Rejecting a New York Magazine story which said his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 was all but moribund a little more than a month after he announced it, Donald Trump subjected the writer to misogynistic abuse.
Olivia Nuzzi, Trump said, was “a shaky and unattractive wack job”.
The former president also called Nuzzi’s story “fake news”, insisted “her ‘anonymous sources’ don’t exist (true with many writers)” and said: “I’m happily fighting hard for our GREAT USA!”
The Guardian, however, has seen messages in which a veteran Trump campaign insider says there is “some accurate stuff in” Nuzzi’s piece and, when told “time catches up with all of us”, answers: “True”.
Nuzzi’s story, The Final Campaign, ran under a pointed subtitle: “Inside Donald Trump’s sad, lonely, thirsty, broken, basically pretend run for re-election. (Which isn’t to say he can’t win).”
The piece quoted numerous anonymous advisers, including one who said: “It’s not there. In this business, you can have it and have it so hot and it can go overnight and it’s gone and you can’t get it back. I think we’re just seeing it’s gone. The magic is gone.”
When such insiders were asked why Trump was running for the White House again, Nuzzi wrote: “Few … are certain of the answers.
“‘It seems like a joke,’ said one ex–Trump loyalist, a former White House official. ‘It feels like he’s going through the motions because he said he would.’”
She also said Trump was “sensitive about smallness” and compared his isolation at Mar-a-Lago in Florida to the predicament of Norma Desmond, the character played by Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, a movie Trump is known to adore.
Nuzzi wrote of “a washed-up star locked away in a mansion from the 1920s, afraid of the world outside, afraid it will remind him that time has passed”.
Trump faces extensive legal jeopardy, from the January 6 investigation and four House referrals to the Department of Justice; from the department’s own investigation; from an investigation of his election subversion in Georgia; from investigations of his business and tax affairs; and a rape allegation he denies.
Nuzzi also wrote that Trump, 76, does sometimes leave his resort – to go to his golf course in the Florida city of Doral. There, Nuzzi wrote, he “meets regularly with an impressive, ideologically diverse range of policy wonks, diplomats and political theorists for conversations about the global economy and military conflicts and constitutional law – and I’m kidding. He goes there to play golf.
“‘He just goes, plays golf, comes back and fucks off. He has retreated to the golf course and to Mar-a-Lago,’ one adviser said. ‘His world has gotten much smaller. His world is so, so small.’”
Trump still polls strongly with Republicans, though he now has a serious rival in the notional GOP primary: Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida.
Nuzzi has repeatedly made headlines with stories about Trump and his close allies, including, in 2019, a series of startling exchanges with Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor who became Trump’s attorney and is now in legal jeopardy of his own.
Speaking to CNN on Monday, Nuzzi was asked how she thought Trump would react to her piece.
“It’s like an 8,000- or 9,000 word-piece,” she said. “I don’t know that he’s going to be sitting down to read it. I think he’ll probably just look at the cover, look at the headline and think ‘Eh, fake news,’ and move on from there.”
Trump did call the piece fake news but he also resorted to abuse.
Writing on his Truth Social platform, the former president said he agreed to an interview with “a once very good, but now on its ‘last legs’ and failing, New York Magazine.
“The reporter was a shaky and unattractive wack job, known as ‘tough’ but dumb as a rock, who actually wrote a decent story about me a long time ago. Her name, Olivia Nuzzi.”
On Monday night, Nuzzi responded – but not with a written rejoinder.
Seemingly replying to Trump’s claim she was “dumb as a rock”, the writer tweeted two pictures of Trump at the White House in August 2017, during a solar eclipse.
Trump was not wearing shades. In both pictures, he stared straight at the sun.