President Obama did not like me, and I
understand why. I was a pain in his ass and
I didn’t drink the Kool-Aid, and, you know,
a lot of other people did.”
There were no righteous RTs back then.
No loving memes. There were eye rolls, the
word “blowhard” attached to his name. So,
yes, it’s nice when the thanks come—but
the same brain holding Trump’s receipts
can’t forget the ones he’s got on us, too.
He’s aware that many who love him today
used to criticize or, worse, ignore him. And
maybe that’s what’s bothering him now—
how fair-weathered we are. He’s been doing
this all along, but now that we have a pres-
ident who is polling astoundingly low,
we suddenly approve?
He won’t say this, so let me say what he
tries to let his face say for him: You think
you’re outraged now? You’re just catching
up, is what you are. Jake Tapper has been
doing outrage since back when you believed
you lived in a free country. While you were
enjoying your long liberal day at the beach,
Jake Tapper was pioneering your outrage.
But it’s important to know, too, that
Tapper doesn’t crave the chaos or the
tumult. That’s not what he’s here for. He
doesn’t want to have to talk every day about
the president’s conspiracies, the wild accu-
sations. And for what it’s worth, Tapper
says, Trump shouldn’t want that stu≠ to
be the story, either. “I think if he stopped
the nonsense, he has the potential to be a
very e≠ective president,” Tapper says. “The
Republican o∞ceholders in Washington
are terrified of him. He is, by nature, a
deal-maker, and not particularly ideo-
logical. He could be a very e≠ective presi-
dent, but he keeps undermining himselfwith conspiracy theories and the attempt
to undermine anyone who provides any
sort of check or balance.”
Of course someday, we will elect Oprah
Winfrey president, and Chelsea Clinton will
be her vice president, and whoever thought
up the pussyhat thing will be secretary of
state. And on that day, we will turn on Jake
Tapper again, because he will still be Jake
Tapper. He will still ask hard questions of
our politicians—even of our popular politi-
cians, though we’ll no longer be grateful for
it. He will still wear his face down to convey
the injustice in the world. He will still fight
you on the beach with his baby in his arms.
Before Tapper’s appearance on Colbert,
we talked in the hair-and-makeup room,
and I asked him if he understood why he
was in such high demand these days. “It’s
because I’m feisty or whatever,” he said. And
again, “But I was always like this.”
He had done his show that day from
the CNN studios in New York and was still
wearing a layer of foundation applied ear-
lier. From his hairline to his neck, the CNN
makeup covered his face, and now the
groomer for Colbert’s show was adding on,
creating a new line on his neck.
He went on the air, and I watched him
from the greenroom. “My job is not to be
liked,” he said to Colbert. “My job is to tell
the truth.” The crowd cheered, and for a
millisecond you could see that face work-
ing hard to fight it, but it didn’t work. No
amount of foundation could help it. Jake
Tapper’s WTF Face gave up and briefly
broke into a smile.taffy brodesser-akner is a gq
correspondent.that they’d been rude and that it had been
unnecessary. He didn’t demand an apology.
He just wanted them to know they couldn’t
behave that way without being called out.
“He just stood there,” Klam said. “He just
stood there in righteous indignation, not
afraid of anyone.”
FOR HIS CRIMES OF practicing jour-
nalism, Tapper has lately become a target.
In February, the website Axios reported
that conservatives were hoping to unearth
damaging info on him. In response, Tapper
played along, creating a Twitter hashtag,
#TapperDirtFile, and gleefully unleashing
his ugliest “secrets”: his predilection for the
Billy Joel channel on SiriusXM, the fact that
he owned and enjoyed Bruce Willis’s 1987
harmonica atrocity, The Return of Bruno.
Two weeks later, some random Twitter
account released a recording that it claimed
was Jake Tapper on a racist screed about
a black woman who was dating his son. It
turned out to be an actually quite well-known
2007 recording of Dog the Bounty Hunter
going on a racist screed. Nevertheless, the
right circulated it widely. It was fishy from
the start, considering that in 2007, Jake
Tapper was still two years from having a
son. (“I wouldn’t want him dating anyone
two years before he was born,” he told me.)
For this sort of thing, Tapper is prepared.
He understands the motives of a White
House declaring war on the press—and on
CNN in particular. “Steve Bannon has made
it clear: His goal is to blow everything up,”
Tapper points out, “so there’s no confidence
in anything except for President Trump.”
Most of the attacks aimed at delegitimiz-
ing Tapper fall into the modern and spec-
tral category of Internet intimidation. “I
don’t even know how many of them are real
people, how many of them are Macedonian
teenagers who are paid: ‘Here’s a list of 30
American journalists, go after them.’ I don’t
know what’s real anymore.”
And yet at the same time, there are also
the real, live human non-bots who think
Tapper is a liberal shill, who wonder what
exactly his problem is with restoring
America’s greatness, who want to know why
he wasn’t ever this hard on Barack Obama.
But he has those receipts, too. Back in
2009, it was Tapper who stood up to the White
House, expressing shock that the Obama
administration had tried to deny Fox News
access. Does anyone remember that? Or that
Tapper, three years in a row, won awards
from the White House Correspondents’
Association for breaking news? No, because
the news was about the Obama White
House, and why did Tapper have to be so
hard on our wonderful president?
“President Obama was not friendly to
the press, but the press was very friendly
to President Obama,” Tapper says. “I mean,
Here Comes a Jake Tapper WTF Face
64 GQ.COM MAY 2017
GQINTELLIGENCE MEDIACOURTESY OF CNNThe Hardest-Working Brow in the Business
Jake Tapper gets fed some pretty egregious nonsense, but his trademark
visage of shock and stupefaction can calm a nervous nation.—LAUREN LARSONTAPPER VS.CONWAY
Complaining about the
press, Kellyanne Conway
said, “There are some
stories that are false.”
Tapper agreed, citing
falsehoods she’d spread.
TAPPER VS. GIULIANI
“Dead people generally
vote for Democrats,”
Rudy Giuliani said when
pressed by Tapper on
his claim that voter fraud
hurts Republicans.
TAPPER VS. TRUMP
“I don’t know anything
about David Duke,”
Donald Trump offered
when Tapper invited
him to condemn the
erstwhile KKK Pooh-Bah.
FACE:
GobsmackedFACE:
IndignationFACE:
You’re Shitting Me, Right?