🎧 Tea with Tina Brown: Trump, Harris, Meghan Markle & Menendez Bros.
Also on the agenda: Bret Baier, Bob Woodward, Elon Musk, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Gus Walz
A theme when talking to legendary editor Tina Brown is how much she bemoans the caution and fear that have taken over not just media, but so much of our ability to converse publicly and openly without worry, or fear of backlash.
So it’s a delight to prompt her on certain topics and just hear her go.
Kamala Harris? “I don’t feel the authenticity there, unfortunately. I wish I did.”
Meghan Markle? “The worst judgment of anyone in the entire world. She’s flawless about getting it all wrong . . . All of her ideas are total crap, unfortunately.”
Bret Baier? “A decent job of being a kind of a real questioner to Kamala Harris, because everything else has been total puff pieces.”
Donald Trump-supporting wealthy Upper East Side neighbors? “Pitiful and shameful and ridiculous.”
Brown’s point of view has always been magnetic. When I spoke onstage at the Aspen Ideas Festival earlier this year at the invitation of Tina, curator of this year’s gathering, I was among a disparate rarified group that included Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, John Kerry, Neal Katyal, Jenna Bush Hager and A-Rod. It was like being included in the best dinner party in the world (such events being something Tina and her late husband, Harry Evans, were famous for in the heyday of Manhattan media). Tina is of the old model of editors: a polymath who originated “high-low” journalism, a rarity who can toggle between tabloid fodder, world leaders, literature and complex social and political issues. She came of age in an era when courting controversy was baked into the job description.
Her turnaround of a dead Vanity Fair in the 1980s in one of the great magazine feats in history (I thought of her later as I transformed a few of my own); went on to inject her energy into The New Yorker; and then launched the short-lived Talk in partnership with a pre-#MeToo Harvey Weinstein (about whom she has things to say below). After that came the Daily Beast, Newsweek, conferences and bestselling books (The Diana Chronicles, The Vanity Fair Diaries, The Palace Papers). Today, at 70, she keeps her finger firmly pressed on the pulse of culture.
It says something about the fractured state of media that she, I and so many journalists are on Substack, and Brown just launched her own newsletter, Fresh Hell. We talked on Oct. 17 for a wide-ranging and often hilarious conversation about the journalists impressing her (Tony Dokoupil to, yes, Baier), Ta-Nehisi Coates, the frustrating state of cable news punditry, what celebrity she’d put on the cover of a magazine in 2024, her maternal rage after Trump supporters ridiculed Gus Walz’s emotional moment at the Democratic National Convention, and Harry and Meghan (buckle up for one big anvil drop of ouch). That’s on top of a lot of talk about Trump, Harris, Elon Musk and the forces and figures driving our “constant state of agitation” — including her own.
Our conversation is edited for length below; you can hear the whole thing on The Ankler podcast.