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Susan B. Glasser ’90 is a politics writer for The New Yorker, where she writes a weekly column, “Letter from Trump’s Washington.” Her books include “Kremlin Rising,” “The Divider,” and “The Man Who Ran Washington,” and she is working on a fourth. She is currently a fellow at Harvard’s Institute of Politics.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
FM: Was there a moment when you realized you wanted to follow in your parents’ footsteps?
Glasser’s parents, Lynn and Stephen A. Glasser, co-founded the newspaper Legal Times. Her father was a college journalist before becoming a publisher.
SBG: I would say it was more doing, maybe, what my dad didn’t really get a chance to do.
The summer after my first year at Harvard, I became an intern at Roll Call, a newspaper on Capitol Hill, and that was just a fantastic experience. The paper had actually been bought by Jim Glassman, who was the managing editor of The Crimson in the class of 1969 — a long time ago. I had never met him before, and he had this brilliant idea basically to take this community newspaper and turn it into a real journalism outlet, breaking news.
He had this idea: the people on Capitol Hill are an incredible audience and community, and if you could just serve them with targeted news — which seems almost self-evident today.
I was just a teenager, but I got to see this really exciting cutting-edge experiment.
FM: It seems like the model you mentioned is very similar to how POLITICO operates today, and I know you were editor in 2016. When did you join POLITICO, and what was that like?
SBG: I think that early period with Roll Call was extremely formative for me, but also I think it kind of was a prescient foreshadowing of what would happen to Washington journalism later. And so I then went to work at The Washington Post and did a lot of things. And then I was the editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy magazine, which also was a sort of digital-era effort to look at a particular niche of journalism. And then I had the chance in the summer of 2013 to go to POLITICO and to start a magazine. And that was sort of irresistible.
I remember talking with the founders of POLITICO — John Harris and Jim VandeHei and Robert Allbritton, who was the funder, the backer of it — and saying to them, well, yes, you should have the best minds in the country — they’re obsessed with politics, they would love to contribute. And they were like, “really?” And I was like, “Yeah, we just need to build them the platform for it.”
FM: ATo backtrack a bit, at Harvard, you concentrated in Social Studies, and I saw you won a Hoopes Prize for your thesis you did on the Webster v. Reproductive Health Services case. How did you become interested in that case and that subject?
SBG: I loved my thesis project. It was suggested, I can’t even remember by whom, but it was specifically about the role of amicus briefs in the Supreme Court and this idea of outside expertise, and to what extent the Supreme Court takes social science into account and not just varying interpretation of the law — and also historians. So there were two different briefs that I thought were very interesting that were filed. That was one of the major abortion cases of the 1980s, and, at the time, people were worried that Roe v. Wade would be overturned — which, as you know, it was not overturned in the 1980s, but it was overturned recently. So it was kind of a foreshadowing. And so there was one amicus brief that was filed by a group of American historians looking at the context in which abortion had been practiced in the U.S. and was essentially, effectively legal in colonial America, versus a group of law professors making a more traditional argument, just about the precedent should stand here.
FM: And you mentioned, obviously, the foreshadowing of the eventual reversal of Roe v. Wade. Was there anything while doing that project — with Webster upholding Missouri’s restrictions on abortion — that you kind of saw the beginning of what was to come with Dobbs?
SBG: In the course of writing this thesis, I definitely came to understand that there was a lot of controversy around the legal basis on which Roe v. Wade had been decided. Even people like Ruth Bader Ginsburg had not been convinced that that was right.
She wanted abortion to be legal, but I think she didn't necessarily want it to be decided on the legal basis that it was. So I understood that there were some legal concerns about the constitutional basis on which the Roe v. Wade foundation was built, even from liberal scholars who supported the outcome of legalized abortion.
FM: I saw that after your time as managing editor for The Crimson, you wrote a couple pieces about “women’s issues” at Harvard. How do you see women’s issues intersecting with your coverage of national politics now?
SBG: Obviously, it’s something that I’ve always cared very much about, both as an individual, and also just in a broader frame. We just did an appearance the other day in Dallas, actually at the Dallas Bar Foundation.
They asked me at the end about the 2028 election. Would a woman run? And was gender the reason that both Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris didn't win?
But I was just like, yes. We can’t look away from a very simple fact, which is: if we’ve had 250 years worth of presidents and zero women, then you can say that being a woman is, in fact, a damn hard obstacle to being the president.
I’m amazed at our singular inability to even name the problem. And in my experience, if you can’t name a problem and understand in pretty unsparing terms what it is, then you’re definitely not going to be able to fix it.
FM: Definitely. And on that subject, what has been your experience as a woman in journalism, especially early on in your career?
SBG: The truth is we have issues with women in leadership in this country, and that applies to women in almost any kind of leadership role.
I think I was the second standalone female managing editor of The Crimson in its whole history. And I found that in the workplace too, like incredible opportunities, but at the same time, statements that I feel like would make today’s undergraduates’ heads explode to realize that this happened.
People would say things like, “Well, why do you and your husband both need to have a full salary as foreign correspondents for The Washington Post?”, for example. That's a real statement. Or, like, “you couldn’t possibly compete with him, so what does it matter?” A, I wasn’t interested in competing with him. B, I actually earned more money than he did because I had been hired at The Washington Post coming from being the editor ultimately at Roll Call.
To come to this huge newsroom that had very ingrained, very sexist ideas — a huge problem with race as well, I should say — I was like walking back into a time machine, in some ways, to the 1970s. It was like you could be sort of unmarried, and somehow marry your job, or women would be kind of “mommy tracked.”
FM: On that point again, this August, Harvard closed and restructured its space of the Women’s Center, following Trump’s demand for the University to dismantle DEI offices. What’s at risk when resources like that are lost?
SBG: Again, I feel like it’s important to just be able to look the moment in the eye. We’re in this age of staring at the eclipse without the glasses on. But I think it’s important, and this is an amazing example where I feel like we’ve gotten sucked into normalizing this frame in which Trump’s demonization and those around him’s demonization of the very concept of “DEI” — it’s like this all-purpose epithet now in American culture. And essentially what it’s done is to call into question the credibility and the credentials of every single female executive and every single African American executive in the country. It is an outrage. I actually think it’s one of the most insidious things that has happened.
FM: Something I’m curious about with the news cycle with the Trump administration — it is kind of never-ending, and it seems like reporters often are playing catch-up, barely touching on one egregious thing before moving on to the next. How have you tried to counteract that quick cycle through your column for The New Yorker and your other projects?
SBG: That was the original impetus, in many ways, behind my weekly New Yorker column, a “Letter from Trump’s Washington,” which started back in the spring of 2018. That was because we felt back then — and it’s even more the case now — that you couldn’t remember by Thursday or Friday all the crazy things that had happened on a Monday or Tuesday.
Forcing people out of the public common is part of the goal here when extremists across the political spectrum commandeer our politics. That’s what’s happened. Regular people want to live their lives, I get that, so hopefully I’m writing for them in an act of both bearing witness — but also because it does matter, even if it’s awful to think about sometimes.
FM: Do you think that there are ways the broader media ecosystem needs to adapt to Trump’s strategy with this onslaught of information?
SBG: He is many things, but I think it is fair to say that the thing he’s very best at is a certain kind of media genius, or media manipulation genius, in part because he lives suffused in media.
He is watching hours and hours upon hours of television and then reacting to it in real time while having a floating circus of courtiers and rent seekers and favor seekers, floating in and out of his office. It’s like no other presidency you’ve ever conceived of. Someone we know well who served in Trump’s first term and observed him up close said to me — and I always thought this was really apt — that he was like the character of Mike Teevee in “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.” He’s the little American kid, wearing the cowboy outfit, who wants to live inside the television.
Living inside the TV and making that his reality — and therefore our reality — is what Trump has done. And in that context, you know, the media has really struggled. For example, in Trump’s second term, compared with his first term, there’s a lot less, actually, of the fact-checking than that used to be done and also a lot more of Trump. And so that combo is really, I think, unfortunate.
FM: Your previous column you also did was on Biden’s Washington. What was that change like from one of the least media accessible presidents to one of the most?
SBG: Trump, he sucked all of us, in a way, right into this incredibly narcissistic vision of the United States as almost a one-man show.
Whereas Biden is almost the polar opposite. Both the Biden and Obama administrations were very technocratic administrations. I compare it to the difference between Godzilla versus the technocrats, and it means that they were very process-oriented. Now the critique would also be that they were so process-oriented that decisions were slow, or that it was more bureaucratic. That was probably especially true later on in Biden’s term when cabinet officials would tell us that they saw the President less and less — it’s unclear what role he was playing.
There’s an asymmetry between the nature of the news challenge and the potential threat to democracy. You’re covering Biden, but Trump remains a huge story.
FM: You’ve written at length about Russia as the Moscow co-bureau chief for The Washington Post, and also in your book “Kremlin Rising.” Do you see parallels between Vladimir Putin’s rise to power in Russia and what’s happening today in America?
SBG: It was not a coincidence, as far as I’m concerned, that the people who we knew in Washington who had spent time overseas either as journalists or diplomats covering autocracies, covering what happens when democracies are compromised — they were the ones very early on to sound the alarm about what was happening in the United States.
We saw this playbook being run because we happen to have been posted to Moscow in the first few years of Putin’s presidency. And we saw a very systematic rollback of these very flawed, very fragile institutions of democracy there. The independent media, that’s the first thing that Putin went after.
We’ve seen a democracy die in a very, very short period of time. It’s not an accident that all would-be autocrats are going after independent levers of power in society, whether they’re major law firms in the United States or they’re major academic institutions like Harvard.
FM: The book that you wrote about Russia and the book project now is co-written with your husband. How did you guys meet?
SBG: Well, we like to say we’re the only good thing that came out of the whole Monica Lewinsky scandal in Washington.
I went from Roll Call, which we talked about, and I was the editor there, and then I went to work at The Washington Post as the deputy national editor for investigations, one week before the news broke of the star investigation of Bill Clinton for lying under oath about his relationship with this former White House intern. And Peter was the junior White House reporter, which meant he had been stuck with the unpleasant assignment of covering all the unseemly court cases involving Bill Clinton.
Of course, this turned into the biggest investigation, and Peter and I were kind of the only two young people on the national staff of The Washington Post at this time, and it also turned out that we lived like 400 yards away from each other on the same block in Washington.
FM: What was your most challenging story?
SBG: Peter and I were in Moscow on 9/11, and we were still basically new foreign correspondents.
Basically, all the correspondents in Moscow got sent to the war in Afghanistan because if you look at a map — which we didn’t do for about 24 hours — it’s right there. And I was from suburban Montclair, New Jersey. I literally never heard a gun fired until the Battle of Tora Bora, which I actually did cover for The Washington Post.
It was frankly terrifying. But the hardest things are also the most formative things.
We ended up going in under the protection of this warlord because this Italian correspondent, and I think two fixers had been killed on that same road going in from Peshawar, Pakistan to Afghanistan just a few days earlier. And then we got there, and as soon as we got into the hotel in Jalalabad where all the foreign journalists were, the anti-Taliban warlords came to the lobby literally as we arrived, and they were like, “And now we will begin the war in Tora Bora to take Osama bin Laden out.” And that was basically like a three-hour drive across no-road landscape to get from the city of Jalalabad into the White Mountains where bin Laden was hiding out. So that was the day I got there. And it was terrifying.
FM: Your career obviously revolves around the media. What media do you consume for fun?
SBG: This is going back to college or even high school — I always was a junkie of food magazines. I used to read, I remember, my mother’s copy of Gourmet magazine. My husband thought it was very strange when we first met, and I would read old cookbooks while eating a bowl of cereal. So I still find that to be kind of good escapism.
FM: Do you have a favorite recipe from those cookbooks that you make?
SBG: We moved into this new house that is like half a mile away at most from our old house, on inauguration day 2017 — Trump’s inauguration day — and my son discovered this recipe for Ina Garten’s perfect roast chicken. And trust me on this, you will never have to make another roast chicken. Google it. I make a few tweaks, but seriously, it is the best roast chicken recipe, which means you can always have somebody over for dinner anytime, and it requires no effort. There’s no basting. There’s nothing. It is perfect.
FM: Going back to your work with The New Yorker, your columns are structured as letters from D.C. And throughout the last several decades, the American public has become increasingly suspicious of legacy media. How do you navigate cultivating trust as a Washington journalist?
SBG: The numbers for all institutions in our society — I mean, the last 20 years are a terrible story of Americans losing trust almost across the board. In particular, the media has bottomed out. And some of that requires our own self-examination, and some of it is, of course, a conscious political strategy.
The truth is that politicians across the political spectrum have a pretty strong vested interest in diminishing and downgrading the credibility, independence, and trust of the media because it undercuts our ability to hold them to account. And I think, to me, that’s the tragedy of this moment as well — that the media’s credibility should have eroded at a moment when that function of accountability in our society is more important than ever.
Whatever we can do to rebuild our trust with audiences, I think, is important. Now, The New Yorker is lucky because it has paid subscribers — people who are opting in to this publication.
But, the across-the-board numbers, especially for mass media news outlets, are really, really worrisome.
FM: My last question: obviously, it’s an incredibly turbulent time in journalism, in politics, in every aspect of life. What’s something that makes you hopeful?
SBG: There is so much just resilience and brilliance and energy. I think maybe subconsciously that’s why I wanted to come and be on a wonderful college campus like Harvard again. That, to me, is almost the definition of optimism.
—Magazine writer Rachael A. Dziaba can be reached at rachael.dziaba@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @rachaeldziaba.
