Becket Adams writes for National Review Online about one sobering lesson from the recent Vanity Fair controversy.
When it comes to the Republican Party, it’s impossible not to notice the pattern of its members saying one thing and doing another. I’m talking specifically about the gap between GOP rhetoric and actions regarding the legacy news media, which follows the same pattern as the party’s approach to similarly right-coded issues, especially abortion.
Republicans talk a lot of trash about “fake news.” But that’s what it is: talk. When it comes to engaging with mainstream reporters and jumping at the chance to appear as a profile subject in one of those glossy periodicals, there is no cheaper date than a Republican officeholder.
The latest example of this eagerness to consort with a supposed sworn enemy came last week with the publication of Vanity Fair’s profile of White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. The profile included a series of (unflattering) photos of top Trump advisers, including Karoline Leavitt, JD Vance, Stephen Miller, and Dan Scavino, among others.
The article is painfully embarrassing for the White House. The staffers involved ended up looking just as vainglorious and out of their depth as their critics claim. They don’t come across as powerful or savvy, which was clearly their goal, as evidenced by their power poses in their glamour shots. They come across more like beauty pageant contestants in a coal-mining town with a population of 50, with the main difference being that that town has at least enough good sense to recognize itself as a small-time, amateur operation.
No one involved in the Vanity Fair ordeal escapes unscathed, especially Wiles, who, for reasons only her diary is privy to, thought it was a good idea to do eleven on-the-record interviews in which she made not-at-all prudent and hardly flattering comments about her colleagues and even her boss, at one point comparing him to a manic alcoholic.
