Robert Draper joins The New York Times Magazine

Robert Draper

We’re thrilled to announce that Robert Draper, who has been a contributing writer at the magazine since 2009, will be coming on board as a staff writer, working for both the Washington bureau and the magazine. He will be based in Washington, covering politics and political figures, especially Republican officials.

Robert, a Texas native, is a deeply sourced reporter with a long and impressive track record covering politics in books and as a magazine journalist. Over the past 15 years he’s published a sequence of essential books about American politics, starting with “Dead Certain,” a narrative account of the George W. Bush administration. In 2012, he wrote “Do Not Ask What Good We Do,” about the House of Representatives in the wake of the 2010 Tea Party midterms; after that, he published “To Start a War,” a fascinating account of the post-9/11 decision-making that led to the U.S. invasion of Iraq; and this year his deeply reported book, “Weapons of Mass Delusion,” a deeply reported inside look at House Republicans and the rise of a far-right fringe captivated by conspiracy theories.

Robert’s work for the magazine over the years has demonstrated the same expertise, assurance, analytical chops, masterful storytelling, skill at reaching and building trust with often hostile sources and a nose for good dirt. In 2016 he wrote an excellent campaign dispatch from inside the Trump operation, and in 2018 his profile of Nancy Pelosi gave readers an unusually vivid sense of her calculations as she prepared for her second stint as House Speaker. In 2020 his bombshell investigative scoop on White House influence into a 2019 National Intelligence Estimate revealed the corrosive effects of Trump’s battles with U.S. intel agencies.

Robert’s work has been defined partly by an especially sharp eye for the way in which the right side of American politics has evolved over the past 15 years. His recent work for us exemplifies this. His 2021 profile of Liz Cheney gave readers an early look at the tensions building within the Republican caucus following the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. This February, he published a piece on Michael Flynn that showed how the MAGA movement had “reconstituted itself as a kind of shape-shifting but increasingly robust parallel political universe.” A couple months later he was back with a juicy profile of Fiona Hill and other former Trump advisers and officials as they reexamined the pressure campaign on Ukraine in light of Jan. 6 and the Russian invasion. In August his incisive story about the Arizona Republican Party captured the fanatical bent that would lead many far-right G.O.P. candidates to struggle in this year’s midterms. His October cover story profiling Marjorie Taylor Greene, an excerpt from his latest book with significant original reporting, was based on numerous interviews with the Georgia congresswoman, making Robert the sole journalist she’s sat down with for extensive on-the-record interviews.

As he was on this recent run at the magazine, Robert began working closely with Elisabeth in Washington this summer, with A1 stories on the alumni of the Watergate hearings and on Cassidy Hutchinson, the aide to Trump’s chief of staff whose Jan. 6 Committee testimony broke inside news about interactions between the White House and Secret Service on that day.

Again and again, Robert has combined great sourcing, rigorous, independent-minded reporting, deep expertise, and a flair for narrative storytelling in informative stories that illuminate an increasingly complicated political world. In his new role, he will report to Elisabeth in Washington and continue to work on profiles and long-form narratives with Deputy Editor of Politics and Investigations Jessica Lustig at the magazine.

Please join us in welcoming him aboard. His first day will be January 9.