I want to thank everyone who came out for our TPM 25th Anniversary show in Manhattan last night. Kate Riga and I did a live version of our podcast (it should be in your feeds soon). But before that we had a panel/oral history of TPM featuring three members of our current team — John Light, Nicole LaFond and David Kurtz — and three alums — Paul Kiel, Evan McMorris-Santoro and Katie Thompson. I loved this discussion. I’m not sure precisely what my expectations were, but whatever they were, it exceeded them.
Before this panel, we did a Q&A with a small group of readers and then after I was doing the podcast with Kate. Those were the things I needed to be on for. I decided in advance that I wanted to be as invisible as possible for the panel/oral history. I had some idea of wearing a hat and sunglasses. But it turns out I don’t own a pair of sunglasses. So I settled on a beanie and sitting as far back as I could. I wanted to watch as much as I could as an observer, not being in any kind of eye contact with the people on the stage and as far to the back of the venue as I could get so as few people as possible were aware of me being there. It’s hard for me to get outside of TPM, to get some distance to see it from the outside, and TPM probably has similar feelings about me.
In a seamless way, the discussion reminded me how much of TPM’s history stretching back 25 years prefigured our current moment, this administration, this version of the American right and in many cases these people who are now running the show. Paul talked about our time — it was really pretty much just the two of us — covering the Abramoff scandal and the U.S. attorney firing scandal, a scandal that was really about voter suppression at its core.
There’s an interview Evan did with Donald Trump back in I think 2011. They had the video as part of the presentation. This very brief hand-cam video, I believe recorded down in Florida, has always stayed in my memory as an ur artifact, a kind of rosetta stone of Trumpism and the Trump era that was soon to unfold. The interview focuses on birtherism, Trump’s then-crusade. He and Evan talk about standard birther stuff. Trump says his bit. Then Evan asks him why he’s pushing this so hard, why he believes it, something like that. The question pivots off then-Majority Leader Eric Cantor recently dumping on Trump over the silliness of his birther schtick. Then Trump says something that has rattled in my head ever since. He says something like, “People love this. There’s something about it. People love it. Especially Republicans.”
You have to hear the exact words and the gestures. When you do you hear the whole Trump story foretold, you see into his non-truth cognition world. It’s not even that he doesn’t care whether the birther story is true. The idea of true or untrue isn’t even a metric he understands. People love it. He can smell the hunger. He has that animal instinct. It’s a product. And he knows how to sell the product. And he is presciently indifferent to and contemptuous of the criticism of people like Cantor who made up the outer shell, the mask, as it were, of the pre-Trump Republican party.
Then we heard from Katie Thompson, who back in the early 2010s was a very young woman, right out of college and an internship with the late Wayne Barrett, who we had for years talking to members of American militia and white supremacist movements. She has a very interesting perspective about how they opened up to her, as a woman in her twenties, in a way they likely wouldn’t with other reporters. People like the Oath Keepers. A through-line of her discussion was how many of these people and groups become the shock troops and top advisors of Donald Trump. Every conversation she had in 2013, 2014, 2015 in its own way prefigured Jan. 6. The Oath Keepers came up from Evan too, trying to sleuth out whether one-time Harry Reid opponent Rep. Sharron Angle is part of their group. (As Angle’s husband told Evan when he called their home, “She loves those guys!”)
The theme that came up again and again in the discussion was that the topic everyone is in a feeding frenzy about one year we had been covering for the previous five. In a way, we had been covering Trumpism, the Trump movement going back 25 years. This isn’t news judgement precisely or good editorial decisions. It’s that we believed these people were the motive, driving force of the American right rather than the titular Republican party. That is a perhaps the central insight TPM’s editorial outlook has been based on. That’s always been the premise, even when many of our colleagues derided this kind of coverage as a clown show or not serious politics or clickbait.
It was gratifying to witness this discussion. But I wanted to be very far away, literally and figuratively, because I wanted to see it from a distance and not exert any gravitational pull over it. Watching it had a bit of a feeling of painting a picture and walking up to someone as they are looking at it in a gallery and asking them what they think it is or what it means to them. They respond and you say, “Yes, that’s actually exactly it. That’s right. Wow.”
Obviously this is not my painting. But I like to think I had some guiding hand in saying what kind of painting we wanted to paint. I was captivated by the way these six incredibly talented journalists told this story in such a seamless way, how they did it, what they were trying to do, how they were consistently ahead of the curve in telling a story and revealing characters who would seemingly burst out of nowhere (but not really from nowhere at all) starting just about a decade ago.
I got conflicting word when I spoke to my colleagues last night about whether we’d recorded the audio or whether we got video too. One of the treats of this whole 25th anniversary event is that we have such a talented team these days, with many who’ve been with TPM for years, that I was able to have almost literally nothing to do with the planning or execution of the anniversary at all. That’s a treat. Whichever version we have recorded we will try to make it available to watch or hear if you weren’t there.