FRESH HELL Tina Brown's Diary

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Towering Inferno

Jan 13, 2025 | tinabrown.substack.com | Tina Brown

There are few politicians who would want to be in Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass’s blazing saddle right now. When the raging flames begin to cool, the fiery embers of political finger pointing that are already falling on her luckless head will entirely take over from the mesmerizing human stories that have filled our screens for the past week. Usually I find the parade of stricken people interviewed during climate calamities blur after a while. Not this time.
Wrecking Balls

Jan 7, 2025 | tinabrown.substack.com | Tina Brown

As 2025 begins, there is already so much drama that I have removed my brain to the dreamy equivalent of a room next door. There is something calming about knowing that partisan media hysteria is now dead in the ratings water.
After flying private a few times with gilded friends, I’m convinced it is the ultimate corrupting force.

Dec 3, 2024 | tinabrown.substack.com | Tina Brown

I have sometimes pondered the pivotal moment when money changes people forever. The answer is without doubt the acquisition of the private plane—it’s the moment when you leave the human race forever. And having just flown back on JetBlue Mosaic from the Dominican Republic sitting next to an enormous Russian chomping plantain chips, I attest wholeheartedly that it’s a loss of connection not to be regretted.
As we enter a period of unmitigated crassness in public life, I find myself guiltily dreaming of frivolity and luxury.

Nov 25, 2024 | tinabrown.substack.com | Tina Brown

As a Brit, I have no particular fondness for Thanksgiving, which has always felt to me like it steals the thunder of Christmas. Turkey with all the trimmings twice in four weeks? Get me outta here. Plus, I have never been a fan of that frenzied interregnum when every professional decision is deferred till “after the holidays” and one lives out the end of the year in the hectic oxymoron of a packed limbo.
Trump’s F-you Flex

Nov 18, 2024 | tinabrown.substack.com | Tina Brown

The great thing about being in London the week of Trump’s cabinet announcements was I missed the surround sound of exploding liberal heads that gives me PTSD from the first Trump era. The announcements came through as discrete news bombs that gave me five seconds of agita before subsiding into the new passivity of an anesthetized shrug.
Military Matters and Royal Feuds

Nov 12, 2024 | tinabrown.substack.com | Tina Brown

Fled to London Saturday night for some post-election air only to realize I had woken up on Remembrance Sunday. I arrive at the BBC for a panel on Laura Kuenssberg’s morning politics show, alongside Lord Andrew Roberts, the historian, and Lord Peter Mandelson, the former Blair government luminary. In the green room, a poppy is pinned on my lapel in memory of the more than one million UK soldiers killed since the onset of WWI.
Four More Years

Nov 6, 2024 | tinabrown.substack.com | Tina Brown

So Bret Easton Ellis was right after all (see yesterday’s Fresh Hell). America went all in for post-Empire at the polls and embraced bigger than before, the full-on Charlie Sheen of Trump’s disinhibited diatribes. There was no Proud Boy violence or battalion of lawyers bused in to litigate contested results. The so-called rigged system that Trump has spent four years spewing about worked like a charm in his favor and made him the 47th president of the United States.
Countdown Crazy

Nov 5, 2024 | tinabrown.substack.com | Tina Brown

It’s here at last. The restless terror of election day, when there’s nothing but dead air filled by pundits blathering and text threads from hair-on-fire friends sending anecdotal nuggets of hope. As the votes tally, I shall be watching at home with my two kids, a snoring bulldog, and a handy vial of Klonopin in case everything goes south. My decision to bail on media invites and somber watch gatherings is informed by superstition as much as by preference.
Road Rage at MSG

Oct 29, 2024 | tinabrown.substack.com | Tina Brown

I had no intention of watching Trump’s Madison Square Garden 1939 Bund rally. But I was sucked in halfway through in spite of myself and found it genuinely terrifying.
Frenzy Barometer

Oct 14, 2024 | tinabrown.substack.com | Tina Brown

I am now so nerve-wracked by the tightening of the race in swing states that even my nocturnal calming mechanism of watching videos of my daughter’s snoring English bulldog does nothing to allay my mounting panic. It seems so long ago that we thought Biden’s win in 2020 would return America to some form of respect for truth in public life. But the reverse has happened. In the last four years, Trump has taught his party and his followers not just how to lie, but how to lie with abandon.