Hard To Kill

Why MAGA's Hit Job On Platner Failed

I know a hit job when I read one. I should. I used to build them.

There was a version of me, years back, who could take a candidate’s life, lay it out on a light table, and find the one frame that ruined them. You don’t need the truth. You need a true-enough fragment, a sympathetic reporter, and a Democratic Party so terrified of its own shadow that it does the rest of the work for you. That was the whole game. We didn’t beat Democrats. We handed them a mirror and a magnifying glass and let them disqualify themselves over a flaw, a mistake, a misstep, a college newspaper article, a tweet.

So when the New York Times dropped its long, carefully sorrowful piece on Graham Platner last week, I read it the way a retired safecracker watches a heist movie.

And here’s the thing. The hit fell short. I knew of the woman at its center, and she was

always one of the tribe. She was a Republican operative, a DC MAGA apparatchik who ran Ladies for Brett Kavanaugh. That was always going to sully the attack, and given she was once part of Ali Alexander’s circle of CPAC freaks, I wondered how credulous the Times would be.