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      in Elections

      How Molly Jong-Fast Tweeted Her Way to Liberal Media Stardom

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      Molly Jong-Fast had just finished interviewing Vice President Kamala Harris for her podcast when she hopped in an Uber S.U.V. headed to the Century, the Manhattan literary club where she was throwing a book party for the media critic Margaret Sullivan, a friend. The editors of Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair greeted her with hugs. The owner of The New Republic, Win McCormack, stopped to say hello.“I just interviewed the vice president!” Ms. Jong-Fast gushed.“The vice president?” Mr. McCormack replied, brow furrowing. “ … Of the United States?”For much of her life, Ms. Jong-Fast, 44, was known for being the daughter of her mother, Erica Jong, whose novel “Fear of Flying” is a feminist classic. Ms. Jong-Fast went to rehab at 19, married at 23, and wrote a couple of novels and a book of essays about her bohemia-by-way-of-Park-Avenue upbringing.Now, within a certain rarefied slice of American political life, she is a star. On Wednesday, she joined Vanity Fair as a special correspondent. One million people follow her on Twitter. The first guest on her new podcast, distributed by the mega network iHeartMedia, was President Biden’s chief of staff. In the run-up to Tuesday’s midterm elections, she has interviewed Senators Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, John Fetterman and Ms. Harris — a lineup rivaling MSNBC.In Woody Allen’s “Purple Rose of Cairo,” a moviegoer steps into the screen and enters the world of her favorite film. From her Upper East Side living room, Ms. Jong-Fast marshaled a weapons-grade Twitter habit and a penchant for sliding into journalists’ DMs to catapult herself into the beating heart of left-wing media: the MSNBC Mom who starts actually appearing on MSNBC.Her rise is a testament to the power of social media, the increasingly blurred lines between armchair pundits and professional commentators, and the opportunism of writers, on the right and the left, who used Donald Trump’s presidency to reinvent themselves. It’s about the flight to ideological comfort among news consumers in a partisan era. But it’s also about Ms. Jong-Fast and her ability to win friends, wear her privilege lightly and help anxious liberals cope with a chaotic moment.“She speaks and writes in a way that is incredibly relatable to a group of people that don’t ordinarily have a columnist that speaks to them,” said Noah Shachtman, the editor of Rolling Stone, who praised her “lack of harrumph.” One superfan, the artist Diana Weymar, stitched enough needlepoints of Ms. Jong-Fast’s aphoristic tweets (“What if killing your constituents is bad for your re-election?”) to fill an exhibit at a Chelsea gallery. Ms. Jong-Fast is not an adversarial interviewer — “Do you think, personally, that democracy can survive a second Trump term?” she asked Ms. Harris — but her progressive fans don’t seem to mind. “I think she’s found her sense of purpose,” Ms. Sullivan said at the book party, as Ms. Jong-Fast, in periwinkle glasses and a Thom Browne cardigan, darted among guests. “There are very few people that meet Molly that don’t wind up rooting for Molly.”‘I’m so grateful I got sober before social media.’ — @mollyjongfastMs. Jong-Fast with her mother, Erica Jong, in New York, in July.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesLast month, Ms. Jong-Fast sat barefoot in her spacious but homey Upper East Side co-op, surrounded by the bric-a-brac of uptown literary life: Fornasetti candles, her grandfather’s Emmy, a pillow needlepointed with the cover of The New York Post. As one dog was groomed in the dining room, another nestled in her lap. In her makeshift home podcast studio, Ms. Jong-Fast had just wrapped a Zoom interview with Gisele Barreto Fetterman, wife of the Pennsylvania Senate candidate. (“You look a-mazing,” Ms. Jong-Fast cooed, as Ms. Fetterman asked after her pets.)The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.House Democrats: Several moderates elected in 2018 in conservative-leaning districts are at risk of being swept out. That could cost the Democrats their House majority.A Key Constituency: A caricature of the suburban female voter looms large in American politics. But in battleground regions, many voters don’t fit the stereotype.Crime: In the final stretch of the campaigns, politicians are vowing to crack down on crime. But the offices they are running for generally have little power to make a difference.Abortion: The fall of Roe v. Wade seemed to offer Democrats a way of energizing voters and holding ground. Now, many worry that focusing on abortion won’t be enough to carry them to victory.“I was a drug addict, I nearly died, I got sober; I’ve had this incredible run,” Ms. Jong-Fast said. “A lot of kids who grew up like I grew up are not high functioning. I feel very grateful.”Her parents split up when she was 3. Her mother, busy being a cultural icon, often left Ms. Jong-Fast with her grandparents, including Howard Fast, the “Spartacus” novelist and Communist activist who served prison time in the McCarthy era and introduced Molly to left-wing politics.Her mother, Ms. Jong-Fast notes, was an early adopter of oversharing. In 1985, Erica moved 6-year-old Molly from New York to the Beverly Hilton for a month because she was developing a sitcom based on her daughter’s experience with divorce. A pilot aired, but not before Ms. Jong-Fast’s father, Jonathan Fast, sued and demanded that his ex-wife change the character’s name from Molly to Megan. (A review in The New York Times praised the show’s “appealing breeziness.”)Ms. Jong-Fast is dyslexic and did poorly in school; her ejection from Dalton, she said, was a “seismic” shock for her ur-intellectual family. She got into alcohol and drugs. After spending time at Hazelden, the A-list rehab center, Ms. Jong-Fast, at 21, published a roman à clef about her struggles. “That was what my mother did,” she said, referring to the act of novelizing one’s life. “So I just thought that was what you’re supposed to do.” The reviews were vicious.She married her husband, an English professor turned venture capitalist, had three children, and wrote another book. But she felt at a loss. “I was like, ‘My life has no meaning,’” she recalled. “I was not put on this earth to write chick-lit novels.” Her writing on politics, at The Forward, drew little notice.Then Mr. Trump came down the escalator. “At some point I realized this guy was gonna win and I was like, ‘Why isn’t everyone hysterical?’” she recalled. “That’s when I really started tweeting.”She tweeted her angst five, 10, 15 times a day. (Sometimes she would merely reply to Mr. Trump’s tweets, scoring likes and retweets for her punchy responses.) She replied to journalists and posted links to their stories. The conservative commentator Bill Kristol hired her to write for his site The Bulwark. She traveled, on her own dime, to cover Trump rallies and conservative conferences, mingling with the network of reporters she was cultivating online.She turned her lack of reportorial expertise into an asset, forsaking complex political analysis for a “can you believe this?” astonishment. (When she started a newsletter at The Atlantic, she called it “Wait, What?”) For anguished liberals in the Trump era seeking a voice in the media, simply underlining the preposterousness of events was enough. “Sometimes everyone will say something and I’ll be like, ‘How’?” Ms. Jong-Fast said. “I just feel like a lot of times I’m like, this doesn’t smell right, and I think that has been really helpful in my life.”‘Democrats continue to bring a stuffed animal to a knife fight.’ — @mollyjongfastOne evening in 2019, I arrived at Ms. Jong-Fast’s building for a party she was throwing in honor of the actress Kathy Griffin. Inside the door was Resistance Twitter come to life.The writer E. Jean Carroll, who had recently accused Mr. Trump of sexual assault, was engrossed in conversation with George T. Conway III, husband of Kellyanne Conway, when Ms. Griffin, in an ecru Valentino dress, approached. “Who has Mrs. Mueller’s number?” she asked mischievously, laying out a “Lysistrata”-style scheme in which the wife of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, would withhold physical relations from her husband until he divulged damning details about Mr. Trump.Her planning was interrupted by the arrival of the Momofuku catering. “This is the best party I’ve been to all year,” Ms. Carroll said as she glided toward the slow-roasted pork. (Later, when she sued Mr. Trump for defamation, she hired a lawyer that Mr. Conway recommended to her that evening.)Philippe Reines, a former senior aide to Hillary Clinton, surveyed the room of liberal writers, comedians and cable news green room habitués, and compared the gathering to the TV show “Lost”: shellshocked survivors wandering a beach. “If we all went down on the plane, who would get the obit?” he asked. The consensus: Ms. Griffin.Washington has its famed political hostesses — Sally Quinn, Pamela Harriman — but latter-day New York has lacked for gatherers. Ms. Jong-Fast, with her ample personality (and ample apartment), filled the void. “I walked in and the first sight I see is Erica Jong talking with Joyce Carol Oates,” said Ms. Sullivan, a former public editor of The Times. “I felt like I was in literary heaven.”These gatherings — which extend to a semiregular Washington party at the home of the NBC reporter Jonathan Allen — have doubled as another prong of Ms. Jong-Fast’s path to media success. Many attendees are people Ms. Jong-Fast has met online. (“It’s just one of those friendships that develops through direct messages,” Mr. Conway recalled.) When she started a podcast in 2020 at The Daily Beast, “The New Abnormal,” Ms. Jong-Fast leaned on those connections to secure guests like Ben Stiller, Sharon Stone, and Mary Trump. The podcast, co-hosted with the former Republican consultant Rick Wilson, sailed toward the top of the charts.Noah Shachtman, the editor of Rolling Stone, with Ms. Jong-Fast at a book party for Margaret Sullivan, right, in New York, last month.Krista Schlueter for The New York Times“I was sort of like, ‘Meh, OK, does the world really need another podcast?’” recalled Mr. Shachtman, the Rolling Stone editor who ran The Daily Beast at the time. “And it became hugely important to us — hugely.”Ms. Jong-Fast left for The Atlantic in late 2021, where she remained until joining Vanity Fair. In September, she moved her podcast to iHeartMedia, which advertises the show across its radio stations. So far, “Fast Politics” — a two-person operation consisting of Ms. Jong-Fast and a producer who previously recorded songs for The Misfits — is hovering around the Top 50 of Apple’s news category.The Trump era produced no shortage of wannabe pundits. Ms. Jong-Fast credits some of her success to a tenacity honed by years as a freelancer; to secure Ron Klain, Mr. Biden’s chief of staff, for her podcast, she pestered his staff for months. “I’m used to so much rejection,” she said. “I’m like, ‘Do you have five minutes for me? You could do it in your car!’”A high-end Rolodex helps. Her first MSNBC appearance was with Lawrence O’Donnell, who, she admits, once went on a date with her mother. “There are people I am more connected to than others,” she said. When Ms. Jong-Fast, on Oct. 20, tweeted about the death of her dog, Cerberus, she received condolences from Aimee Mann, Padma Lakshmi, Daryl Hannah, and Megyn Kelly.She is particularly close with Ms. Griffin, who said in an interview that when she met Ms. Jong-Fast, “about 75 percent of my friends had dumped me permanently.” (Ms. Griffin had been widely castigated for posting a photo of herself with a facsimile of Mr. Trump’s decapitated head.) When Ms. Griffin had surgery in 2021 to remove a tumor in her lung, Ms. Jong-Fast stayed with her in Malibu, Calif.“We’d watch the news or she’d be online the whole time,” Ms. Griffin recalled.‘My life may not turn out how I want it but at least I won’t be buried on my second husband’s golf course.’ — @mollyjongfastPhilip Vukelich for The New York TimesMs. Jong-Fast says she wants to fill a perceived void in the political podcast space, arguing that conservative megastars like Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino need more liberal rivals. (Mr. Shapiro is not exactly a fan, once tweeting that the fact Ms. Jong-Fast is paid “to say and write words” proves that “in a big, beautiful, capitalistic democracy like ours, literally anyone can make a living.”) Ms. Jong-Fast acknowledges a debt to “Pod Save America,” the lefty podcast started by Barack Obama alumni, and expressed some jealousy that they booked Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has repeatedly turned her down.Her podcast is unlikely to move the needle with purple-state voters, so why do boldface politicians like Ms. Harris even bother? The audience, said one Democratic operative, is not voters so much as elite liberals with money; for Democrats, accessing the donor class is as much a part of the left-wing media game as swaying hearts and minds. Ms. Jong-Fast is a relatively friendly conduit.Ms. Jong-Fast, after years of struggling to break into top-tier magazines, marvels at Twitter’s ability to bypass media gatekeepers. But her million-strong Twitter account is a powerful megaphone in its own right: Several journalists confided to me they often text their stories to Ms. Jong-Fast as a surefire path to clicks.In recent days, she has been heckling Elon Musk on Twitter, although she is relatively sanguine about the medium’s future under its new owner. “We’re still gonna need a place to push content,” she said.There are downsides. Ms. Jong-Fast has received death threats. (“I told the doormen and they were like, ‘Again?’”) She shrugged them off. “One thing that was helpful — or made me pathological, depending on your viewpoint — is that my mother wrote about me my whole life, so I never had this assumption of privacy,” she said.Erica Jong is suffering from memory issues, but her daughter said she enjoys seeing her appearances on cable news. “It makes her feel good about her parenting choices,” Ms. Jong-Fast said, wryly.In the age of Trump, partisan punditry is a kind of modern therapy: How many liberals attribute their sanity to nightly sessions with Rachel Maddow? Some of Ms. Jong-Fast’s fans feel the same: “I get emails that are like, ‘I live in Montana, I’m 88 years old, you make me feel like it’s going to be OK.’”For Ms. Jong-Fast, who on Wednesday celebrated 25 years sober, the treatment might go both ways. “My husband is like, ‘Oh my god, democracy is dying in front of us,’” Ms. Jong-Fast said as a dog hopped off her lap. “And I’m like, ‘I’m just going to write another piece.’” More

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      in US Politics

      PJ O’Rourke obituary

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      PJ O’Rourke obituaryConservative American humorist, political satirist and writer who took aim at his own generation – the baby boomers The American humorist PJ O’Rourke, who has died aged 74 of lung cancer, was a writer of sharp wit that ranged from dry to lusciously over the top, but was always leavened by a measure of self deprecation that stopped it from being cruel or harsh. In the political satire that dominated his later writing, he became that rarest of things, a funny conservative.His political writing was based on his early change of tack from 1960s lefty to what he could call the libertarian right, libertarian being the escape hatch for those trapped within the Republican party. His changing stance mirrored the course of his career, from the satire of the National Lampoon and hipness of Rolling Stone to more earnest outlets such as the Atlantic Monthly and the rightwing Cato Institute.He had been instrumental in making the Atlantic Monthly Press a success; its editor Morgan Entrekin called him “one of the major voices of his generation”.The recurrent theme in his writing was his place in his generation – the baby boomers. “My generation spoiled everything for you,” he told younger readers. “It has always been the prerogative of young people to look and act weird and shock grownups. But my generation exhausted the earth’s resources of the weird … all you had left was to tattoo your faces and pierce your tongues. Ouch. That must have hurt. I apologise.”He was born in Toledo, Ohio, to Delfine (nee Loy), a housewife and later a school administrator, and Clifford O’Rourke, a car salesman. He went to Miami University in Oxford, Ohio – “the one where you can’t major in windsurfing” – and took a master’s in English (1970) at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, where he began writing for a local underground paper, Harry, and the Rip-Off Review of Western Culture, which got him a gig with the National Lampoon magazine in 1973.He made his mark quickly, working on the stage show Lemmings, which made stars of John Belushi, Chevy Chase and Christopher Guest, and co-writing with the Lampoon founder Doug Kenney The National Lampoon High School Yearbook, based on a piece by Michael O’Donoghue. There was a strong Irish-American wise-guys at the back of the class vibe at the Lampoon.Kenney also hailed from Ohio, but had attended a private school; the record of the fictional class of 1964 at a high school in Dacron (the name a cross between Ohio cities Dayton and Akron, but also a popular brand of cheap polyester cloth) was based squarely on O’Rourke’s days at Toledo’s DeVilbiss high. The yearbook itself was purportedly the property of one Larry Kroger, who would reappear in 1978 as the naive protagonist of the film National Lampoon’s Animal House.By the time Animal House became a hit, O’Rourke was the editor-in-chief of the Lampoon, charged with “the Squaresville task of making the magazine show a profit”. In the 2018 biopic of Kenney, A Futile and Stupid Gesture, O’Rourke is portrayed in just that light – but his empathy with squares was crucial to the yearbook’s success.Now he found himself out of place in a “clubby and snitty” atmosphere which remained as the creative core of the Lampoon moved on to Hollywood and Saturday Night Live. He turned the magazine, according to one critic, into “comedy you can jack off to”.In 1981 he went freelance, writing for the top-payers such as Vanity Fair and Playboy. His key Lampoon essay “How To Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink”, was reprinted in his first book, Republican Party Reptile (1987), a homage to Hunter Thompson, the chief exponent of gonzo journalism, that saw him appointed “foreign desk chief” at Rolling Stone, the ultimate hip boomer journal.His writing moved from social satire to politics and he reported from war zones, where his knack for satirising the absurd found its true metier. His 1988 collection, Holidays in Hell, is perhaps the best of his 20 books. He became a celebrity, without slowing down in the least, but as I can attest after surviving a London evening with him and my then ABC television colleague Charles Glass, O’Rourke was one of those rare people who was nicer in private, going beyond his public affability, which often surprised those expecting combative wit.In 1991 O’Rourke interviewed Bill Clinton, along with his Rolling Stone colleagues Thompson and William Greider, and its publisher, Jann Wenner. He quickly slid Clinton into identity politics via the Lampoon yearbook template. Clinton’s favourite Beatle was Paul McCartney: Clinton was the “band geek” who paid attention in class.For a short time O’Rourke held down the right side of Point/Counterpoint on CBS’s flagship news show 60 Minutes, opposite the equally funny and acerbic Molly Ivins, but they were too brilliant a mix to last on network TV. As he once wrote, “no humorist is under any obligation to provide answers”.That voice could lose its affability when writing for the Cato Institute, but the new millennium presented new problems, which his work for the Atlantic laid out clearly. A 2004 essay on listening to the radio host Rush Limbaugh shouting to his echo chamber of “ditto heads” led him to search for a leftwing equivalent, but when he could not find one he wound up blaming the entire media landscape. He complained in another essay you could not tell the “liberals who once led Vietnam protests in clown pants from the car ads”, ironically putting his young self and his father into the same boat.His libertarian conservatism reached its apotheosis with Donald Trump’s taking over the Republican party, reflected in his 2016 book of election coverage How the Hell Did This Happen? He endorsed Hillary Clinton, because “she’s wrong about absolutely everything, but she’s wrong within normal parameters”. Although he claimed in 1992 he had “given up” the 60s, Trump was exactly the sort of spoiled preppy boomer O’Rourke could despise. But he might have looked back to his childhood, and Walt Kelly’s comic strip Pogo. It was Pogo who said: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”In 1990 O’Rourke married Amy Lumet, daughter of the film director Sidney and granddaughter of the entertainer Lena Horne.They divorced three years later, and in 1995 he married Tina Mallon. She and their children, Olivia, Clifford and Elizabeth, survive him.TopicsMediaUS politicsComedyMagazinesUS televisionobituariesReuse this content More

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      in US Politics

      Profusely Illustrated review: Edward Sorel and all the golden ages of New York magazines

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      Profusely Illustrated review: Edward Sorel and all the golden ages of New York magazines A memoir by a man who has drawn caricatures for the greatest editors is a treasure trove of the American mid-century modernAt 92, Edward Sorel is the grand old man of New York magazines. For 60 years, his blistering caricatures have lit up the pages of Harper’s, the Atlantic, Esquire, Time, Rolling Stone and the Nation. He is especially revered for his work in Clay Felker’s New York in the late 60s and for work in the New Yorker under Tina Brown and David Remnick.A life in cartoons: Edward SorelRead moreHe has also worked for slightly less august titles, like Penthouse, Screw and Ramparts.He is one of the foundational New Yorkers. Like Leonard Bernstein or E B White, Sorel absorbs the rhythms of the rambunctious city, using them to create an exaggerated, beguiling mirror of all he has experienced.A very abbreviated list of his memories includes the Great Depression, Hitler and Mussolini, the Red Scare, Joe McCarthy, Lee Harvey Oswald, both Bushes, Clinton, Obama and Trump.His memoir begins with a political frame. Like the unreconstructed lefty he is – he voted for Ralph Nader twice – he announces that he will show how the crimes of the previous 12 presidents made possible the catastrophe of Donald Trump.He gives the CIA and the military industrial complex all the shame they deserve for an unending parade of coups and wars – from Iran, Guatemala and Chile to Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. But he promises “these exposés will be brief”, so “it will only hurt for a few minutes”. On that he keeps his word.What gives Profusely Illustrated its charm and its power – besides 177 spectacular illustrations – are Sorel’s tales of New York, beginning with a childhood spent in a fifth-floor walk-up in the Bronx with a father he despised and a mother he adored.Sorel spares no one, especially his “stupid, insensitive, grouchy, mean-spirited, fault-finding, racist” father, who he dreamed of pushing in front of a subway train when he was only eight or nine.“When I grew older, I realized how wrong that would have been,” Sorel writes.“The motorman would have seen me.”The first riddle that tortured him was why his amazing mother married his revolting father. She explained that a few months after her arrival in New York from Romania, at 16, she started work in a factory that made women’s hats. When one of the hat blockers noticed on her first day that she hadn’t left for lunch, he loaned her the nickel she needed. Later, the same blocker told her he would kill himself if she didn’t marry him. So that was that.During a prolonged childhood illness that confined him to his bed, Ed started making drawings on cardboard that came back with shirts from a Chinese laundry. When he went back to school, the drawings were admired by his teacher at PS90, who told his mother young Ed had talent. She enrolled him in a Saturday art class at the other end of the city, the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and then another at the Little Red School House, at the bottom of Manhattan.At Little Red, thanks to the generosity of one Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, all the students were given a wooden box containing oil paints, brushes, turpentine and an enamel palette.It was Ed’s “to keep so I could paint at home” – and it changed his life.He gained admission to the highly competitive High School of Music and Art, and then to tuition-free art school at Cooper Union. But his teachers did nothing but delay his success: the fashion for abstraction was so intense, he wasn’t allowed to do the realistic work he loved.The Bronx boy who had been Eddie Schwartz was transformed after he discovered Julien Sorel, hero of Stendhal’s novel The Red and the Black. Julien was “a sensitive young peasant who hated his father, was appalled by the corruption of the clergy in 19th-century France, and was catnip to every woman he encountered”.Five years later, Eddie changed his name to Sorel.With Seymour Chast he founded Push Pin Studios, which after Milton Glaser joined, became the hottest design studio in New York. Sorel didn’t last long but when Glaser founded New York magazine with Felker a few years later, Sorel got the perfect outlet for his increasingly powerful caricatures.His book’s pleasures include interactions with all the most important magazine editors of the second half of the last century, including George Lois, art director of Esquire in its heyday under Harold Hayes.Gay Talese had written what would become a very famous profile, Frank Sinatra Has a Cold. The crooner had refused to pose for the cover, after Lois told him he wanted a close up with a cigarette in his mouth and a gaggle of sycophants eagerly trying to light it.Lois asked Sorel for an illustration. It was an assignment that would give him “more visibility than I had ever had before”. He panicked and his first effort was a failure. But with only one night left, his “adrenalin somehow made my hand turn out a terrific drawing of Frank Sinatra”. It launched Sorel’s career. The original now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery.Gay Talese: ‘Most journalists are voyeurs. Of course they are’Read moreThe Village Voice, New York’s original counterculture newspaper, gave him a weekly spot. Sorel inked a memorable portrait of the New York Times editor Abe Rosenthal as a tank shooting a too-liberal columnist, Sydney Schanberg, after Schanberg was fired for attacking the news department from the op-ed page.Tina Brown chose Sorel to do her first New Yorker cover. When Woody Allen and Mia Farrow split up, Sorel imagined a Woody & Mia Analysts Convention.If you’re looking for a bird’s eye view of the glory days of magazine journalism, illustrated with drawings guaranteed to make you nostalgic for great battles of years gone by, Profusely Illustrated is perfect. When you’re done, you’ll be ready to rewatch Mad Men all over again.
      Profusely Illustrated is published in the US by Knopf
      TopicsBooksUS press and publishingUS politicsMagazinesNewspapers & magazinesArtDrawingreviewsReuse this content More

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      in Elections

      The Trump Prophets Regroup

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      When you are in the business of prophecy, what do you do when prophecy fails?This spring, the media mogul Stephen E. Strang made an unusual apology to readers in the pages of his glossy magazine.Mr. Strang presides over a multimillion-dollar Pentecostal publishing empire, Charisma Media, which includes a daily news site, podcasts, a mobile app and blockbuster books. At 70, he is a C.E.O., publisher and seasoned author in his own right. Despite all that, Mr. Strang worried something had gone awry.“I’ve never been a prophet,” he wrote in a pleading March editor’s note. “But there were a number of prophets who were very certain that Trump would be elected.”This had not come to pass. Mr. Strang continued, “I hope that you’ll give me the grace — and Charisma Media the grace — of missing this, in a manner of speaking.”Over the past five years, he had hitched his professional fate to the Trump presidency, in a particularly cosmic way: promoting, almost daily, the claim that Trump’s rise to power was predestined by God. Interviewed in Mr. Strang’s various platforms, a rotating cast of religious leaders spoke with mystic authority on this subject.Where secular pundits were blindsided by Mr. Trump’s 2016 victory, the prophets of Charisma had been right. And they predicted another sweeping victory for Mr. Trump in 2020. For Mr. Strang, the last year presented the following question: When you are in the business of prophecy, what do you do when prophecy fails?Mr. Strang reflected on this question in a series of interviews last month.He mused, “God has plans and purposes we don’t understand.”This month, Mr. Strang will release his first post-election book, titled “God and Cancel Culture.” The text does not dwell long on questions of prophecy, failed or otherwise. Instead, it skips into the pandemic political zeitgeist, approvingly featuring vaccine skeptics like Stella Immanuel and megachurch pastors who defied lockdowns. The election conspiracist and pillow salesman Mike Lindell does the introduction.Mr. Strang seems to have discovered that one way to handle being publicly wrong is to change the subject and to pray readers stick around.Beyond the spiritual test of unrealized prophecies, there are very earthly stakes here: Under Mr. Strang’s stewardship, Charisma had grown from a church magazine to a multipronged institution with a slew of New York Times best sellers, millions of podcast downloads and a remaining foothold in print media, with a circulation of 75,000 for its top magazine. It is widely regarded as the flagship publication of the fast-growing Pentecostal world, which numbers over 10 million in the United States. With its mash-up of political and prophetic themes, Charisma had tapped a sizable market and electoral force. In 2019, one poll found that more than half of white Pentecostals believed Mr. Trump to be divinely anointed, with additional research pointing to the importance of so-called prophecy voters in the 2016 election.In his new book, Mr. Strang mentions the former president only in passing, with far more attention going to topics such as the coming Antichrist and loathed government overlords seeking to stamp out religion wholesale.Mr. Strang summed it up, “The fact is there are people who want to cancel Christianity.”“Christians and other conservatives need to wake up and stand up,” Mr. Strang said in an interview. “It says that right on the cover of the book.”The supernatural and mass media have long been fused in the story of Pentecostalism. In 1900s Los Angeles, Aimee Semple McPherson broadcast news-style reports of miracles and prophetic words over her own radio station in Echo Park. Oral Roberts conducted healing crusades through the TV screen. The duo Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker mastered the flashy style of prime time talk shows.Mr. Strang’s journalism career began in Florida as a rookie reporter at The Sentinel Star, where he covered more mundane topics like police and town hall meetings. In 1975, Mr. Strang founded Charisma, then a small periodical put out by Calvary Assembly of God, a congregation in the Orlando area that he attended with his wife. Mr. Strang bought the magazine from the parent church in 1981 and dove into religious publishing.In time, Charisma prospered. The editorial voice had the sunny boosterism of a hometown newspaper, covering the personalities of the Pentecostal world, an audience that Mr. Strang believed was woefully underserved. While competitors such as Christianity Today courted the buttoned-up elite of American evangelicalism, Charisma cornered a niche market of what are called charismatic Christians, set apart by their interest in gifts of the spirit, including things like healings, speaking in tongues and modern-day prophecy. Mr. Strang eschewed matters of stuffy dogma for eye-popping tales about the Holy Spirit moving through current events. Editorial meetings would focus on looking for what one former employee called “the spiritual heat” behind the headlines of the day.“We didn’t want to become the kind of boring publications many ‘religious’ journals are,” Mr. Strang wrote in an early editor’s note. “That is why we went first class with this publication.”In time, he surpassed competing publications. With a slick and dependable product, Mr. Strang unified diverse groups who might otherwise squabble over doctrine or not attend the same kinds of churches at all.“Strang became the ultimate Pentecostal businessman,” said John Fea, a historian of evangelicalism at Messiah University. “At Charisma, he fused the marketplace, faith and entrepreneurship.”Mr. Strang’s project stretched to include a book imprint, several spinoff magazines and educational materials for religious schools. By 2000, the company had expanded to a plush $7.5 million, 67,000-square foot headquarters outside Orlando. At the time, The Orlando Sentinel reported that the company employed about 200 people and expected revenue that year of $30 million.Yet the internet upended the world of publishing. By 2015, when Mr. Trump began his quest for the White House, Charisma, like much of the media industry, was dealing with declines in print advertising, revenue and circulation.Mr. Strang did not initially support Mr. Trump’s candidacy, but once the nomination had been clinched, a new theme rippled through the pages of Charisma: Mr. Trump was not just some ally of political convenience, he was anointed by God.In the months to come, the pages and airwaves of Charisma featured a range of religious leaders and lay people telling of a Trump victory. Each claimed that God had revealed — in dreams, visions or ethereal signs — that Mr. Trump would take the presidency. There was, for example: Jeremiah Johnson, a youthful seer from Florida (“a relatively young man but has remarkably accurate prophetic gifts”); Kim Clement, a onetime heroin user from South Africa (“he reveals the heartbeat of God”); and Frank Amedia, a Jew-turned-evangelical preacher with a penchant for spiritual warfare (“known for his bold and accurate prophetic words”).At this time, Charisma’s staff was producing 15 stories a day, many related to the election. (Typical headlines read: “Prophecy: God Sent Donald Trump to Wage War Against Destructive Spirits” or “Prophecy: Donald Trump Is Unstoppable Because the Lord Is Unstoppable.”)“Running stories about politics got clicks. And stories about prophetic words also got clicks,” Taylor Berglund, a former editor at Charisma, said. “So you combine these two and you had the most popular articles on the site.”Monthly readership of the Charisma website rose to somewhere between two and three million, Mr. Berglund said. “There was a real incentive to keep posting like that,” he said.Leah Payne, a scholar of religion at Portland Seminary, said there has long been “a real appetite in the Pentecostal community” for the kinds of prophecies that took off at Charisma during those months, delivered by people “who believe that the Holy Spirit can and does give anyone special insight into the future.”As the polls closed in November 2016, most mainstream news outlets scrambled to explain how projections for a big Hillary Clinton victory had been so off. But Mr. Strang felt vindicated.“Those prophecies may have sounded ridiculous,” he wrote later, “but Trump was elected, just as the prophets had said.”In the next months, the Trump administration brought a cohort of Pentecostal leaders closer to the halls of power than ever before. Mr. Strang’s longtime acquaintance Paula White, a televangelist from Florida, became a spiritual adviser to Mr. Trump. At one point, the president was pictured smiling and holding Mr. Strang’s 2017 book, “God and Donald Trump.”Advocacy groups that monitor the religious right tracked Charisma’s influence with alarm, concerned about the combination of divisive politics with divine prophecy. Peter Montgomery, a senior fellow at Right Wing Watch, called Mr. Strang’s work harmful “pro-Trump propagandizing” because it cast political battles as holy wars. “This extreme demonization of one’s political opponents is toxic to our political culture,” Mr. Montgomery said.Mr. Strang’s boosters and critics often portray the company as a large and influential entity, and by most available metrics it does command a relatively large audience for a religious publisher. But Charisma’s staff appears to have shrunk since the early 2000s, when The Sentinel reported that the company employed 200. According to former staff members, in 2020 there were about 60 employees, with fewer than 10 in editorial. Charisma disputed those figures but declined to provide any information about its finances or number of employees.And for all of his hagiographic overtures, Mr. Strang’s love for Mr. Trump appears to always have been lopsidedly unrequited. The two met only once, for a brief interview in Florida.“I was never on the inside circle,” Mr. Strang said. “I went to the White House zero times.”Still, he remained a dutiful fan. Mr. Strang wrote three more glowing books about the president, including “God, Donald Trump and the 2020 Election.” In one chapter, the book explored the possibility that Mr. Trump could lose, but it came down squarely on the side of a preordained victory.And so, on Election Day 2020, Mr. Strang flew to Texas to appear on the livestream of one of his friends, the televangelist Kenneth Copeland.As exit polls were trickling in, Mr. Strang donned a red MAGA hat and beamed at the camera. “I believe Trump is going to win,” he told viewers. “The prophets have been saying that.”The next morning, Mr. Strang was surprised to find that, though ballots were still being tallied, a Biden victory seemed likely, and he would not accept the outcome for some time. He instructed his readers to ignore the mainstream media and fortify themselves in prayer.“I was feeling we were in a fairly serious place,” Mr. Strang said. “The Christian community I serve was actually kind of depressed.”Charisma did not recognize Mr. Biden as president-elect until after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol and the congressional certification of Mr. Biden’s victory.In the interim, Charisma gave a platform both to people who questioned the results and those who accepted that Mr. Biden was the president-elect. It also waded through a related challenge: the prickly question of what to do with all the failed divine predictions Charisma had published.Mr. Strang interviewed repentant prophets, such as Mr. Johnson, who shut his ministry after Mr. Trump was not re-elected. Mr. Strang also highlighted prophets who refused to budge, and he parroted Mr. Trump’s howls on Twitter about a stolen election. (“I personally do believe the election was stolen,” Mr. Strang said.)After the events of Jan. 6, Mr. Strang did condemn the violence in Washington in forthright language. At the same time he featured leaders who attended and heralded the gathering as a “prophetic breakthrough.”When a Charisma contributor named Michael Brown organized an open letter calling for firmer standards on prophecies (“We really had egg on our faces,” Mr. Brown recalled in a phone interview), Mr. Strang endorsed and published the plea at Charisma. But Mr. Strang also said his overall editorial approach wouldn’t change much at all. “No,” he said. “We won’t back off from the prophets.”His oft-repeated defense, in discussing the election fallout, is that he was simply doing his job, presenting alternate views.“We quoted other people,” Mr. Strang said. “I’m not a preacher. I’m a journalist.”Mr. Strang built Charisma from the ground up, he also likes to say, and will run it as he pleases. “I don’t have to answer to anybody. I don’t have a boss. I answer to God,” he said. “And I answer to Uncle Sam, you know, with the I.R.S.”Yet with division still lingering in the prophecy crowd, Mr. Strang ultimately seems to have decided to sidestep the question of 2020 and what was stolen or divinely ordained and simply to move on to boogeymen the whole family can agree on: the new administration, virus health mandates, what he has cast as liberal cultural censorship of conservative views and, most broadly, society’s diabolical scheme against Christianity.Mr. Strang’s new book was given a fitting debut at a megachurch rally in Michigan in late August, which was in part sponsored by Charisma and featured a lineup of conservative personalities who decried state health mandates over the course of the weekend.Trump flags billowed outside next to QAnon merchandise, and top billing went to MAGA stalwarts like Michael Flynn and Roger Stone. Mr. Strang plugged his book onstage, speaking to an audience of several thousand, and sold copies in the foyer.In an email exchange afterward, Mr. Strang ventured a cheery, if tentative, prediction of his own: He might have another hit.“I signed books all afternoon,” he typed. “People tell me I’ve hit a chord.” More

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      in Elections

      A Tabloid Ally of Trump and Weinstein Reboots Himself

      by

      Dylan Howard, known for the “catch and kill” deals during the #MeToo reckoning, teams up with an Italian publisher for a publication aimed at the Hamptons crowd.In late May, the luxury brand Ferragamo threw a launch party to celebrate the Grazia Gazette: The Hamptons — the latest free publication in one of the country’s wealthiest enclaves.Most guests did not know that they were also celebrating a comeback.Grazia’s American operation, Grazia USA, is run by Dylan Howard, the disgraced National Enquirer editor who played a key role in suppressing stories about Donald Trump’s affairs during his presidential campaign, helped Harvey Weinstein dig up dirt on his accusers and, in Jeff Bezos’s telling, threatened the Amazon owner with blackmail.At the party for Mr. Howard’s new venture, young stars and social media influencers mingled while sipping a custom rosé. Some sang along to Olivia Rodrigo’s “Driver’s License.”They knew the lyrics, but not much about the man behind the event.“I have never heard of him,” said Isaac Hindin-Miller, the DJ, in a phone call afterward.“I was more there as a guest of Ferragamo,” said Jenné Lombardo, a marketing consultant who went with her husband, Harvey Newton-Haydon, a model.“I don’t know Howard or anything about him,” Julia Moshy, one of the “Rich Kids of Instagram,” wrote in an email.A Dylan Howard primer: During his time as the top editor of The Enquirer, a job he held for more than five years, Mr. Howard used his position to help suppress coverage of Mr. Trump’s reported extramarital affairs, including buying one woman’s story and then burying it in a journalistic maneuver known as “catch and kill.” The company later admitted that the payment amounted to an illegal campaign contribution, and Mr. Howard emerged unscathed after cooperating with federal prosecutors.Mr. Howard also dispatched a reporter to help collect hostile information on the actress Rose McGowan, who had made veiled references to misconduct by Mr. Weinstein. (Ms. McGowan later said the producer had raped her in a hotel room in 1997 — Mr. Weinstein has denied all allegations of nonconsensual sex.)Soon after leaving American Media last year, Mr. Howard started a new company, Pantheon Media Group. Pantheon later struck a licensing agreement with the Mondadori Group, the biggest publisher in Italy and the backer of the Grazia fashion magazine franchise, to publish Grazia in the United States. The Grazia Gazette: The Hamptons is among the first projects.Madelyn Cline on the cover of the first issue of Grazia Gazette: The Hamptons.Grazia GazetteThe model Ambra Battilana, who had been invited to the party, was aware of Mr. Howard’s background. She said she was relieved she had not attended.Ms. Battilana has accused Mr. Weinstein of sexually assaulting her during a meeting in his TriBeCa office. The next day she recorded Mr. Weinstein apologizing to her. The Enquirer unsuccessfully tried to buy Ms. Battilana’s story at the time. (Mr. Weinstein was found guilty of sex crimes against two women last year and sentenced to 23 years in prison.)Given all that, Mr. Howard’s involvement in the Surf Lodge party did not sit well with Ms. Battilana, who spends most summer weekends in the Hamptons and goes to the Surf Lodge frequently. (Mr. Howard also has a home in Springs, a hamlet in the Hamptons, which he bought for $1.1 million at the end of 2017, according to public records.)“I think this is completely horrendous,” she said. “I will be asking who is connected, because I really want to get to the bottom of understanding who was the person who would allow such a person to get in.”In a statement, a spokeswoman for Ferragamo said: “Salvatore Ferragamo has a longstanding relationship with Grazia titles globally and recently expanded that to partner on the launch issue of the Gazette with a dinner co-hosted by editor in chief David Thielebeule and cover star Madelyn Cline, not Dylan Howard.” (Ms. Cline is an actress and one of the stars of Netflix’s “Outer Banks.”Grazia Gazette: The Hamptons is just one part of Mr. Howard’s reinvention plan. He is trying to raise money to “buy the entire Grazia brand worldwide,” according to a copy of his financing proposal reviewed by The New York Times, with whom Mr. Howard did not wish to discuss his new business ventures. He initially agreed to clarify his future plans over lunch, only to cancel through a publicist, Howard Bragman, several days later.“Mr. Howard would of course like to grow his business, including his successful collaboration with Grazia,” Mr. Bragman said in an email. In a separate email, Mr. Howard’s lawyer, Mitchell Schuster, called The Times’s characterization of Mr. Howard’s fund-raising efforts “not correct as stated and misleading.”Maer Roshan, the editor of Los Angeles Magazine and the former editor of Radar, which Mr. Howard took over in 2009 and transformed into something more akin to the gossip site TMZ, was among those in the media who were incredulous at Mr. Howard’s attempted comeback.How “does this dude come back with this glossy magazine and roster of A-list advertisers?” he wondered.Since leaving American Media when his contract expired on March 31, 2020, Mr. Howard has acquired the website for OK Magazine, as well as Radar Online. Both were formerly owned by American Media.Mr. Howard has also continued a sideline he started in 2018 as an author of true-crime books for Skyhorse, which is distributed by Simon & Schuster. Working in collaboration with other authors, but with his name receiving top billing, he has come out with more than half a dozen books, including, “Epstein: Dead Men Tell No Tales,” “Covid-19: The Greatest Cover-Up in History” and “Diana: Case Solved.”In an email, Tony Lyons, Skyhorse’s president and publisher, called Mr. Howard a “dogged investigator and a talented storyteller.”There is also podcasting. This month, PodcastOne, the producer of “The Adam Carolla Show,” “The Dan Abrams Podcast” and more than 200 other audio series, announced that it had reached a deal with Mr. Howard’s Empire Media to create six limited series and eight weekly programs.One company that won’t do business with Mr. Howard is the dating app Bumble, which removed his profile earlier this year after a woman complained about his work for Mr. Weinstein, according to two people with knowledge of the matter (Mr. Schuster, the lawyer, said Mr. Howard chose to remove his profile for “unrelated reasons” and said he did not “work for” Mr. Weinstein).Mr. Howard grew up in Geelong, Australia, a city southwest of Melbourne, and started his career at a local paper. From there he became a sports reporter for Channel 7 in Melbourne before coming to the United States in 2009.After a stint as a producer at Reuters in New York, he joined American Media, which owned a number of celebrity gossip sites and publications, including the supermarket tabloid Star and RadarOnline. Under Mr. Howard, RadarOnline turned into a celebrity scoop machine, posting audio recordings of Mel Gibson’s vitriolic tirades and other Hollywood dirt.In 2011, he tied for entertainment Journalist of the Year at the annual Los Angeles Press Club awards. “In the world of celebrity and entertainment news, even mainstream media couldn’t ignore exclusive stories broken under Dylan Howard’s tenure as senior executive editor of RadarOnline,” the judges wrote.Mr. Howard left American Media in 2012. The Associated Press reported that his departure came after an external investigation into his workplace behavior. (The company said he was cleared of any wrongdoing.) The next year he returned to American Media, whose chief executive was David Pecker, a friend of Donald J. Trump, and he soon became the company’s chief content officer. That job gave him oversight of The Enquirer as well as Us Weekly, Globe and OK!, among other publications.Mr. Howard in 2014, when he was the editor in chief of Radar Online.Ilya S. Savenok/Getty ImagesDuring the 2016 presidential campaign, headlines in The Enquirer lionized Mr. Trump and belittled his political rivals. In addition, as The Wall Street Journal was first to report, American Media made a $150,000 payment to the former Playboy model Karen McDougal in return for the rights to her story of an affair with Mr. Trump. The Enquirer never ran that story.Mr. Howard also worked with Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former lawyer, on a deal that silenced another woman, Stormy Daniels, who also said she had sex with Mr. Trump, who has denied having sex with either woman.In an email, Mr. Bragman added that Mr. Howard had been “ORDERED BY MANAGEMENT” to help suppress coverage of Mr. Trump’s affairs. But in a follow-up email, Mr. Schuster, Mr. Howard’s lawyer, said that Mr. Bragman’s comment was not authorized by Mr. Howard.“Please disregard Mr. Bragman’s comment and confirm that it will not be included in your article,” he wrote. “Thank you.”American Media ultimately admitted that its payment to Ms. McDougal violated campaign finance law. Mr. Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison. Mr. Howard, along with Mr. Pecker, entered into a nonprosecution agreement with the government and cooperated with its investigation.The agreement remained in effect only if American Media did nothing to break the law for three years. In 2019, Mr. Bezos, the Amazon founder, accused the company of blackmail after it had published an 11-page exposé of his extramarital affair with the former TV personality Lauren Sanchez headlined “Bezos’ Divorce! The Cheating Photos That Ended His Marriage.”The story led to a public spat in which Mr. Bezos accused the tabloid’s leaders of “extortion and blackmail” in a lengthy post on Medium. The multibillionaire quoted from a letter sent to him by Mr. Howard. In the letter, as quoted by Mr. Bezos, Mr. Howard described the supposedly compromising photographs The Enquirer had in its possession, including a “below-the-belt selfie.”No one was charged in the matter. Mr. Schuster called Mr. Bezos’ post on Medium “self-serving and inaccurate,” and said that Mr. Howard’s reporting was “fair and accurate.”Now, a little more than a year since Mr. Howard made his exit from American Media, Grazia Gazette: The Hamptons appeared in stacks along Main Street in East Hampton. Distributed free, it has a lot of competition in a place where there is no shortage of gratis publications aimed at wealthy readers, a boomlet fueled by ad dollars from real estate agencies promoting multimillion-dollar listings.“Most of them are thrown in the garbage,” said the author Steven Gaines, a resident of East Hampton who has written extensively on the area’s history. “Some people pick them up and look at them, but there’s really nothing interesting.”The lucky ones have a rack under an awning, or a place on an indoor windowsill. The unlucky ones get tossed on doorsteps, rained on and thrown away.Lynn A. Scotti, a president and group publisher at Modern Luxury Media, which publishes Hamptons Magazine, is aware of the new entrant in the field. She said she had seen the Grazia Gazette “out wet,” adding: “We welcome healthy competition and I wish him the best.”The editor and publisher Dan Rattiner, who has run Dan’s Papers, a Hamptons local news publication, for more than 60 years, said of the free glossies: “They come and go. There are so many of them, it’s hard to tell one from another.”Mr. Roshan, the editor, expressed surprise that luxury advertisers would sign on with a publication run by Mr. Howard at a time when “people have been canceled and cast out for far less.”But Joseph Montag, the managing director of the Topping Rose House, a hotel and restaurant and a not infrequent filming location for “The Real Housewives of New York City,” suggested that people in the Hamptons were not likely to be bothered by Mr. Howard’s efforts to bury the accounts of the women who had accused Mr. Weinstein of sexual assault or told of their affairs with Mr. Trump.“People out here are used to those sorts of things,” Mr. Montag said, adding that Matt Lauer, the former NBC anchor who was fired by the network after accusations of sexual assault, was still out and about in the Hamptons.Mr. Gaines, the Hamptons chronicler, seemed to be of two minds.“If he wants to reinvent himself, he should go to Miami,” he said. “They forgive everything down there.”But then again, the Hamptons-specific media market is crowded.“If he took his bad-boy reputation out here and he used that, he exploited that, to make a different type of magazine,” Mr. Gaines continued, “I think people would read that.”Jim Rutenberg, Lauren Hirsch and Michael Rothfeld contributed reporting. Susan Beachy contributed research. More

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      in US Politics

      Kamala Harris and why politicians can’t resist Vogue (though it always ends in tears)

      by

      When Theresa May appeared in US Vogue in 2017, even her deliberately anodyne choice of a posh-end-of-the-high-street dress by British label LK Bennett did not prevent this newspaper calling the Annie Leibovitz shoot a “defining moment” which, “like Margaret Thatcher in the tank turret looking like a cross between Boudicca and Lawrence of Arabia … might easily become a signifier of all that is flawed in her prime ministerial style”. Michelle Obama’s bare upper arms appeared no fewer than three times on the cover of Vogue during her White House years, causing pearl-clutching uproar at the sight of her toned triceps.A political Vogue appearance is such a white-hot issue that it causes controversy even when it doesn’t happen. Donald Trump recently weighed in to complain about “elitist” Vogue having snubbed Melania, notable by her absence from the magazine over the past four years. Vice-president-elect Kamala Harris’s Vogue debut, in the February issue of the magazine’s US edition, is the latest in a long line of political covers to have caused a media storm. Sunday’s release on social media of the rather different newsstand and digital covers quickly fuelled a wave of criticism. Had Harris’s skin tone been “washed-out” by thoughtless or even culturally insensitive lighting? Was it disrespectful, on the newsstand cover, to present Harris wearing her battered Converse trainers, rather than giving her a stately makeover? Was Harris’s team led to believe that the more formal portrait in Michael Kors tailoring, apparently destined for digital editions, would appear on newsstands, too?Vogue has sprung to the defence of images that show Harris at “her casual best” in “styling choices that were her own”. Tyler Mitchell, who in 2018 became the first African American photographer to shoot a US Vogue cover, explains in an accompanying online article that a much-maligned pink-and-green backdrop was chosen to honour Harris’s sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, of which Mitchell’s aunt was also a member. Mitchell, who “grew up from a young age deeply understanding the rich history of these sororities and their significance … wanted the set design to pay homage to that history, to [Harris’] status as an AKA, and Black sororities and sisterhoods worldwide.”A Vogue appearance is rarely anything but controversial for women in politics, but the invitation remains apparently irresistible, nonetheless. To be a cover star – and especially for Vogue – is to be the avatar of a cultural moment. To have your image publicly displayed beneath that Vogue font is perhaps the closest any public figure will ever get to having their profile on a stamp or, while still living, their face on a banknote. And in an increasingly atomised media landscape, a Vogue cover is one of the few platforms with the cut-through to reach disparate audiences. It is shared on Instagram, discussed in newspapers, and on display at the supermarket checkout.When Hillary Clinton appeared on the cover of Vogue in 1998 it was in a floor-length velvet gown and pearl drop earrings, smiling beatifically from a stateroom banquette beside an urn spilling red roses. The letters of Vogue were spelt out – in gold – directly on top of the curlicued gilt frame of one of the wall’s oil paintings. The message was clear: a Vogue cover is as close to an official portrait as pop culture gets. Which is why the row around Vogue’s latest cover is not really about Mitchell’s lighting rig, or Harris’s shoes. Rather, these portraits are a lightning rod for a country grappling with a moment of cultural reckoning around gender, race and power.Harris’s stretchy black trousers are a little wrinkled around the knees, the kind of imperfection you might expect to have been smoothed out by a watchful assistantThe relaxed and smiling images were taken in the dizzy post-election relief of November, but landed online a few days after the storming of the Capitol had dialled the emotional tone of politics back up to febrile. This, perhaps, has left them out of step with the particular moment. In the more casual of the two portraits, Harris’s stretchy black trousers are a little wrinkled around the knees – just a tiny imperfection, but the kind that you might expect to have been smoothed out by a watchful assistant before the shutter clicked. Perhaps the informality was judged by the editorial team to chime better with the era of WFH dressing than slick tailoring. Perhaps it was intended to channel Harris’s now famous leggings-clad victory moment. (“We did it, Joe!”).Certainly, any likeness to the 2009 cover for Newsweek of Republican former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, posing in her gym gear, is unintentional. Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, who after a close relationship with the Obamas has been in self-imposed exile from the circles of political power during Trump’s presidency, will surely be looking to align herself as friend and ally of the incoming Democrat administration.The current British Vogue is more overtly political than ever before, and wears its activist heart on its cover – the magazine equivalent of its sleeve. Recent cover stars have included frontline workers and the Man United and England striker Marcus Rashford who, as one of the most high-profile public figures driving legislation for progressive social change, surely counts as a political figure – and the prime minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, who was featured among 15 Forces for Change on the August 2019 cover.British politicians, however, have been notable by their absence. And should a flattering invitation find its way to a Westminster in-tray, it should be approached with caution. A Vogue cover is always a moment, but not always a flattering one. More