THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER23, 2019 15
“ Yup, it’s bedbugs. You must have forgotten to sleep tight.”• •
our society is being manipulated to
make us fight with each other, mak-
ing us the worst versions of ourselves,”
he said, sounding an awful lot like a
person describing Fox News.
Is James taking aim at his father?
“There are views I really disagree with
on Fox,” he said. “But I wouldn’t cast
it as some reaction to that.” He is
backing a program at the Center for
a New American Security, a biparti-
san think tank. The aim of the pro-
gram, called Countering High-Tech
Illiberalism, as it’s described on the
Web site for the Quadrivium foun-
dation, founded by James and his wife,
Kathryn, is “to craft effective, practi-
cal, actionable, and ambitious policies
domestically and abroad” that impair
illiberal populism, such as fighting
disinformation and electoral interfer-
ence. (Fox News hosts have down-
played Russia’s interference in the
2016 election.)
Quadrivium also supports nonprofit
groups seeking to increase American
voter turnout by making it easier to
register to vote and safeguarding vot-
ing rights—steps that could help de-
feat Trump. “But this is not just a
Trumpian problem,” James said. “Gen-
erally, Western liberalism is up against
an enormous amount of opposition
everywhere.”
James did not want to comment
on his relationship with his father,
but said that they’d seen each other
recently at a corporate board meet-
ing. Asked whether the two talk, he
said, “There are periods of time when
we do not.”
Like his five siblings, James is the
beneficiary of a family trust that holds
the remaining News Corp and Fox
stock, but it is unclear whether he will
ever exercise any control over the com-
panies. “Succession” offers no clues. “I
don’t watch ‘Succession,’” he said. “Not
even a peek. Why would I?”
He also hasn’t seen “Ink,” the
Broadway play about his father’s Lon-
don tabloid, the Sun, or “The Loud-
est Voice,” the Showtime series based
on Gabriel Sherman’s book about
Roger Ailes, the disgraced former
head of Fox News. “There are only
so many things you can watch,” he
said, shrugging.
—Jane Mayer
gray T-shirt, black ballroom shoes, and
no makeup. “Frankly, I’m just making
money, trying to enjoy life.” To dance
on television, he will be paid at least a
hundred and twenty-five thousand dol-
lars—more each week that he does not
get eliminated. “They try to have a di-
verse cast,” he said. “Mark Cuban, sports
people, Hollywood folks, Tom DeLay”—
the former Majority Whip, who ap-
peared before being convicted on money-
laundering charges—“Rick Perry, Tucker
Carlson, Bristol Palin. They’ve had a lot
of conservative-slash-political folks. I’d
say I’m in that lineage.”
He was joined that day by his profes-
sional dance partner, who has been fea-
tured on many seasons of “Dancing with
the Stars.” (Her name will be revealed
on the season première.) “Sean’s really
persistent, but he doesn’t have a lot of
upper-body-isolation movement,” she
said. She wondered if he’d been practic-
ing. “Be honest. Did you work on this
while I was gone?” she asked him. Then
she said, “We got a shimmy down—like
a little chest pop—but his body just does
not move that way. It’s not even that he
needs to learn how to do it, it’s just that
he doesn’t have the flexibility for it.”
Spicer defended his learning style. “I’m1
DEPT.OFMOVES
SLIDE
L
ast week, a few miles from the Pen-
tagon, at a dance studio in a strip
mall, Sean Spicer slid several feet on his
knees across a polished wooden floor. A
producer wearing khaki shorts with pine-
apples on them coached him from the
sidelines: “When you’re done sliding,
hold it for five seconds,” he said. Spicer,
President Trump’s former press secre-
tary, was rehearsing for his début as a
contestant on ABC’s “Dancing with the
Stars.” After resigning from his White
House job (Trump’s counsellor Kelly-
anne Conway invented the phrase “al-
ternative facts” to describe Spicer’s
press-conference style), he taught at Har-
vard, published a tell-all book (thesis: “I
was beginning to realize I had misspo-
ken badly”), and is now moving on to
reality television.
“This wasn’t part of the plan,” Spicer
said, standing in the mirrored studio.
He was wearing green athletic shorts, a