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- [00:00]
Ashley Parker
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- [00:32]
GNC Drop Host
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- [01:01]
Matt from P1
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- [01:46]
Charlie Sykes
I'm Charlie Sykes. Welcome back to the to the Contrary podcast. Donald Trump is not having a very good week. He just lost a big vote in the House of Representative on Tariffs. A very rare moment where Republicans actually voted against him. A federal grand jury has refused to indict six Democratic members of Congress for recording that video where they told people that they ought to obey the law. You know what's more shocking? The fact that the grand jury turned down those indictments or the fact that the Department of Justice actually wanted to criminally charge six Democratic members of Congress. There's nothing normal about all of that. And then meanwhile, we have the continued fallout from the Epstein files and the Epstein cover up. It does appear that this week is Howard Lutnick's turn in the barrel. If there is actually a barrel. We talk a lot about 2.0. What it's what it would be like to live in a rational world with actual real consequences where truth actually mattered and that lies might be career ending. Well, we don't actually have to imagine Earth 2.0 because we can actually watch the rest of the earth, the rest of the world. What's happening in this split screen where there's a lot of accountability in other countries. And the United States is very much an outlier. So we have awful lot to talk about today. And our guest today is a veteran Trump watcher, Ashley Parker from the Atlantic, former reporter for the Washington Post and the New York Times. Ashley, how are you?
- [03:20]
Ashley Parker
I'm well. How are you?
- [03:22]
Charlie Sykes
Good. I was reflecting that I first met you ten years ago in a different world. Feels like a different century. I was on radio and you were at the New York Times covering what felt like for about five minutes, the TED surge cruise against Donald Trump. Yeah. Never mind.
- [03:41]
Ashley Parker
Yes, we met at the cusp of a changing world because that was the moment I think people were realizing Donald Trump could actually win the Republican nomination. When we were both in Wisconsin.
- [03:54]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah. Cusp of a changing world. And even though it's, you know, 10 years, you could say on one level, that's really a long time. We've been doing this, Ashley. We've been doing this a very, very long time. A whole decade talking about all of this. And yet it feels longer than 10 years, doesn't it? Because it does feel as if that world just no longer exists. I mean, it feels like an epic. Did you ever imagine that we would be talking about Donald Trump and the transformation of American politics ten years later?
- [04:23]
Ashley Parker
Probably not at that moment. No.
- [04:27]
Charlie Sykes
No, no. Or many moments since. All right, so I want to start off by talking about your piece in the Atlantic about the Washington Post. And it was a very, very vivid piece. And it begins, we're witnessing a murder, the murder of the Washington Post. So let's just talk about this. You know, Jeff Bezos and his former right hand man, Will Lewis, you know, and. Well, they didn't actually not. They didn't show up for all the bloodletting, did they? When they, when they slashed, you know, 300 jobs. They didn't even have the courage of their own cowardice and in an indifference. But tell me why you describe it as a murder. Because it's still publishing.
- [05:08]
Ashley Parker
That's true.
- [05:08]
Charlie Sykes
Right? I mean, I, it's still published. There's still a lot of journalists there. I still see the news stories. But you chose to use the word murder to describe these layoffs. Talk to me about that.
- [05:19]
Ashley Parker
Yeah, I Mean. I mean, two things are true. There are still a lot of talented, hardworking journalists at the Washington Post doing very good journalism in very trying circumstances. I want to be clear about that. But I described it as a murder because it felt like Jeff Bezos and Will Lewis and the leadership team that ultimately went along with it had quite deliberately set out to destroy, not just gutting the newsroom, but to destroy what made the Washington Post so special. And what made the Washington Post so special has long been what is set at apart from other newspapers, other publications, other places to work, and in that culture, informed not just the culture and the atmosphere, but as I argue in the piece, and I truly believe that culture, actually, which I'm happy to talk more about, informed the journalism. There is a reason that even during its heyday, the Washington Post was regularly able to compete against the Times, the Wall Street Journal, everyone else, and not just compete against, beat them, scoop them, have stories that others envied, even though the newsroom was smaller and we were doing more with less. And that was because of the incredibly special culture at the Post. And that is what Will Lewis at least seemed to not just not only understand, but have kind of utter contempt and disdain for since he arrived. You know, he viewed anything as anything from the Graham family, anything from the old Post. It felt like he was doing kind of a de Bathification. Right. If you're not on board with my new vision, which I can't articulate, and my new business plan, which I can't articulate, and which continues not to be successful, then you should vote with your feet and leave. And that's what a number of people.
- [07:21]
Charlie Sykes
Did and many, many people did. Yeah. I mean, there was the bloodletting from last week, but there was a long, rather dramatic attrition. I think you used the wor. The diaspora of Posties who are. And every week it felt like there's another big name, there's another person that I was associated with the Post. You left to go to the Atlantic. So clearly there was this long process of transforming the Post, draining it, until they decided basically to kill it. I'm going to get to the bigger questions in a moment, but let's talk about Louis, who was fired last week. He was fired, right. I mean, there's no question. But he abruptly resigns late, lamented Will Lewis. The staff seems to have hated his guts. Jeff Bezos lost faith in him. You have an interesting line right in the beginning of your piece about Will Lewis. Lewis, who had already earned a reputation for showing up late to work when he showed up at all, to not join the zoom call with the announcement for the cuts. So tell me about Will Lewis. What was the deal with him that he was jet setting around, he didn't show up at the office, he wasn't engaging.
- [08:23]
Ashley Parker
He.
- [08:24]
Charlie Sykes
I mean, he sounds like a really dramatically bad fit for the job of CEO of the Washington Post. So what was his deal?
- [08:31]
Ashley Parker
He was, I mean, he was a dramatically bad fit. That was quite clear. You know, he. He comes in with this, this baggage from his role in the Murdoch phone hacking scandal, which, which is already an odd choice, you know, to choose someone who, you know, who is sort of under investigation for possibly deleting 50,000 emails. But I should say, and I'm happy to talk about all the reasons the entire newsroom did not like him, but I should say at the beginning we were all cautiously optimistic, right? We were even willing to put aside the fact that he might actually be a criminal if he had a good business plan to save.
- [09:19]
Charlie Sykes
Other than that. Yeah, right.
- [09:20]
Ashley Parker
Yeah, other than that, Mrs. Lincoln. Right? Like, who among us? So everyone was willing to put that aside. He had this very charming British accent, this kind of studied lauchness and rakishness. And he came and we sort of thought like, okay, maybe he's the guy, right? Maybe he can do it. And he talked in all this kind of grandiose corporate speak. But one of the things he did initially was he would send reporters emails about their stories. And he would always, this is a very savvy thing to do, but I give him credit. He would mention a detail that he really liked, you know, in the 17th graph, which gave you the impression he was reading it or at least had scrolled to the 17th graph and pulled something out. So, so again, he, he came in with a little skepticism, but a lot of goodwill. And that started to change at this town hall he held right after he pushed out the executive editor, Sally Busby, in part, it seemed, because he was furious that she had dared to cover his scandals back in the uk. He had told her, this isn't a story, we shouldn't publish it. She had sort of said, it is a story and we are gonna publish it. And after that, she was essentially dead to him.
- [10:40]
Charlie Sykes
Okay, that should have been like a red line, right? I mean, that should have been like all flares going up that whole episode right there. So were people still cautiously optimistic when he forces out. No, no editor who wants to commit flagrant action, flagrant act of journalism, much.
- [10:56]
Ashley Parker
Like Cruz and Trump in Wisconsin. So he pushes for these reasons. And he also then brings in, you know, sort of a couple of leaders who are all white men, but also who are all sort of his chums, for lack of a better word. Right. So it becomes clear. And he was frankly asked this, that, and one of these guys, Rob Wynette, who ultimately ended up not joining the Post, but was someone, one of his friends from London who was unclear if they had ever even been in the United States, right. And was going to lead a newspaper doing national political coverage in an election year. So he basically, he doesn't run a search process. He chooses a few of his buddies. It's unclear if they're the best people for the job or they just, they're a good time at a pub and in this town hall, it's a room full of journalists at the Washington Post. And he is asked some very basic questions. They're sharp, they're pointed. They're also quite obvious in the sort of things you should expect if you are the publisher of the Washington Post. And they're asked politely. And it's, you know, at one point he's asked very politely by Caroline Kitchener, who, you know, won a Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on abortion and is now at the New York Times, he sort of asked, she literally just raises her hand and says, I'm just wondering, did you have a search process? And in that search process, did you interview anyone who was a woman or a person of color? And this question sends him reeling. And he, he basically says, I can't sugarcoat it any longer. No one is reading your stuff. And he was not wrong that the Post, you know, did need to juice readers and users and the business model. That's not what people objected to. It was the word your right, because it just showed this utter disdain and utter contempt in this sense that not us. Yeah, he wasn't in it with us. And that was the first turning point. And then after that, he became incredibly scarce in the newsroom. He was often spotted, as I wrote in the piece, showing up quite late when he showed up at all. And again, we didn't have much contact with him after that. But as it was explained, you know, from the outside, it did look like he was enjoying a Bezos funded vacation. Right. He was at Davos schmoozing. He rented out the, you know, in a moment when there had just been layoffs and buyouts, he rented out the members only private Ned Club for a brunch the weekend of the White House Correspondents Dinner where there was caviar and champagne and fresh ahi tuna flown in. And that feels really tone deaf when you have a staff where we're very talented, people have been forced out. And then I think maybe the final straw, it seems for Bezos was when that vacation continued at the super bowl red carpet, you know, the day after he'd laid off half of the post, including essentially the entire sports staff.
- [14:11]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah, that was, that was, that was a bad look. But now we're getting into the area where I just don't quite understand it because all of this, you know, you know, look, Will Lewis is a case in and of himself, but this all flows from Jeff Bezos. He's Jeff Bezos's choice. Jeff Bezos stood by him up until the end. And I guess I thought it was rather ironic that Jeff Bezos, who has been jet setting around the world posing as a billionaire oligarch, prince, places like Davos, et cetera, that he thinks it's tone deaf for Will Lewis, who actually to go to the NFL. But it's like, okay, Jeff, let's do the split screen of what you were doing. Were all these layoffs, how you refused to engage with the people who were pleading with you not to kill the post. And so this whole notion that Jeff Bezos. I am really shocked, shocked, shocked to find out that Will Lewis is arrogantly out of touch when Bezos himself really was putting on a masterclass in being arrogant and out of touch. What am I missing here? Yeah, it's okay for him to do it because he has f you money and like the underlings can't, you know, do your thing. What?
- [15:27]
Ashley Parker
I mean, it's interesting. Bezos. So I joined the Washington Post at the very beginning of 2017, you know, sort of two weeks before Trump was inaugurated to cover Trump. So Bezos had already. Bezos was already the owner. I never knew a post where Bezos was not the owner, but sort of the entire time I was there, Bezos was a pretty absentee owner. And I have to say, for much of that time, I thought that was a wonderful way to own a publication. Right. You don't want an owner who is emailing you thoughts all the time and suggesting story ideas because Oprah said something to him on his yacht in the Caribbean. That's not what you want in an owner. He, to me, was sort of the perfect owner. He had the money and he gave the Post sort of the money and the means and the resources to match the ambition and the talent and a lot of resources.
- [16:29]
Charlie Sykes
We had to make it clear that the pre. Basis, whatever you want to describe, he pumped a lot of resources into the Washington Post. I mean, really scaled the newspaper up in a very dramatic way. So there was a time when he really thought this was really important to him and this was his legacy. Right.
- [16:44]
Ashley Parker
And he didn't. He didn't. Yes, exactly. And he cared deeply about it, if you kind of took him at face value. And I did, as did Marty Baron and others. And again, he didn't really weigh in, which was exactly what you wanted. And not just did he not weigh in, but as someone who covered the Trump White House, you know, Trump called us the Amazon Washington Post. That was not a term of endearment, to be clear. And there were moments when Trump was going after Amazon quite deliberately because of the Washington Post coverage. And Jeff Bezos never blinked, which is all to sort of say, I don't want to be a hypocrite because I did not have a problem with him being a jet setting owner and doing whatever he wanted as long as he was supporting the Post and not meddling. And he also, you know, the other thing people make the point which, which I totally get is, you know, he's so wealthy, he could, he could own the Post and have the Post hemorrhage money for the next 100 years and it would be like you or I buying an extra venti latte every day. Right? That's how much it would cost him. And he wanted the Post to be profitable. And, and I think that's reasonable. I, I don't think it's unreasonable to want it to be profitable. I am at the Atlantic where we are owned by, by another billionaire. She wants the Atlantic to be profitable and we are. And all of that profit, she allows us to pour back into the magazine and back into the journalism. And I think kind of needing to having the mandate that we want. You know, we weren't a nonprofit. Right. We weren't a charity. And so I don't think the craziest thing is for an owner to say, I want you to be profitable because it forces you to innovate and experiment and, and evolve.
- [18:31]
Charlie Sykes
So, but they were never able to do this. So I guess the big question is, so what, what changed his mind? As you point out in Trump 1.0, he didn't blink. And some of the threats against Amazon, you know, would have been quite, quite substantive. So, you know, on the one level, on one level, we sort of understand, okay, so Trump 2.0, a lot of the businesses, the billionaires decided you don't Want to get on the wrong side of this guy. He can, you know, he can. He can damage your business in really, really dramatic ways. So I guess the question is, you have an interesting line here where you talk about how Bezos and Louis were treating it like a distressed asset or a bargaining chip with a president who ultimately does not respect bargaining supplicants. Why? So talk to me about that mentality, that choice, because the new Jeff Bezos basically decided, I don't care about the Post anymore and I am willing to sacrifice it. I'm not gonna be concerned about my reputation, the reputational legacy hit that I'm going to take. What changed in his mentality that he would destroy the Washington Post? And I guess the question, in the back of my eyes, destroy the Washington Post as opposed to, I don't know, sell it or spin it off in some way.
- [19:45]
Ashley Parker
So I think it's a couple things. And I should stipulate that since he went from being this sort of beloved good billionaire owner to be in something different, I have not spoken to him. So this is all sort of informed conjecture based on the public evidence available. But. But it's a couple of things. I think it's very clear that he, like a lot of these billionaires, tech executives, you know, Silicon Valley oligarchs, and frankly, like the entire world in many ways. When Trump won reelection, they realized that there was a sense after Trump's in first. In Trump's first term and even afterwards that it was an aberration, it was a fever dream, and that Biden was the return to normalcy.
- [20:33]
Charlie Sykes
A lot of us thought that, yes.
- [20:35]
Ashley Parker
And when Trump, when Trump came back, there was a sense that, you know, Biden was the aberration. Right. And, you know, Trump, Trump was here to stay. And even when Trump is gone because he can't run for a third term, that, you know, there might be another MAGA successor. And this is sort of where they wanted to wheel and deal for their business interest in play. That's why you saw them all descend on the inauguration. So Bezos begins sort of meddling in the editorial side, which, again, as an owner, is his right. There's a very strong wall between the news side and the opinion side. And I am of the belief that an editor has the right to do whatever they want. On the opinion side, I didn't agree with what he was doing, but it's his right. And I want to be clear.
- [21:28]
Charlie Sykes
Let's clarify, because this was what a lot of people think. This was a turning point. There were A lot of bad decisions that led to where we're at right now. But of course, it was the pulling of the Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris just shortly before the election. And that resulted in a huge blowback, lots of lost subscribers. That was the first of the new Jeff Bezos big footing, the Washington Post. Right. And that, I mean, it was not the only turning point, but it felt like a big one.
- [21:59]
Ashley Parker
Yeah. And I want to be clear. The reason I disagree, again, it's his right. And the reason I disagreed with it was not because he pulled the endorsement of Kamala Harris, a Democrat. It's just pulling the endorsement. If you are a paper that is always endorsed and you pull the endorsement of a presidential candidate 10 days before the election, that just looks problematic and biased in the same way. It was his right to come to the inauguration and essentially perch himself on Donald Trump's lap. I disagreed with that decision. Not because it was Donald Trump. I would have a similar problem if Jeff Bezos showed up at Barack Obama or Joe Biden's inauguration and gave them a lap dance. Right. Like, I just think it's a bad look, but it is his right. And so, you know, so he does that. And I think it's a couple things, but I think it's shortsighted of him. If you were to sell the Post, if you believe the cynical explanation that he is using the Post as a bargaining chip with Donald Trump. Right. And so he can say, look, nobody likes the Melania movie, but we wrote a review of how amazing it is, how it deserves an Oscar. Look, Mr. President, give me a contract for Blue Origin. If he sells the Post, he doesn't have that bargaining chip that he believes he has. Right. But I would argue it's very short sighted because if Jeff Bezos has read any of his own papers, coverage of this president going back to the first term, he would understand a couple of things. He would understand it's never enough for Donald Trump. Donald Trump is purely transactional and makes decisions based on the person in front of him, the minute, the hour. And what's interesting is Jeff Bezos still has, in all of these layoffs and cuts, they're sort of doubling down on what they believe are the Post's core constituencies, which are our politics. So he has this newspaper, and if the White House team, on the day that the contract decision is being made for who gets to go to Mars. Right. The White House team writes a really basic story that just says, today Donald Trump shared on social media a very racist video that portrayed The Obamas as apes. Trump is still going to be angry and is very likely to take it out on Jeff Bezos. So it doesn't entirely make sense to me as a business strategy. And the last thing I would say is that I actually do believe, and a number of reasonable people disagree with me, but I do do believe that Jeff Bezos sort of does want to own the Post, does think he can make it profitable, and just I think, and I think he was incredibly successful with Amazon. Journalism is not Amazon. And I think he is just sort of misguided about the media and about where the growth. There's certainly growth opportunities, but I think he is misguided about where they are.
- [25:03]
Charlie Sykes
Right. And the contrast between just from the business side, the New York Times and the Washington Post, the New York Times has managed to make itself immensely profitable, branched out into a lot of entrepreneurial side ventures, and the Post has not made those particular decisions. But you're right about the sort of the Faustian bargain that he's making that you're never going to grovel enough for Donald Trump, even if you destroy it. By the way, I think the Ellisons and Barry Weiss are gonna discover the same thing with C that you just can't. You can't play with, with this, with this guy. The other big question is, of course, journalism is different than Amazon.com the audiences are different. And this apparent philosophical decision they made to basically pivot away from their loyal core constituency, the people who have been reading them for 10 years. If you've been reading the Washington Post for the last 10 years, you've had this very, very aggressive coverage of Donald Trump. There's going to be a certain expectation from the readers and the subscribers, this notion that somehow you can grow it by alienating the people who have been supporting you for the last decade and going for some mythical person saying, well, since you are now writing less terrible things about Donald Trump, I'm going to change my reading and subscriber habits. It seems, I would say, just delusional to think that you can do that. And any media that basically decides it would be like, you know, a rock and roll band that says, you know, let's become easy listening or easy listening that decides to become something. I mean, you know, you can't just change the essential nature of the paper and then expect not to lose your audience. Right?
- [26:43]
Ashley Parker
Yes, the 100%. The only part of that I would quibble with is, yes, I think the reader base became accustomed to very rigorous accountability coverage of Donald Trump. But. But that's because what they turned to the Post for was rigorous accountability, coverage of whoever that. That's the only distinction I would make.
- [27:02]
Charlie Sykes
Speak truth to power, right?
- [27:03]
Ashley Parker
Yes. And so the, the people who, who, the liberals who loved my Trump coverage and I, I got, you know, emails hailing me and my colleagues as a hero for our coverage of Trump. These readers were equally furious for the four years I covered Biden, and I got just as angry, vitriolic email from them. But, but it goes to your core point. People subscribe to the Post, they turn to the Post because it held power to account, regardless of who was in power and. And when. Yes, you alienate those subscribers.
- [27:34]
Charlie Sykes
So the meta question, I suppose, is why should we really care about. This isn't the age of the newspaper basically dead. You know, papers all around the country have been closing or becoming ghost newsrooms. That whole idea of the institutional corporate media. What you have now is the blooming of a thousand flowers. You don't just have the Washington Post covering it. You have the Atlantic, you have Politico, you have Puck, you have Semaphore, you have all of these, I mean, could go on this long list. So why should we care about the. I mean, isn't the Washington Post just simply a symptom of a much larger transformation in the media? And so it's not that much of a tragedy. It's just one more data point in the way everything has changed in the last decade. What do you think?
- [28:22]
Ashley Parker
I mean, I just, I fundamentally disagree with that, obviously. I mean, first of all, you're right. The Atlantic is fantastic. It's funny, before I went to work there, it was one of the first places I subscribed to because I kept on running up against the paywall, right? Like, I was like, but there's another story I want to read. And then finally, I just said to myself, you're a journalist, right? Like, you, you should pay for good journalism. So, so there are great publications doing great journalism, whether it's the Atlantic or the New York Times or, or other places. And people should subscribe to the Atlantic if you do not already. But there's, there's very few places that were, again, that were doing what the Washington Post was able to do, which was being first and foremost, in many ways a local paper covering, you know, Washington's beloved sports teams, the Commanders and the Gnats and the Caps and the Wizards and the Mystics for a city that really cares about its sports and robust metro coverage. And I think a couple things about the Post, which is that you, you can't disentangle local stories from national stories because so many things that happen here locally, you know, back to Watergate, but up to the January six attacks which happened in this city, which involved, you know, the D.C. police and the Capitol Police, they are local stories first and foremost, but they are also national and global stories. And the reason the Post was so good at leading the pack was because they had report and the dojing of the federal government is because we had reporters at every federal agency. We had reporters who knew the Capitol Police officers and the D.C. police officers by name because they had been working the beat for years in a non glamorous, non sexy way. So when these local stories happen, you know, every decision made inside the White House is a local story, right? 9, 11, the crash the Pentagon was a local story, but the decisions made within Washington which led to the global war on terror. I mean, you can just piece local, national, global together for the Washington Post in a way you cannot for any other news organization. And again, I also write a lot about. And people should care less about this, fine. But the Post managed to have this just magical culture of collegiality and kind of zippy teamwork that felt like a family, which is so rare in a major newsroom. And I think one anecdote that tells you why we should care about the Washington Post, and yes, media is changing is this was before I left the Post, but this exodus was happening. And I ran into someone, actually who I'd worked with at the Post and was now an editor at the New York Times. I ran into them at a coffee shop by the White House, and, you know, they were lamenting what was happening at the Post. And I kind of said, yeah, it's awful, it's devastating, but hey, it's good for you guys, right? You've hired a ton of us. And she said it's not good for us. You know, she said, it's great to get these new reporters and editors, but it's not good for us. The country deserves two major newspapers and we got better competing against you. Right? And so it's not good.
- [31:41]
Charlie Sykes
Well, I want to radically disagree with you, but I don't. And I can't because, you know, and the loss of institutional memory cannot be overstated. You're talking about relationships that have built up, knowledge base built up over many, many, many decades. And this is one of the part of the transformation of the media that I think has been incredibly negative. The local newspapers were more than just a media outlet. You became the hub of every community. And I say this as an old newspaper guy. You cannot replace that with bloggers. You can't replace that with people who are just sitting behind their computer and putting out hot takes. And what I've seen around the country is in one city after another where you had a newspaper that covered local government, covered state government so intensely, as they disappear, the nature of politics changes as well. People know that people are not looking over their shoulders. They're not asking the hard questions. The other thing is, and I say this as a former newspaper guy, before I was on the radio, I was actually like the city hall reporter for the Milwaukee Journal. Now, back then, that was a really big deal because we prided ourselves on being a big metropolitan daily. And we covered county government, the courts, the federal courts, all of these institutions really intensely, like a sports page. And that's all gone now. And what does strike me, and I don't mean any disrespect, for a lot of the people who are out there talking about and covering journalism, we. We've lost a lot of those pipelines of people who were newspaper reporters, who were police reporters, who covered the education beat, you know, and then move their way up the ladder. There are a lot of people. You can walk into a lot of the newsrooms today and really find out that nobody's ever been a reporter before, not a journalist, and there's a tremendous, tremendous loss there.
- [33:34]
Ashley Parker
Yes, two brief observations about that. I mean, one is also a lot of those places when you were saying, why do we need the Post? We have Politico, we have Semaphore. A lot of the people who work at those places at some point passed through the Washington Post. And I cannot overstate how valuable it is to go into a newsroom when you are young or even mid career and have someone there who has been there for 60 years who can help you with thinking through things or sources or even just you listen to your colleagues on the phone and you say, oh, that's how they ask that question. That's much more effective than how I've been asking that question. And it's interesting. My husband, he works for the New York Times now. He's five years older than me. We're both old, but he's five years older than me. And I felt like when I graduated from college there, it was like at this tipping point in journalism. But long story short, he had the career that I thought I was going to have, which is to say graduates from Ohio State. He starts at the Grand Junction Sentinel in Western Colorado, where he had to. He told me, he said, you know, when you're writing these stories, you know you're going to run into these people you took shots at in the grocery store. So it doesn't mean you can't take shots, but you've got to have it nailed down, right? And it's got to be fair and accurate. And from there he moved to the Palm Beach Post, and then he worked for a couple of different Florida papers before he became the Tallahassee bureau chief for Bloomberg. Bloomberg moved him to D.C. he went to the Wall Street Journal. He ends up at the New York Times. And that was the career. I thought you cover politics in New Hampshire and then cops for the Arkansas Democrat Gazette. And when you're 40 years old, you finally arrive at the Times, the Post, or the Journal. And I'm very grateful for the career I have, but there are moments when I see my husband reporting and I'm just like, you know how to do things that I struggle with, right? Like, you know how to do your own FOIA request or you know how to show up in the stacks of a library to find, you know, the obscure high school newspaper article on the campaign manager that you're profiling. Because that's what you learn at those places.
- [35:54]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah, that is exactly what you learned at those places.
- [35:59]
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- [36:29]
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- [37:15]
Charlie Sykes
So, okay, let's pull back from the post. You have been, as we talked about, you've been covering this for nearly a decade now. Trump 1.0, Trump 2.0. For those of us who have been doing this for so long, what's the hardest part for you in watching the transformation of our politics, the transformation of our political culture? I mean, this is an open ended question, but my answer would be how do you combat, I think it was Peter Wehner who used the phrase outrage fatigue. How do you manage the everyday waking up and going, I cannot believe this is real. I cannot believe this is real life. What's the hardest part for you?
- [38:04]
Ashley Parker
I mean, covering this Trump administration can, it can sometimes feel like there are no real arbiters of truth. And on the one hand, that's by design. Donald Trump has quite savvily, you know, managed to sort of brand any story he doesn't like as fake news. Right? Not, not that it's not true, but, but that's what he, he tells his supporters. And more than that, especially in the first term of the Trump White House, you know, every, I want to be clear, every White House spins and is too cute by half and walks up to the line of lying and sometimes lies. But I had the sense that there were, and again, Democrat, Republican, you know, there were certain people where in the Obama White House, if David Axelrod or Valerie Jarrett told you something, you know, you'd still have to confirm it with a second or third source, but you knew it was probably true. Same, you know, in the Bush White House, if Karl Rove or someone else, you know, there were, there were just these people who you knew were inside the room and were trustworthy arbiters if you could get them to talk to you. And in the Trump White House, you know, there, there are people going up to the president himself who regularly say things that are just 100% not true. And so in the first Trump term, especially the Washington Post, where I was working at the time, kind of trademarked this. But now everyone does it. If you had read a Washington Post story from then, it would say, you know, this portrait of the president in this moment, you know, is, is the result of interviews with 47, you know, white senior White House officials, lawmakers, Republican operatives, and confidence of the president, you know, many speaking anonymously. And there were a couple of reasons for that, but part of it was because we realized if we were to do our jobs correctly which is to tell the truth as best we can ascertain it, and as rigorously and thoroughly as possible. You couldn't just talk to one or two or three people. Right. If there was, if there was a meeting in the Oval Office, you had to talk to all eight people in that meeting, and then you had to talk to the three people each of those eight people talk to. And then you had to take all of that information and synthesize it through what you knew was everyone's competing motivations and warring factions. And it was a really kaleidoscopic view.
- [40:40]
Charlie Sykes
Not anymore. Yeah. Okay. I have a question though for you. What is this true thing of which you speak? Because one of the innovations of our era has been that you can tell the most egregious lie, be exposed telling the most egregious lie, and there are no consequences whatsoever. I know it's a cliche to call it a post truth world, but I mean, you know, again, isn't this part of the problem is that there are so many lies? And the Washington Post had a fact checker, Glenn Kessler, who, you know, just kept track of the thousands and thousands of lies. Apparently the voters didn't care. Republicans in Congress don't. Don't care. I mean, isn't this one of the frustrating things, you know, tracking down what is true, what are the facts, and then being in a political environment where people don't care, where nothing happens?
- [41:29]
Ashley Parker
Yeah, yes, yes, of course. Right. Like I believe in operating in a sort of reality based, fact based world. I think that's ideal. But I also think regardless of what people believe, it is our job to track down the facts and tell people what is actually happening. And they may not believe it, or they may believe it, but for partisan reasons, there may be no consequences, but there are moments when the populace needs to know the facts. They need to know what Covid is and how to protect themselves. They need to know what happened on January 6th, and we can tell them what happened and then they can make their own decisions with it. My job or my goal is not to get people to vote a certain way or make a certain set of decisions, but I do think it is our job to tell the truth and to tell the facts, and that's not going to stop.
- [42:27]
Charlie Sykes
So for the last 10 years, there have been these moments where people were saying, well, this story, this is going to be the turning point, or this is going to be the pivot point, or the walls are closing in on Donald Trump. And as we know, this story over and over again. It does not happen. The stories don't necessarily break through, even the ones that are so big. I mean, getting your head around the fact that he was reelected president after January 6, after everyone understood what had happened on January 7. But are there stories that you' seeing breaking through right now? I mean, my sense, and I'm teeing this up, and I avoid irrational exuberance, but it certainly does seem that the ice abuses out of Minneapolis have broken through to the normies. The Epstein files, the fact that we're still talking about that is amazing given the news cycle. So give me your sense about the stories that are breaking out of the information bubbles that are actually having, having some real world impact and I'll just tee those up ice in Minneapolis in the Epstein files. Do you think so or not?
- [43:30]
Ashley Parker
Yes, 100% on both of them. These are not quite stories. But, you know, we talk about a post truth world. There are some objective facts that people, and frankly, this was a challenge for Joe Biden. There's some facts that people don't need to read about. But, but prices, right? Like prices at grocery stores and interest rates and the ability to buy a first home or not buy a first home.
- [43:58]
Charlie Sykes
You can't spin that. There's, there's, there's no messaging that's going to spin that lived experience, is there?
- [44:02]
Ashley Parker
No. And, and the truth is Joe Biden, there were a lot of quote unquote good economic indicators that that wasn't a lie. All those sort of factors were 100% true. But if you don't feel them in your day to day life and you're catching three buses to work, two job, and you are still saving for three months to get each of your two kids one Christmas present. It doesn't matter what the jobs report was at the end of the month. It just doesn't. And I think that's another thing that Republicans are gonna have to grapple with. And the other thing I would add is Donald Trump is not on the ballot anymore. They are, you know, they've talked about trying to nationalize the midterms, but one fascinating thing is that his voters and his coalition are willing to forgive a lot when it comes to him. They are not willing to forgive nearly as much when it comes to his party. And so I think we will see that in the midterms.
- [45:04]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah. Does Howard Lutnick survive, do you think? You know, now that he's been basically caught lying about Epstein, you know, again, back in the 1970s, something like that, the guy would resign. He would leave the Cabinet. But this is, this is the era of Trump. What do you think?
- [45:16]
Ashley Parker
Think so. That, that is an interesting one because I know a couple quite conflicting things to be true based on my reporting. One is that, you know, the, the Trump administration, more than anything, they kind of want to go out as they came in with, with the cabinet secretaries and they're, especially after Matt Gaetz pulled his nomination, they're especially reluctant to give what they view as strong sort of scalps to the media. Right. They never want to be viewed as pushing someone out because there was outrage among Democratic lawmakers or the media. So that accrues in Lutnick's favor. What does not occur in his favor was the reason we know he was lying about Epstein was because a couple of months earlier he went on a podcast and it was a moment where the Epstein stuff was very fraught for the Trump administration. Where there were, you know, there, there's photos of Trump with Epstein. Trump wants it to go away. It's guilt by association and kind of unprompted. Right. He's not really required to do this. Howard Lutnick does this bit of moral grandstanding of, I knew Jeffrey Epstein was such a disgusting human that my wife and I left his house that day and vowed that we would never see him again. And at the time, the Trump people were furious, right? They were like, who does this guy think he is? No one was asking him to weigh in and certainly not in such a self righteous, moralizing way. So there is that anger at him from that moment. And I think there's probably an internal sense of glee that he's finally getting his comeuppance. But I don't know if that means he will be pushed out for the other reasons I mentioned.
- [47:04]
Charlie Sykes
Okay, two other quick questions. Because I use the phrase shocked but not surprised. I mean, my reaction to the Obama putting out the racist video of the Obamas was that was genuinely shocking. But if you've been paying attention to the way they've been moving that Overton window of acceptable racism, it's not surprising. Would you put that in that same category? That there are a lot of things that are, are genuinely shocking. Like, for example, the story this week that the Justice Department tried to actually criminally indict six Democratic sitting members of Congress for, you know, had an accurate video telling members of the military not to disobey the law. I mean, that is genuinely shocking, but it's not surprising when you consider, you know, that, you know, that Trump has been vowing revenge and retribution I mean, isn't that one of the formulas of dealing with Trump that you know, that if you follow him, you know where these things come from? But it's still like, holy shit, what's happening?
- [48:04]
Ashley Parker
I mean, I think that racist video is shocking. I think it is shocking. I think just the fact that it exists is shocking, let alone that it would be shared by the President of the United States. What was surprising to me was actually that this was one of these rare moments where when you look at the White House's behavior, even they seem to sense that. That they had gone too far. And you, you know, you had sort of multiple explanations. You know, he. He didn't. He didn't see it. He just re. Shared the video. And. Oh, actually, it was an intern. And in the intern apologizes, I mean, you rarely see that level of kind of backpedaling from this administration, which, which gets to, I think, also underscores your point, Charlie, about ICE in Minneapolis being another issue, because that was another area where Caroline Levitt in the briefing room, you know, declined to kind of defend the language and the characterization of the two people who were killed. That Stephen Miller, for instance. Yes. And you rarely. And then it came out, then Stephen Miller claimed, you know, he was just basing this on early information he got from, you know, border Patrol. And again, you rarely see that sort of backpedaling, which tells you they know they have really crossed a line.
- [49:30]
Charlie Sykes
It does. Ashley Parker, thank you so much for all of your generous time today. There's just so much going on. You can read Ashley's piece about the Washington Post in the Atlantic, the murder of the Washington Post, about last week's layoffs, the latest attempt to kill what makes the paper special and why it actually matters. Ashley, good to talk with you again. Thank you.
- [49:51]
Ashley Parker
Good to talk with you, too.
- [49:53]
Charlie Sykes
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- [50:50]
GNC Drop Host
That new thing? Yeah, we've got it. The Drop by GNC Bringing you all the newness that matters. Hand picked by the pros who actually know what's up and what's proven to work, we keep you on top of the trends and dialed into what's next. Whether you're crushing it at the gym, leveling up your game or thriving every day, the Drop by GNC is where the latest solutions in health and wellness land first non stop innovation and fresh finds daily explore what's new and what's next on the Drop by GNC did.
- [51:20]
Ashley Parker
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