Hello, and welcome back to Tomorrow Will Be Worse! I got a bit bogged down in reporting a longer feature, which is why you didn’t get a TWBW letter last week, but stay tuned for that piece—on the Washington gerontocracy—which will land in your inboxes right after the holiday weekend. 

As we head into my favorite and most problematic American holiday, Thanksgiving, I just want to say that I am thankful for you, our readers. You keep our dream of revolutionizing media humming cheerfully into the future, and I know all my colleagues at Puck—Teddy Schleifer, Tina Nguyen, Matt Belloni, Bill Cohan, and the rest—are thankful, too. And if you’re getting this email but you’re not yet a subscriber to Puck, I am thankful for you as well. If you like the free preview you’re reading here, you can always subscribe here.

Murdoch’s Big Lie and Putin at the Gates

Pre-Thanksgiving reflections on the Tucker Carlson-ification of Fox News, Russia’s designs on Ukraine, my reading list, and more.

This week, which is short enough to allow me a couple days in the kitchen to help cook a labor-intensive meal that will be eaten in 15 minutes—more on that below—I wanted to answer some more reader questions. To be honest, I love doing these. You’ve all been sending in great questions, ones that really make me think and force me to do more research and reporting, and I would strongly encourage you to send me more. You can reply to this email or send your questions to [email protected]. My inbox is always open. 

As the Times’ Ben Smith reported, two Fox News contributors recently quit over Tucker Carlson’s latest antics. What does Establishment D.C. think? Is this grandstanding or something more serious?

If you missed the story, Ben Smith dropped another bombshell on Sunday night, reporting that conservative commentators and avowed Never-Trumpers Stephen Hayes and Jonah Goldberg quit their lucrative Fox contributor gigs over Tucker Carlson’s “exposé” of the attempted coup on January 6th as a false flag. (Which it very obviously wasn’t, just so we’re clear.) According to Ben, “Mr. Goldberg said that he and Mr. Hayes stayed on at Fox News as long as they did because of a sense from conversations at Fox that, after Mr. Trump’s defeat, the network would try to recover some of its independence and, as he put it, ‘right the ship.’” 

This is what establishment D.C. has thought since before the 2020 election: that if and when Trump loses, sanity will be restored and things will go back to normal. This was and remains a delusional fantasy. There is no unseeing what Trump showed us about our country. And there is very little that will undo the damage he’s done, not by a Republican party that remains in his thrall, and not by toothless Democratic investigations that drag on for so long that voters forget to care. 

The idea that things can and should go back to normal is, perhaps, the most defining—and most maddening—thing about the standpatter D.C. establishment, which loves normalcy and calm and decorum, and will try its darndest to see it in everything, even when it’s long gone. Remember a D.C. establishment fantasy named Teleprompter Trump? Or He’ll-Grow-Into-the-Presidency Trump? Or This-Is-the-Day-Trump-Became-President Trump? Or the dream, when those fantasies flamed out faster than a paper napkin in an industrial furnace, that there were Adults in the Room who could restrain Trump—or, better yet, push him into something we could all pretend was normal? The thing about this near-pathological craving for normalcy is that the people who aspire to it tend to vilify as hysterical—or “too pessimistic”—those of us who were leaning on the alarm from the start. In part, that’s because those people—often people of color—were on the margins of the establishment, on the outside looking in and pointing out its many flaws. They were the Adam Serwers to the Bob Costas. 

The point is, if you thought normalcy was something that could be attained post-Trump, you weren’t paying attention. This quote from Goldberg in Ben’s piece really caught my attention: “Now, righting the ship is an academic question… [The Carlson January 6 special] meant: OK, we hit the iceberg now, and I can’t do the rationalizations anymore.” I mean, if you thought that was the moment Fox hit the iceberg, rather than when the G.O.P. accepted and embraced Trump as their presidential nominee in 2016, well, you likely wouldn’t have survived the actual Titanic’s impact with the actual iceberg. You’d be 30 feet under the icy water, unable to feel your extremities and, noticing that you were running out of oxygen, thinking, Wait, did we … hit an iceberg?

Some observers believe that Fox News is the way it is because its audience and Trump’s supporters, which are essentially one and the same, demand it. But that would be like saying that the Sackler family simply had to churn out more pain-killing pills because opioid addicts demanded it. As any marketing professional can tell you, demand can be created out of thin air...

FOUR STORIES WE'RE TALKING ABOUT