21 March/22 March 2020 ★ FT Weekend 3
Life
C
oronavirus anxiety has not
yet consumed New York
when Rachel Maddow slides
into the corner booth of
Keens with two bags packed
for the weekend. The host since 2008 of
MSNBC’s primetime news broadcast has
yet to focus her withering commentary
on the Trump administration’s woeful
preparations for the spread of the pan-
demic. Instead, a more jovial Maddow
sits across the table as I take in the decor,
a brown ensemble of framed cartoons,
suits of armour and former patrons’
pipes that was a throwback even when
Keens opened in 1885.
The New York steakhouse — which
was shuttered this week until further
notice — is no longer the all-male club it
was when the actress Lillie Langtry sued
in 1905 to be let in, but it still seems an
incongruousspot for American liberals’
favourite anchorwoman. Maddow con-
cedes that she is not exactly a regular.
“It’s been, like, 12 years since I last had
lunch in a restaurant,” she says: she is
usually at work by now, ploughing
through a pile of articles to inform her
show. “I eat two or three meals a day at
my desk, which is gross. My office is a dis-
aster area. My most likely cause of death
is being crushed by a tower of paper.”
The line is delivered with the big,
deep, in-on-the-joke laugh familiar to
her millions offans. Five nights a week,
her wry wisecracking can make Mad-
dow seem the happiest warrior in Amer-
ica’s news wars.
But wars they are, and Maddow has
played a part in cleaving America’s
nightly television audience, even if that
was not her aim. Polarisation by TV
remote has reached the point where vot-
ers are forming their views on politics
(and pandemics) “in two nearly inverse
news media environments”, the Pew
Research Center has found.
MSNBC does not have the lock on
Democrats that Fox News has on Repub-
licans, but Maddow is still a preacher to
the largely converted. An influential
one, too: as Democrats split over how
leftwing a candidate they want to chal-
lenge Donald Trump in November,
Politico breathlessly dubbed her the
party’s new kingmaker.
In the early stages of the Democratic
race, “every time I’d do an interview,
there would be this hubbub online: ‘Oh,
so and so just won the Maddow pri-
mary,’” she recalls. She dismisses the
notion of her studio vying with Iowa on
the campaign trail, but no rival has the
same sway with the people who actually
show up to Democratic primaries.
A Rhodes scholar and former Aids
activist whose career has taken her
through the Democratic strongholds of
California, Massachusetts and New
York, Maddow could personify the term
“liberal media”. She came to fame in the
mid-2000s, juggling a breakfast show on
Air America, the shortlived talk radio
network for the left, with appearances
on MSNBC as the wonky liberal foil to
conservative pundit Tucker Carlson.
Back then, she would visit Keens at
odd hours around those shifts; and
while cable news networks have gone to
their blue and red corners since Carlson
took his bow tie and crusades against
political correctness to Fox, her old
haunt hasn’t changed.
“This was a place that I came a few
times to have boozy martinis and
steak,” Maddow recalls, ripping into a
roll and reaching for the butter. She has
come back for the steak but not the mar-
tinis, because for a decade she has had a
no-spirits-on-school-nights rule, “which
is so sad”. At 46, she finds less fun in
drinking; she noticed in her thirties, she
recalls, that “I would be fuzzy the next
day, if I drank the night before.”
And Maddow is nothing if not in com-
mand of her material, as displayed
when she landed a notable scoop in Jan-
uary. Lev Parnas, the indicted Rudy
Giuliani associate who helped Trump’s
lawyer press Ukraine for dirt on former
vice-president and current Democratic
frontrunner Joe Biden, chose her pro-
gramme to assert that the president
“knew exactly what was going on”.did rather than air what he said. “I don’t
mean this in an ad hominem way, but he
lies all the time,” she explains bluntly.
Yet, like most journalists, Maddow
still gets accused of falling into the presi-
dent’s trap, responding to his every
provocation in a way that ensures that
he dominates the news agenda, and that
no story stays long in the headlines.
“Part of what will be hard to explain to
future generations about this moment is
how many things would have been
gigantic, showstopping scandals in
other administrations that we just
didn’t have time for,” she says.
As she stacks two slices of steak on her
fork, however, Maddow insists that she
is not looking to bring Trump down.
“I know you won’t believe me when I
say this but... I’m not trying to end the
Trump presidency,” she says. “I think of
my job as explaining things... That’s
my jam.”
Maddow was widely accused of hyp-
ing the publication of an anticlimactic
two pages of Trump’s 2005 tax return, I
note. She again shrugs off the criticism.
“Whatever anybody was projecting on
to me, in terms of what I might have
been hoping for the political impact of
that scoop, I feel like is their problem
and not mine.”
Salt crystals are bursting on my
tongue as Maddow theorises that she
was late to spot Trump’s chances in 2016
because, for most of the years when he
was staking his claim on popular cul-
ture, she owned no television. Even
now, she says, she has never watched a
full hour of Fox.
Does she agree that MSNBC bears as
much responsibility as Fox for the coun-
try’s polarisation, I ask. “Do you think
that’s true?” she shoots back. I remind
her between garlic-laced mouthfuls of
escarole that I asked first.
“We get asked, ‘Are you the other side
of the coin of Fox’ all the time. I don’t
think people ask Fox, ‘Are you the other
side of the coin for MSNBC,’” she laughs.
Maddow acknowledges that she
brings an avowed liberal’s perspective to
her coverage, but she argues that Fox
was founded to advance Republicans’
electoral chances. “That’s in the bones
of what Fox News is,” she says: “There’s
no project like that on the left that’s aim-
ing at those same goals, let alone suc-
ceeding at that.”I
t is hard to fathom that Maddow
once sought presenting advice from
Fox’s late chief executive, Roger
Ailes. She says she found the
former Nixon consultant difficult,
paranoid and “Paleo” in his views — yet
also “incredibly talented”. That does not
excuse the behaviour of which Ailes was
accused in the sexual harassment alle-
gations that felled him, she says firmly,
but she did not witness it.
Our lunch takes place before Chris
Matthews, a veteran MSNBC host, left
abruptly amid allegations of sexist com-
ments. It is three years since NBC fired
Matt Lauer from theTodayshowafter
claims of inappropriate sexual behav-
iour. When I ask whether Maddow has
felt the need to speak up about its cul-
ture, she doesn’t take the bait.
“I do not enjoy office politics in any
office,” she replies, saying she knows lit-
tle about NBC’s other programmes.“Any time I’m not in the process of
producing a show, I leave New York.”
Maddow tries to tune out the news on
weekends in Massachusetts with her
partner Susan Mikula, although last
summer a broken ankle disrupted “all
the things I do to keep me sane”, from
dog walking to fishing. What did you do
instead, I ask, aware that she has dealt
with depression since she was a teenager.
“I did not stay sane,” she laughs. She is
still in pain, though a cold winter has
helped because ice fishing is easier on
the ankle than wading through rivers.
When she arrived home last night, she
confides, “I was going to do all this prep
on you,” but instead “I decided I would
go to my happy place.” She poured a
glass of wine, put on an Ella Fitzgerald
album and started assembling three
“tip-ups”, or ice-fishing traps.
Maddow proudly pulls one of the con-
traptions from a bag, showing me how a
tug on the line flips up the flag that alerts
her to a bite. You can buy luxury mahog-
any tip-ups, she notes, but she swears by
this $12.99 model.
Our waiter asks if we are finished, but
I still have more arteries left to clog and
a question to ask: who does she think
will win November’s election? Incum-
bent US presidents tend to be re-elected
and authoritarians tend to use the
power of the state to improve their
chances. “The only rigorous way to
approach [the election] is with an open
mind,” she says.We are lunching before the Demo-
cratic race has narrowed to a revived
Biden, who has given Maddow no inter-
view this year, and Bernie Sanders,
whose campaign has had a prickly rela-
tionship with her. Interviewing Eliza-
beth Warren after the Massachusetts
senator dropped out, Maddow cited
“women who are just bereft” by the end
of her campaign. Maddow strikes me as
one of them, but sheinsists that she has
no opinion on who should win.
She surprises me by asserting that it
is “folly” for Democrats to choose their
candidate on the basis of who they
think is most likely to beat Trump.
More important, she says, is deciding
that whoever the party picks, “you’re
going to do everything possible to get
them to the finish line”.
The waiter returns to offer dessert but
Maddow’s paper piles are calling. “I’ve
got to go, but I hope that you stay and
have a hot fudge sundae,” she suggests.
Can Maddow keep up five shows a
week in such an intense news era, I ask
before she returns to the battle. “Nope!
It’s definitely killing me,” she laughs
again, a little more grimly than before.
“Physically, this is not a good way to live,
and it’s been a long time.”Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson is the FT’s US
business editor‘In the same way that
the best solution to
problematic speech is morespeech, the best solution to
anti-democratic forcesis more democracy’
Beloved by America’s liberal left,
the TV host has been dubbed a
Democratic kingmaker. Over steakand mutton in New York, she talks
toAndrew Edgecliffe-Johnson boutapolarisation, the primaries — and
why ice-fishing keeps her saneKEENS STEAKHOUSE
72 West 36th Street,
New York, NY 10018Lunch sirloin $33
Mutton chop $62
Mushrooms $15
Glass Brunello
di Montalcino $13
Fresh ginger ale $5
Total (inc service) $139.35Coming on the eve of the Senate
impeachment trial, it was greeted s aa
bombshell. Yet Republican senators ulti-
mately resisted the pressure it created to
call witnesses to explain the holes Par-
nas poked in the president’s impeach-
ment defence. It is a challenge for Mad-
dow’s trade that so many headlines roll
off this uniquely newsworthy president.
The interview earned Maddow’s show
record ratings, but they had already
been rising. In the Trump era, her
broadcasts have become a balm for
despairing Democrats for whom hers is a
Stanford-educated voice of reason. “I’m
not here to calm you down,” she says,
“but I am here to make it explicable.”M
addow has only a few
hours to distil today’s
news into a show, so we
must order. The menu
describes Keens’ mutton
chop as “legendary”, and she goads me
into choosing the hefty-sounding dish
that Langtry once ordered. Our waiter
assures me that if I ignore the bone and
fat, I will find a manageable 12 to 14
ounces of “old lamb, young sheep”.
“Do you want it sliced or do you want
it to arrive like a piece of dinosaur?”
Maddow asks. I opt for the fullFlint-
stoneseffect, with sautéed escarole and a
glass of Sangiovese.
“I like seafood,” Maddow grins as she
scans the menu, “but I feel that what-
ever else I did in life, it would keep me
out of heaven if I came to Keens and
ordered the octopus.” She orders a
sliced sirloin, medium-rare, with fries,
mushrooms and a fresh ginger ale. I ask
how she landed the Parnas interview.
“I’m not a great people person,” she
admits, saying that most of her staff are
similarly nerdy “AV club” introverts,
but one producer had built up trust with
Parnas’s lawyer. Thinking that this
could be Parnas’s only chance to share
what he knew, Maddow insisted her
cameras roll for three hours.
“I approached it as a deposition,” she
says as our drinks arrive.
The interview was the culmination of
a focus on Trump’s ties to foreign influ-
ences, which critics have labelled an
obsession. “Oh, I’ve not yet begun to
talk about Russia,” Maddow scoffs. “I
make no apologies for the Russia cover-
age and I don’t think we’ve been wrongand I don’t think the story is over.”
Her grandfather was Russian, she
observes, but “that’s trivia”. Her life
story is interesting enough to fill a
recent biography, though she claims not
to know which parts of her upbringing,
as a gay Catholic in a conservative cor-
ner of California, were particularly
formative. Self-reflection is not her
strong suit, she says: “My memory
about things related to myself is like a
bodega security cam — it writes over
itself frequently and erases everything.”
The waiter brings her steak and my
uncompromising cross-section of rumi-
nant, which is framed by an unbuckled
belt of crisp fat. I cut a juicy chunk of
mutton off the bone and we turn to her
latest book, which grew out of her fasci-
nation with Russia.
Maddow says she thinks of business
reporting as someone else’s job, yet in
Blowoutshe tackles what she calls his-
tory’s most consequential industry —
oil and gas. “I was interested in it
because I don’t understand it intrinsi-
cally,” she explains.
The book’s case is that perversely sub-
sidised fossil-fuel companies are not
just wrecking the environment but are
also bending democracy out of shape.
Most pointedly, the political science
PhD argues that industry executives
have fuelled Vladimir Putin’s “thug
dream” of Russian resurgence at the
west’s expense.
Blowoutis a wittily, angrily told story
that owes more to Maddow’s talent for
synthesising other people’s work than to
her own shoe-leather reporting. The
core of her argument is that corruption
is not a byproduct of the oil and gas
industry, “it’s the point... The last
thing that Putin wants is for people to
have faith in democracy on his borders.”
Yet I was struck, I say, by her book’s
all-American faith that democracy will
prevail. She gives a hollow laugh as she
picks up a fry.
“It’s better than every other idea, as
they say. In the same way that the best
solution to problematic speech is more
speech, the best solution to anti-
democratic forces is more democracy.”
Maddow is in the “more speech” busi-
ness at a time when her audience con-
siders Trump’s speeches problematic,
and early in his administration she
resolved that she would report what heLunch with the FT achel MaddowR
‘I’m not trying to end the
Trump presidency’
MARCH 21 2020 Section:Weekend Time: 3/202019/ - 16:44 User:andrew.higton Page Name:WKD3, Part,Page,Edition:WKD, 3, 1