How Trump Outplays the Elite, Where the Truth Tellers Are… and Hunter S. Thompson’s Hysterical Letter Bomb
The most interesting takeaway from Monday’s Atlantic interview with President Trump is the way he muses wonderingly about elite targets caving under pressure. He knows them better than they know themselves. As someone who has never hidden that his worldview is transactional, it clearly amuses him that the gussied-up moral pretensions of Establishment poobahs are proving so easy to take down. “You saw yesterday with Columbia University. What do you think of the law firm [Paul, Weiss]? Were you shocked at that?” Trump asked The Atlantic reporters. He notes how all the media coverage of the SpaceX rocket splashdown in March followed his edict banning the geographic name Gulf of Mexico. (On-air commentators burbled about “the Florida Gulf Coast” rather than the Gulf of America or Gulf of Mexico to show their obeisance and integrity at the same time.)
Trump observed to The Atlantic reporters:
“They didn’t make a big deal. They didn’t say Trump named it. It was like it was old hat. And it’s been the Gulf of Mexico for hundreds of years, literally hundreds of years. The Gulf of Mexico, before our country was formed.
The dusty norms of history – such an easy mark
But in Trump’s canny judgement, the easiest marks of all are the billionaire media owners and entertainment conglomerates who have multiple regulatory interests before the government. Why would Paramount/CBS owner Shari Redstone jeopardise an $8 billion deal with Skydance Media by defending the editorial independence of 60 Minutes in the face of Trump’s $20 billion lawfare shakedown? Chest-beating about freedom of the press versus getting FCC approval for a mega-merger? LOL.
On Sunday night, 60 Minutes wise man Scott Pelley issued a somber on-air rebuke of CBS’s corporate overlords for their increasing “supervision,” which led venerated 60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens to quit. Trump knows that virtually every CEO of a media conglomerate is his for the taking. The Atlantic recounts:
“You know at some point, they give up,” Trump said, referring to media owners generally and—we suspected—Bezos specifically. “At some point they say, No más, no más.” He laughed quietly.
Journalists can only be as brave as their bosses allow them to be.
Bugle Blast
The last time I attended the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was 2011, the fateful year when President Obama roasted Donald Trump. As it happened, I was sitting at a Reuters table that night right behind Trump and watched the color of his neck turn from pale salmon to boiled magenta. His fury wasn’t just directed at Obama. It was aimed at the entire room of liberal laughing faces, that condescending media elite conjoined in their mockery of the vulgar, inept political pretender. The press now knows what his revenge feels like.
In the 100 years of Trump's first 100 days, we’ve seen him go for the journalistic jugular in other ways: planting fan-friendlies from the far-right margins in the White House briefing room, trashing reporters on social media, gutting funding of overseas outlets that were once the only channels to deliver unfiltered news to citizens isolated by government-controlled media. On Friday, his AG bot Pam Bondi announced she was rescinding a Biden-era policy that protected journalists from having their phone and email records subpoenaed in leak investigations. The Committee to Protect Journalists is recommending that foreign journalists arriving in the U.S. use a burner phone in case they are stopped at the border and some student journalists at universities are asking for their bylines to be removed because of fear of retribution.
Unfortunately, Saturday’s WHCD didn't rise to the promising “Celebrating the First Amendment” banner over the dais at the Washington Hilton or the stirring Marine band playing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” As the forced march of the first course dragged on, with no rousing oratory to rally the resistance, I felt a desire to leap onto the stage and decree a change in dress code from drooping black tie and polyester cleavage to Volodymyr Zelensky’s black tactical gear and combat boots. One day, this period will appear in history books hidden from MAGA commissars as the great First Amendment Wars of the 21st century. And legions of brilliant and brave journalists, if not owners, are fighting them every day, even if they are doing it on threadbare platforms financed by a few non-profit dollars or on podcasts from their kitchen table. To the barricades, damn it!
What Trump doesn’t understand and never will is that journalists themselves are a tribe rarely motivated by money. (They will never get Paul, Weiss-sized bonuses.) I see this more and more when I read the hundreds of entries from the young reporters applying for the Sir Harry Evans Fellowship in Investigative Journalism. It is supported by a fund I established in partnership with Thomson Reuters chairman David Thomson, Reuters News, and Harry’s alma mater Durham University in 2022 to keep the journalistic legacy of my late husband alive. The entries arrive from every corner of the globe, sent by passionate, hungry young reporters eager to expose the malfeasance of the high and mighty or do the dangerous work of bringing back stories from war zones or natural disasters.
My beloved Harry was the celebrated editor of the Sunday Times in the UK for 14 years and a crusader for justice his whole life. He is best known for his successful ten-year investigation that won compensation for victims of the thalidomide drug, which inflicted severe birth defects on thousands of children, his Insight team’s exposé of the Foreign Office cover-up of Soviet spy Kim Philby, and his campaign against the gross miscarriage of justice in the 1950 execution of an innocent man that helped lead to the end of capital punishment in the UK. (It’s worth noting that he could never have taken the legal risks of the thalidomide story without the backing of Lord (Roy) Thomson, grandfather of David Thomson, who gave him full support, despite the fact that thalidomide was manufactured by the paper’s largest advertiser.)
Harry never believed in the current defeated notion of a post-truth world. At the age of 89, in 2017, when a hedge fund know-it-all across the table at a fancy Hamptons dinner party was holding forth with half-cocked political analysis, Harry counter-attacked with a hailstorm of disputatious evidence that annihilated the man’s argument. The next night, I ran into a guest who’d also been at the dinner—and who clearly didn't know I was Harry’s wife. He said to me, “you have to be really careful who you have dinner with these days. Apparently, there was some old guy last night who practically leapt across the table at a friend of mine and pounded the hell out of him with facts and figures!” I have never been more proud to call myself Mrs. (uh, Lady) Evans.
That’s why in 2022, as part of Harry’s legacy initiative, I launched an annual convening in London in his name, Truth Tellers, the Harry Evans Summit in Investigative Journalism, returning for a third year on May 7th at the Royal Institute of British Architects. You can watch it live at SirHarrySummit.org and the 2025 agenda will be posted on Wednesday. I promise you will feel inspired by this rebel yell for the preservation of rigor that Harry’s brand of journalism embodied. Journalists, editors, documentarians, podcasters, and photographers, both celebrated and undiscovered, gather from around the world to enthrall us with the backstories of their intrepid work. As Harry once said, freedom of the press is a moral concept, or it is nothing.
So we should valorize all those who spend their days, undeterred by intimidation or spin, digging for the unvarnished truth that hides beneath official lies. They are the dragon slayers. They navigate mazes, prize open black boxes, unmask villains, decipher data, unlock fortresses, run through walls, and hold power to account. Watch them all on the stage of Truth Tellers on May 7th.
Limey Bullshit
The other night, I was asked to read at the annual SpeakEasy literary gala, hosted by Dr. Amanda Foreman, Jonathan Barton, and Lucas Wittman, who had the inspired idea of asking presenters to read from unexpected letters between writers, publishers, editors, and lovers. (I read the delicious rejection of Animal Farm that T.S. Eliot wrote to George Orwell when Eliot was director of Faber & Faber publishing house in the UK. “Your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm.”) But the rejection letter that should be pinned up on the wall behind every weary editor searching for ways to politely tell a lofty byline that what he or she delivered was dashed-off tepid gruel (or, as old-guard New Yorker editors used to call it, “a useful piece,” which I rebranded as “a useless piece”) was from Hunter S. Thompson to the British novelist Anthony Burgess. Why the gonzo literary lunatic Hunter was playing an editorial role for Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone on the national affairs desk at the time is unclear. But I offer his letter here in all its glory. The actor Richard Kind read it with mad gusto.
August 17, 1973
Dear Mr. Burgess,
Herr Wenner has forwarded your useless letter from Rome to the National Affairs Desk for my examination and/or reply. Unfortunately, we have no International Gibberish Desk, or it would have ended up there.
What kind of lame, half-mad bullshit are you trying to sneak over on us? When Rolling Stone asks for “a thinkpiece,” goddamnit, we want a fucking Thinkpiece … and don’t try to weasel out with any of your limey bullshit about a “50,000 word novella about the condition humaine, etc….”
Do you take us for a gang of brainless lizards? Rich hoodlums? Dilettante thugs?
You lazy cocksucker. I want that Thinkpiece on my desk by Labor Day. And I want it ready for press. The time has come & gone when cheapjack scum like you can get away with the kind of scams you got rich from in the past.
Get your worthless ass out of the piazza and back to the typewriter. Your type is a dime a dozen around here, Burgess, and I’m fucked if I’m going to stand for it any longer.
Sincerely,
Hunter S. Thompson
Thank you, Tina, for a literary end to my day. The news is awful, but I appreciate the way you have packaged it.
I aspire to emulate the below more than just about anything. I'm only 63 so while I perhaps have the facts and figures I don't quite have the gravitas.
"Apparently, there was some old guy last night who practically leapt across the table at a friend of mine and pounded the hell out of him with facts and figures!”