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On the cover of @nymag: the story of The Trump campaign, based on my interviews with more than 30 sources from the 2020 & 2016 campaigns, Republicans in politics & government at all levels, & people serving at the highest ranks of the Trump administration. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/donald-trump-reelection-campaign-2020.html
Jared vs. The World; Kellyanne vs. Brad Parscale; Trump vs. himself; the Campaign vs. reality. The portrait of the operation that emerged was so dysfunctional that I felt, at times, like I needed to hire a family therapist to moderate my interviews. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/donald-trump-reelection-campaign-2020.html
I also report new details about the political career of Trump’s new campaign manager Bill Stepien, and about the dynamics between Stepien, Kushner, and Chris Christie — whom they both have valid reasons to hate. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/donald-trump-reelection-campaign-2020.html
This campaign isn’t a normal one, since the candidates are mostly housebound, but I found a campaign trail anyway, and following it revealed what the Trump campaign’s supposedly amazing ground game actually looks like up close. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/donald-trump-reelection-campaign-2020.html
And about my reporting on the Trump campaign volunteer events that either did not exist or did not take place because there were no volunteers: the first one I went to was a two hour drive from Washington — more than four hours in the car total — and when I got there and nobody/1
showed up, I was annoyed! I had wanted to see a volunteer training session! That was the whole idea! No volunteers = no training session to see. I was amused by this, sure, but I wasn’t happy about it. Because I wasn’t setting out to prove the ground game hype might be fiction/2
When I got to the next event, the next night, and there were no volunteers there, either, I wasn’t annoyed exactly. It was very interesting to me, at that point, that this was starting to become a pattern. But I would’ve been happy to have been able to witness the training sesh/3
The third Trump event was 4 hours from Washington — more than 8 hours driving in total. I point this out to emphasize the lengths, literally, I was going to in order to try to see the campaign in action. But there was no action to see. No event existed. That became the story/4
As I was doing this reporting, I kept thinking, Who the fuck has the time to do this kind of legwork? Very few reporters & very few publications have the time & resources to do the time consuming/expensive work of following your gut to check out something that might be nothing/5
To double check it, triple check it. To spend hours & hours that you’re not sure will amount to much. This is a privilege, but it shouldn’t be. I’m grateful to work for @NYMag, a place that values & supports the kind of journalism that is getting harder & harder to produce.
Here I am sitting in my rental car waiting for Trump campaign volunteers to show up to a scheduled campaign event in Pennsylvania that it would later turn out did not exist in the first place due to rampant incompetence within the Trump campaign 
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