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Covering politics for the New York Times isn’t a job for the faint of heart, even at the best of times. But as a Times journalist focused on the intricacies of congressional power, Annie Karni is in the especially unenviable position of having to follow the near-daily scandals and outrages surrounding the House’s Republican leadership during the second Trump administration.
Luckily for us, she’s channelled all of that madness into a new book. This week, Karni and fellow Times congressional correspondent Luke Broadwater release Mad House: How Donald Trump, MAGA Mean Girls, a Former Used Car Salesman, a Florida Nepo Baby, and a Man with Rats in His Walls Broke Congress, their account of the “epic dysfunction” on the Hill—and it’s every bit as lively and cinematic (and more-than-occasionally dispiriting) as its punch-packing title would suggest.
Vogue recently spoke to Karni about the difference between interviewing politicians for a news story versus a book, the extremist shift of Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina, Karni’s advice for other political journalists reporting on a MAGA-run Congress, and how Nancy Pelosi’s indefatigable sense of style has evolved post-hip replacement.
Vogue: The research process for this book must have been intense. How did you begin to organize it?
Annie Karni: We had a method that really worked well, which was that every time there was a major news event on the Hill, like Kevin McCarthy’s 15 attempts to get elected speaker of the House, or almost defaulting on our debt, or deciding whether to send money to Ukraine, or even less serious things, like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert in a public spat…anything that stood out to us as a moment, we would kind of wait six or eight weeks or so until the moment passed, then circle back and try and set up interviews with everyone who had been involved with that moment or that decision, and have them retell everything that happened. Everything is covered minute-by-minute in real time, and then everyone just moves on to the next thing, but if you circle back, there’s so many crazy stories and layers of insanity that are still untold. We tried to recreate these scenes in the White House and in Congress, and there was so much more detail that hadn’t been reported yet every time.
Also, people will talk to you more extensively and kind of more openly if they know it’s for a book. When it’s 2023 and you tell someone whose job is very in-the-moment that the book isn’t coming out until March of 2025, that literally sounds like “never,” right? They speak more candidly and can share more, and you sort of interview them in a different way. You’re not trying to get a new story out that day. I’m usually writing daily stories off the news, and it was so much fun to do these more in-depth interviews and have people tell me stuff in a different, less guarded way.
Your opening reference to politicians seeing Congress as “a bunch of clowns” is so vivid. When do you think that shift in the American imagination happened?
Everyone’s hated Congress, specifically, for a long time; Congress as an institution has had an abysmal approval rating forever. But our book is really about the MAGA House Republicans who actually broke the institution for good, which was the 118th Congress. This was a new level of dysfunction, where they ground the House floor to a halt. They couldn’t pass any bills. Most of what they did was fight with each other—not even fight with Democrats, but Republican-on-Republican fighting. Struggling to do the bare minimum of keeping the lights on is basically all they did last Congress. It didn’t happen out of nowhere, but I think it was really with the last Congress that something different took place.
You devote a lot of time to Nancy Mace, who has made news lately for her anti-trans bigotry. What’s something you feel more people should understand about her?
What I found most interesting about Nancy is how much she says the quiet part out loud. I started spending time with her a few years ago, when she was still seen as a unicorn—this kind of moderate-on-social-issues Republican who had defeated a Trump-backed primary challenger, who had criticized Donald Trump after January 6, and who was somehow succeeding in this tribal party. Everyone was interested in her, and she’s very attractive, so she got on TV a lot. But she got redistricted, so her district became more red, and she’s openly very ambitious. She wants to move up, she wants to be the governor, she wants to be a senator, and she thought she had a chance to be on Trump’s ticket. She wants to be the first female president, and she realized there’s no way to rise as a Republican right now and be anti-Trump.
This is a conclusion that most people in the party have come to, but what was interesting about Nancy Mace was that she literally said that out loud. She was like, “I can’t move up and be anti-Trump. I have some really tough decisions to make.” That’s a direct quote from the book. And just to hear someone actually say that was kind of interesting. If you want to rise in this political moment as a Republican, there’s only one decision to make, which is to go all-in with Trump, which is exactly what she’s done. She’s become a real extremist. I actually wrote a profile of her for the New York Times a few years ago, about how she’s a moderate trying to carve out a space for herself. People are mad at me that I ever fell for it, but I didn’t, I don’t think. I think she really just changed completely in the hopes of staying powerful.
[Rep.] Elise Stefanik kind of did the same thing, but she doesn’t like talking about it, whereas we were talking to Nancy Mace constantly mid-transition. And some of these Republicans take extreme MAGA views further than Trump does. Trump gave an interview where he kind of agreed that the trans stuff gets too much attention and he didn’t really want to talk about bathroom bans, but Nancy Mace is making an entire political career out of targeting the sole transgender member of Congress, Sarah McBride. Trump is not doing that; she is doing that. Some of these members really make MAGA their own, and even take it further in some cases.
How do you think political reporters need to adapt in order to accurately report on a MAGA-controlled Congress during the second Trump administration?
One dirty little secret of this world is that a lot of these people who claim to hate the “lamestream media” and all that actually crave the credibility that comes with being covered by the New York Times or CNN or any mainstream publication. They love attention from anybody, so they’re actually quite a chatty bunch, and they will talk to you and tell you what’s going on and participate in interviews. Someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene, for instance, really has shifted and learned to play the inside game more so that she’s not actually that hard to report on, because she’ll tell you what’s going on in meetings. When there’s a lot of factions who hate each other, that creates great room for reporting, because they want to tell their side of the story. They think that if they don’t talk to you, the other side will. Everyone has an angle that they want to be the angle of your story. The challenge as a reporter is just to make sure you’re talking to everyone, so you know you’re not getting spun.
I thought of your book when I saw Nancy Pelosi wearing Chloé sneakers recently. Do you think style is a part of her political strategy?
Pelosi has always worn stilettos. Like, I think she has Barbie feet, because you’ve never seen her in flats. She did a seven-hour filibuster once in the House in four-inch heels. The heels are not a side point—they are part of how she wields her power. She’s always impeccably dressed, clicking around, never being seen without these heels. Then she falls on the stairs and has a hip-replacement, and we’re all wondering: Oh my God, when she comes back to Congress, what shoes is she going be wearing? Nobody could picture Pelosi without her heels, and she came back in a Merrill clog, which was sort of shocking to see. She’s still in flats, but now she’s shifted to wearing Chloé sneakers.
Her husband, Paul Pelosi, is her personal shopper. He picks out all of her clothes. He picks out her Armani suits and has Armani on speed-dial, so I’m sure that Paul Pelosi bought her the Chloé sneakers. There are a lot of aging lawmakers in Congress, and a lot of them are very vain; for example, Mitch McConnell—who we’ve seen fall and freeze after concussions—was told by his doctors that he needed to have a cane years ago, and he refused, because they all know about what projecting power looks like, and a cane looks weak to him. I actually thought it was really interesting that Pelosi, unlike a lot of these aging male lawmakers who have refused doctor’s orders, seems to be sort of taking the fall in stride. She’s used a walker on the House floor, she’s wearing the Merrill clogs and the Chloé sneakers, and she’s not back in her heels yet, but she’s still Pelosi-ing along. I think it speaks volumes.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
