to the made-up list of terrorist events that
CNN supposedly didn’t cover.
Were you one of the 1.22 million people
who watched it? If not, I highly recom-
mend it, so that you can see all of what is so
gratifying about Jake Tapper in full regalia:
his skill at shutting down a Trump-crony
filibuster, his exhausted dismay at having
his glorious anchor face lied to, his defiant
running of tape to expose many of her
claims as false —even footage, for instance,
that showed CNN journalists, Tapper
included, covering the terror attacks that
Trump insisted the media had ignored. (“I
love having the receipts,” he tells me.)
The clip of the confrontation—which
stretched to 25 uninterrupted minutes—
became, like so many recent Tapper interro-
gations, something of an Internet sensation.
He hadn’t planned on that. Tapper had
planned on a 10- or 11-minute interview, and
he began by asking a couple of questions
that he and his team had outlined in their
news meeting. But after that, he went rogue.
His relentless counter-questioning was like
water in the desert for those of us who’d
grown tired of the constant assault on truth
and the alarming sense that, by continually
manipulating the media, the administra-
tion was starting to craft its own reality. No
less than CNN president Je≠ Zucker him-
self stood in the control room and told the
cameras to keep running, that there would
be no commercial break.
The Internet went nuts before the inter-
view was even over. Blogs reported that
Tapper had “crushed” and “taken down”
Conway. Samantha Bee tweeted, “We are all
that crease between Jake Tapper’s eyebrows.”
Van Jones tweeted that Jake Tapper “is a
GOD.” Alyssa Milano tweeted to him, “You
are giving me hope. Thank you for all you do.”
(His reply: “Are you saying I’m the boss?”)
He became a screen grab, a meme, a
Facebook avatar to people not named Jake
Tapper. A woman on the Internet wrote asong about him. Oh, Jake Tapper, you are
making me swoon, it goes. You ain’t taking
no shit, I think I’m over the moon. Thank God
someone kept the receipts.
But Tapper seems almost weary with
the attention. Why, though? It must be so
gratifying to suddenly be hoisted upon
our shoulders and favored as our crisis
anchor, our wartime consigliere, here to
sort through the befuddlement and fear six
hours a week, then on Twitter in between.
“You think that,” he says. “I think that I’m
doing my job, and it’s nice to be recognized,
but I also know that a lot of the people
who are happy with me now are not going
to be happy with me in four to eight years
and that I’m just going to keep doing what
I’m doing. A lot of people sending me nice
tweets today were cursing me when I was
asking questions about Benghazi in 2012.”
Finally, he concedes this: “I’m definitely
getting some attention right now, at this
period, that I wasn’t before. It also might
be gone in a week. You know what I mean?
I’m not counting on it.” He looks down
at the chicken on his plate and blows air
out of his cheeks.IT’D BE EASY TO THINK that the Jake
Tapper WTF Face—that unique look through
which he transmits his seeming disbelief
and outrage—is just a singular expression,
that it’s just one face. In fact, the Jake Tapper
WTF Face contains multitudes.
There is the JTWTFF that is a mere
frown, the depressor supercilii muscles cre-
ating a hood over his downward-turning,
disappointed eyes. There is the JTWTFF
wherein the muscles you’d most associate
with the apples of the cheeks rise to his eyes
while his eyebrows reach skyward toward
that hair. Me? My favorite Jake Tapper WTF
Face is the one where his eyebrows arch but
also corrugate into small bowl-shaped cat-
erpillars, and his frontalis, the muscle of the
forehead, rises and lowers at the same time,JAKE TAPPER is on a diet,
so he orders the pouletrouge basquaise at Bistro Bis in
D.C., and when le waiter tries
to get us to throw some pommes
frites in for the table, Tapper
says merci but no merci. His diet
consists, as basically all diets
do, of pretty much just protein:
protein shakes, protein snacks,
protein protein. His friend
Paul Rudd, who, Tapper says, got
“really shredded” for Ant-Man,
gave him the diet. Tapper follows
it mostly, also doing cardio at
the gym five times a week. “The modified
Ant-Man” is what he calls it. I wonder
what it says about us when Ant-Man is our
superhero aspiration, but Tapper is realis-
tic: “Paul’s a fellow 48-year-old Jew. This
is achievable.” Fair.
He wants to be his healthiest, he says. He
wants to be able to withstand the pressures
of hosting The Lead with Jake Tapper on
CNN every weekday and State of the Union
every Sunday, and also be present and ener-
getic for his wife and two small children,
and also to keep up with this epic and
unprecedented and completely batshit time
in news. To be clear, Tapper’s job—six hours
a week on-air, and countless ones o≠-air,
preparing—is all-consuming on even a slow
news day; it’s been more than a year since
we’ve had one of those.
So, I’m sure all of that’s true, about his
health. Who doesn’t want to be healthy?
But these days, there’s suddenly added
incentive for an already handsome 48-year-
old Jew—taller than you’d imagine, with
white anchor teeth; clean, neat anchor
nails; and prodigious anchor hair—to want
to look extra good. For suddenly, in this
post- Enlightenment Garbage Fire Era of
American history, there are the late-night
talk-show appearances and the magazine
articles and the daily memes that herald
this as the Jake Tapper Moment.
In just the few weeks I spent with him,
Tapper was invited onto Colbert and Conan
and Trevor Noah. “I think I had a fairly
good reputation before this year,” he says
carefully, trying to remind me that he’s
been doing this particular job since 2013.
“But I think that people are engaged in
what’s going on like never before. People
can’t stop watching, both supporters of the
president and opponents of the president.”
Sure, but there’s something about Tapper
in particular. Consider his notorious UFC
fight of an interview with Kellyanne Conway
on February 7, during which he cornered
the Trump adviser on everything from a
made-up massacre to made-up murder rates
- During Tapper’s epic tussle with Kellyanne Conway, CNN’s president ordered cameras not to cut.
58 GQ.COM MAY 2017
GQINTELLIGENCE MEDIACOURTESY OF CNN