On the cesspool of elite journalism

A new memoir from hot mess Olivia Nuzzi, who covered the White House under Trump and Biden, is revealing for all the wrong reasons.

Last week, a 32-year-old magazine writer named Olivia Nuzzi released a memoir about her decade covering Donald Trump - and year sexting Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The memoir, American Canto, isn’t good, to say the least. It’s draggy, circuitious, hard to read. It’s received scathing reviews complaining Nuzzi is a bad writer.

But Nuzzi isn’t a bad writer. The reason American Canto isn’t good is simpler and sadder: because Nuzzi is a bad person.

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(The truth, even if it hurts. With your help.)

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Why should you care?

Because Nuzzi is a bad person in the most elite way possible.

She was a top political writer, a reliable weathervane to the fixations of Washington journalists. Her July 2024 article about President Joe Biden’s mental decline marked the moment when the elite media turned fully on Biden.

She covered the White House for New York magazine before losing her job when her sexting scandal emerged. And it was a scandal; she had played virtual footsie (and more) with Kennedy while covering the 2024 presidential race that included him.

Her actions broke basic codes of journalism — as well as violating her engagement to Ryan Lizza, another Washington reporter, and demeaning Cheryl Hines, Kennedy’s wife.

But nowhere in American Canto does Nuzzi stoop to consider how she might have harmed Hines, Lizza, or anyone else, much less to apologize.

Nor does she seem to care that she that her misbehavior might reflect poorly on other female reporters covering powerful men. She will not even do the basic work of thinking about what might have motivated her destruction — and self-destruction.

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Instead, she plays the victim.

She complains the revelation of her virtual affair and unethical behavior violated her privacy, that “what occurred in private was supposed to be private” and that she faced “a siege of hyper-domestic terror.” She seems to have forgotten that by cheating on Lizza, she sacrificed any expectations for privacy or any duty of care that Lizza might have for her.

She says she doesn’t lie, as over and over she recounts lies she has told. Her talents cannot cover for her gaping moral void.

Meanwhile, she name-drops throughout American Canto in the most annoying way possible. She references celebrities and politicians, while half-concealing their identities with cutesy semi-pseudonyms. Some cover names are obvious. Kennedy is “The Politician,” for example.

But others contain details that will only make the identities clear to people already in Nuzzi’s world who know them already. The result is the most elitist gossip column imaginable, blind items that are meant only to show her importance.

And so, at 303 increasingly boring pages, American Canto is merely a longer, more feminized and would-be literary version of the emails between Jeffrey Epstein and his compadres.

It fails as a memoir. It fails even more completely at Nuzzi’s obvious ambition to write a chronicle of last decade.

And readers have noticed. Despite massive publicity, sales of American Canto have been worse than weak.

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(Pulp fiction: that Amazon ranking for American Canto translates into about 20 copies sold in the last day, maybe fewer. Remainders ahead!)

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About the only good thing to come out of American Canto is that it seems to have ended Nuzzi’s journalism career.

In September, Vanity Fair hired her, deciding to ignore her unethical behavior with Kennedy and her very messy breakup with Lizza.

In writing American Canto, Nuzzi seems to have gambled that Lizza — who is no innocent, having ditched his family almost a decade ago to be with her — would keep his mouth shut rather than risk further humiliation as a cuckold. She insults him throughout the book, at one point writing, “I pitied him.”

Bad read.

Turns out Lizza is angry enough to eat any amount of crow to destroy Nuzzi. In advance of the book’s publication, he wrote a Substack revealing that in 2020 she had had sex with another politician she was covering, Mark Sanford, the former governor of South Carolina. (Nuzzi has not denied Lizza’s account.)

As the bard Eminem himself once told us:

Wait, what if there’s an explanation for this shit?

What, she tripped, fell, landed on his dick?

No, even an outlet with morals as elastic as Vanity Fair couldn’t overlook Nuzzi’s second skin-in-the-game moment. What would it do, hire a chaperone for her future reporting? Now Vanity Fair and Nuzzi have, erm, parted ways.

And so the real lesson of American Canto is not the one Nuzzi expected to teach us. Instead it’s the maxim Charles de Gaulle (or was it Eminem?) offered long ago: the cemeteries are full of indispensable sluts.

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My 2024 piece about Nuzzi’s sudden turn against Joe Biden is below. Paywalled for subscribers only. Sign up now.

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