CNN’s Jake Tapper Is the Realest Man in “Fake News”

With the leader of the Free World now waging a self-styled war with the media, no journalist on TV has become more indignant, more combative, and suddenly more essential than Jake Tapper. The CNN anchor's ramrod brand of honest outrage has made him a bona fide star and prompted an unlikely question: How, in an age of lies, does a guy make righteous truth-telling so damn entertaining?
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Jake Tapper is on a diet, so he orders the poulet rouge 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 realistic: “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 energetic 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 off-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 to the made-up list of terrorist events that CNN supposedly didn't cover.

During Tapper’s epic tussle with Kellyanne Conway, CNN’s president ordered cameras not to cut.

Were you one of the 1.22 million people who watched it? If not, I highly recommend 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 interrogations, 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 administration was starting to craft its own reality. No less than CNN president Jeff Zucker himself 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 interview 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 a song 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.


Tapper thinks Trump could be a surprisingly effective president, “but he keeps undermining himself.”

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 creating 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 caterpillars, and his frontalis, the muscle of the forehead, rises and lowers at the same time, all of which forces his glabella to form a very satisfying omega sign.

While so many anchors feel obliged to maintain their Ron Burgundy anchor-y-ness, Tapper allows an incredulousness, and maybe even a smidge of disgust, to sneak on through. In those moments, when he augments the standard newsman persona to include his own come-off-it realness, he has a way of embodying all of us. This may be his biggest public service.

“Jake is rising to the moment,” says Jim Rutenberg, media columnist for The New York Times. “Just by doing very basic fact-checking and calling things out bluntly, it kind of comes as this giant cathartic act for the audience, because they're all so anxious and they want to see a lie called a lie so badly. So they're just desperate for fact-checking, even though it's the most basic thing we do.” But also, it's his style. “He doesn't let anyone off the hook.”

It can be risky, this asking question after question, repeating himself as often as is necessary. “Any other television interviewer would let it go,” Rutenberg says. “You have to admit that that's a dangerous proposition on TV. You might lose your viewers. No one's done it quite to that degree.”

It's also the kind of thing that, if not tempered, could veer into pompousness. “I want to dislike him,” Politico's media columnist, Jack Shafer, says, “if only because of the way he puffs himself up to anchorman size, sort of like Jerry Dunphy,” the L.A. newscaster who partly inspired *The Mary Tyler Moore Show'*s vain and fatuous Ted Baxter. “But having puffed himself up, the boy delivers. He's probably the best interviewer TV has these days, as unshakable as that diamondback that chases you in your dreams. His reporting seems to come from the heart. He's probably the only genuine romantic in TV news.”

As much as he seems born for this, as much as any anchor seems like he or she has been gunning for the chair from the cradle, Tapper backed into this life. He grew up in Philly, the son of a nurse and a pediatrician, in a house where the conversations often “focused on injustice,” Tapper says—crooked politicians, children in poverty. He went to Dartmouth, then a semester of film school, then worked for a congresswoman. He didn't seem to have a plan. He thought for a while that he might go into cartooning. He wrote a novel, but it was never published. In 1998, for Washington's alt-weekly City Paper, Tapper wrote about a date he'd recently been on with a woman who was just then beginning to appear in the news named Monica Lewinsky. (He does not regret the story, but he does regret using the words “chubby” and “zaftig.”) He freelanced for a number of magazines, including this one, and worked at Salon for several years, notably covering the Bush-Gore election. After stints at CNN and VH1, he turned up at ABC News and started then to become the Jake Tapper who is now a household name. Diane Sawyer, who was co-anchor of Good Morning America at the time, was instantly impressed. “You could send him an e-mail and within 15 seconds get the entire history, back to the War of the Roses and three references to Saint Augustine and the movie and the remake of the movie and how he felt about the casting of each. It's all in his brain,” Sawyer says. “It's not that he learns the facts and that he studies. It's that he wakes up in the morning so curious, and I think you can tell.”

While serving as White House correspondent at ABC News, Tapper published The Outpost, an excellent account of one of the fiercest battles in America's war in Afghanistan. In 2013, after CNN hired Jeff Zucker to run the network, he made Tapper his first hire. Tapper was everything he was looking for, Zucker told me: “Smart, witty, and holds everybody's feet to the fire.” His indignance isn't inborn. No, he insists, “I'm quite calm when all is well.” His wife, Jennifer, says Tapper's psyche isn't that complicated: He's “an honest and truthful man” who gets mad when people aren't being forthright.

One of his best friends, the novelist Matthew Klam, told me that a few years ago, their families rented a condo in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. After their first day there, an aggressive group of vacationers whom they'd set up near on the beach said, “Tomorrow, why don't you find another place?” It was unpleasant and silly to claim turf like that, and Klam stewed over it a bit.

The next day they did set up somewhere else—but Tapper, holding his small baby, went right back to where they'd been, found that obnoxious group of people, and told them with the same sureness and clarity he used to eviscerate Kellyanne Conway 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 journalism, 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 delegitimizing Tapper fall into the modern and spectral 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, 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 president 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 accusations. And for what it's worth, Tapper says, Trump shouldn't want that stuff to be the story, either. “I think if he stopped the nonsense, he has the potential to be a very effective president,” Tapper says. “The Republican officeholders in Washington are terrified of him. He is, by nature, a deal-maker, and not particularly ideological. He could be a very effective president, but he keeps undermining himself with 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 politicians, 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 earlier. 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 working 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.

This story originally appeared in the May 2017 issue with the title “The Realest Face In “Fake News””