil war doesn't mean I don't know a wire service when I see one. Observation number four. I did wonder something, which is why these four journalists weren't filing.

Max Taney had the same observation on Twitter. We know in peacetime America that media fights with other media. so surely in the event of an actual American Civil War, we would see stark versions of this reality. But besides a mention of Reuters in the New York Times, Garland does not give us Western Forces Ringer or even Western Forces Breitbart.

We see reporting happening in the movie, but we don't really see its consequences. Which brings me to observation number five. Kirsten Dunst's character has a line in this movie about what war correspondence should do. We observe, she says, rather than explain. It's a strand that I wish Alex Garland had tugged just a little harder on. Because that's a debate we're having again and again and again during the Trump administration,

during a time of actual threats to democracy. To what extent should we journalists be passive recorders of events rather than people seeking to aggressively say, that's not right. That idea is raised in this movie, and the characters, especially Dunst, risk their lives to document the carnage of a civil war, much like real-life correspondents do. But that question about what they should do is raised

more than its answer. Finally, observation number six, did I like Civil War? Yeah, I did. But I liked it more as a nightmare and an action movie, and occasionally something that feels like a video game, then I did a movie that's really trying to say profound things about journalism.

I am an advocate, as you know, for our profession to be portrayed in movies. See the recent scoop that Amanda Dobbins and I reviewed here. But in making this very frightening and propulsive movie, I think Garland's interest in journalists was to be guides taking viewers into hell. So three out of four stars from your critic. And if you want to see a cool movie about war photographer, check out Under Fire with Gene Hagman. Well, I think I just saw on the New York Post this week.

Maybe that's a segment for next week. All right, that is the press box. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Brian Waters. Speaking of next week, our next Thursday guest host on April 18th. There's going to be Derek Thompson, fine writer from the Atlantic, podcaster here at The Ringer on plain English. I cannot wait to talk to him.

And this Monday, April 15th, marks the return of the man, the myth, the legend, David Shoemaker, who will be armed? Don't you know it? With more lukewarm takes about the media. Have a fantastic media.