Josh Dawsey: The Washington Post's scoop machine on covering the White House and his investigative reporting

The Trump presidency sparked a renaissance in American political journalism. Amid a relentless news cycle that has barely let up since Trump’s inauguration in 2017, The Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey was — and remains — at the vanguard of the archly competitive White House beat.

Dawsey’s nose for a story, his monster Rolodex of key DC figures and his adeptness at crafting breaking news into a crisp, dishy, detail-packed narrative helped propel him into the top echelon of White House reporters. He has now won two Pulitzer prizes, one as part of the team that covered the January 6 insurrection and another as part of a team who developed a compelling reporting package on the impact of AR-15s on mass shootings.??

Dawsey, who is currently working on a book about the 2024 election race, grew up on a farm in South Carolina and moved to New York two weeks after graduating college to take a job at Fortune magazine. His role at Fortune was “the lowest rank on the totem pole,” he says. “But being from a farm, it was quite fun, actually.” Not long after, in early 2012, he joined The Wall Street Journal.?

Who: Josh Dawsey?

Resume: Political Investigations and Enterprise Reporter, The Washington Post; White House Reporter, Politico; News reporter, The Wall Street Journal; Bachelor's degree, University of South Carolina.

Here in his own words – lightly edited for space and clarity – Dawsey takes us through his career journey and his rise to the top of the tree at one of the nation's top media publications.

My first job at The Journal actually was on the business desk and it was extraordinarily overwhelming. I knew very little about any of it. Much of my job was administrative but when Superstorm Sandy happened in 2012, they needed all hands on deck to cover the hurricane locally. I was sent to the local desk for a few weeks and the editors on the business desk, I think, realized I was good at something. It just wasn't maybe the business beat I had. So I took a job on the metro desk of The Journal as a general assignment reporter, which meant I did a little bit of everything.

My first day on the metro desk as a reporter was actually horrific: the Newtown school shooting in Sandy Hook. That was the first story I covered on the job. A few months later, they sent me for two weeks to the Boston Marathon bombing.?

In 2014, the paper said they need extra reporting help in New Jersey. Chris Christie was running for president. “Bridge Gate” had become a huge story and we had never really dedicated full time reporters in Jersey, but he made it a compelling story. I had a lot of colleagues who were helpful and introduced me to people, but I really just spent a lot of time there, meeting folks who work for Christie, worked around Christie, or used to work for Christie. I became enmeshed in that world for a while.?

I think New York City Hall is maybe the best beat in journalism. I started there in 2015 and did it for about two years. I think it’s fair to say I was not (then mayor) Bill de Blasio’s favorite person. You're writing about a whole panoply of urban issues: ambitious politicians, crime, homelessness, housing, the wealthiest and the poorest folks and sort of how they all blend together into the mosaic of New York City.?

If you're going to be a reporter, you have to be willing to have conflicts with people, you have some people who probably end up hating you just by the nature of doing your job. You're going to get publicly criticized. It's not a job for you if you can't handle criticism. But we're also all human. No one loves to be attacked or criticized, right? You do develop a thicker skin over time. I think I'm better at separating good faith honest criticism and bad faith criticism meant to score political points or demean or belittle.?

I got laid off from The Wall Street Journal when they collapsed the metro desk in October, 2016. They laid off about 75 or so. They offered to rehire some of us, gratefully. But I was at a point in my life where I wasn't making a ton of money and I didn't have a lot of savings and I was living in New York. It was a clarifying moment. In retrospect, getting laid off was maybe the best thing that ever happened to me even though it certainly did not feel that way at the time. It felt demoralizing and really frustrating. I had worked there for five years and really loved the place. But this is a topsy-turvy business. It wasn't personal, I don't think, but it felt personal. Anytime you get laid off, I think it feels personal to you.?

A few friends of mine, who I'm very grateful for, including Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Martin, reached out to folks at Politico and said, ‘you should consider hiring this guy’. I was on a train to DC a few days later. I moved on New Years Day, 2017. When Trump won, suddenly being in Washington felt like where the epicenter of news was going to be.?

I had never lived in Washington at the time I joined Politico. I moved there during the transition; Obama was still president. It was an extraordinarily overwhelming time, but that said, there was sort of an inherent advantage for me in this as a newcomer. No one else in DC knew what was happening either. Let's say there had been a President Clinton, the same sort of folks who work in the government establishment would have probably been there with all the trusted hands of Washington. The policy decisions would have been made through the same processes and agencies. But that didn’t happen. It was Donald Trump. He was doing whatever he was doing on any given day. None of the reporters who lived in Washington understood it. So everyone was starting sort of at the same place.

In any other moment, if you came down to Washington and said you’re going to cover the White House on day one, you would be really extraordinarily behind. You would have all of these disadvantages. But because of Trump’s, let's just say, unusual way of doing things, there wasn't an impossible barrier to entry. In fact, I think, there was an inherent disadvantage if you had covered politics in an institutional way because if you were trying to chronicle how we make decisions and how things happen in the Trump administration and you were looking at it through sort of the lens of a White House, it makes no sense.

At Politico, internally, everyone was sort of hustling for scoops and hustling for news and trying to be as relevant as we could be on the beat. Externally, you had every news outlet putting some of their best reporters on this. We were covering a messy and chaotic beginning of the administration and Mueller’s investigation and all the various layers to that. 2020 was the most frenetic and insane news year, but 2017 was probably number two.?

I felt a little more comfortable as time went on but I have never felt (fully comfortable) to this day. It's a challenging job dealing with these sort of people and that’s never easy. When I was recruited by The Washington Post (in 2017) I guess that was a little bit of vindication for me, like, OK, good, someone else was noticing my work. But I mean, still to this day, I feel insecure in this job and I really do it as well as I can… I think a good reporter is hungry… Reporters always say, like, you're always afraid of being exposed as a fraud, not a fraud like you do things fraudulently, but that your sources won't talk to you and people will stop calling you back and you suddenly won't know anything. There's always that sort of fear. And I still feel that to this day, even after two Pulitzers. I mean that's what keeps things going.

Is Mar-a-Lago a strange and exotic place to work? It's a private club. So you can't just go, right. But during the presidency, I spent a decent amount of time there. Trump often went there and the White House had a pool of reporters. So anytime you're on on-call duty, you follow him there. I spent a couple of Thanksgivings there, and a lot of weekends there. I’ve been there a couple of times a year for various events.?

One of the more difficult parts of the Trump beat is trying to discern with any high level of accuracy what is right on any given day, because you often hear competing accounts, competing narratives, competing stories from various people. This is actually true in any beat, though — people have varying degrees of accuracy and it's worth talking to them all, but some of them are more reliable than others. It's about taking frankly, a pretty wild world, and translating it to what an average reader can understand and what an average reader needs to learn or know. We spend a lot of time thinking about that. Like, this is sort of juicy and interesting, but is it relevant? Those two people don't like each other? OK. Does that matter in any significant way? We want to take what we know and channel it through a filter we hope means that the reader gets the most relevant info.

As a reporter, as much as you can be, you're an advocate for the reader. The way I view my job is if a reader consistently reads my byline, he or she understands what I'm writing about and what's going on in a way that mirrors reality. We try to look for details that are an allegory for a bigger story. Like, OK, that's an interesting detail and that tells you something about that. You make conscious choices of what feels like it puts you in the room.

Have I feared for my personal safety? I've gotten death threats, as other reporters have. None of them I thought were particularly credible. I did have in the Trump presidency an experience where someone was targeting me. They figured out where I live and took pictures of me in my neighborhood and posted them online… The Post was great about it, they put security cameras in my house. I have felt like I was being bullied, I guess, or harassed at the Trump rallies. I've never felt unsafe. Some rallies are hotter than others. I often find at those rallies that people who heckle the press, that when you talk to them individually, they are pretty nice people. And they will talk to you and give you quotes… It’s an interesting element. I've often found at Trump rallies that people contain multitudes.

How is my relationship with the former president himself? There are times I'm sure he has liked me way more than others. He has only ever publicly attacked me by name once.

He called me a low life. Actually a restaurant in my neighborhood in DC named this sandwich after me for a while, ‘the low life’. Trump is highly engaged in his press. More than any other politician I've ever covered he’s hyper aware of what you're writing and saying and doing at all times. I've done an interview with him before where he brought up something I wrote two weeks before to dispute something like 16 paragraphs down.?

I was working at home on January 6th, 2021. It was in the middle of the pandemic and we really only went to the office sparingly. You had to have a special permission to go in because there were no vaccines yet or at least not available to the general public.

We sent folks to the White House, but I wasn't on duty that week and we sent folks to the Capitol. I watched the more grotesque scene that afternoon on television and started making calls to the White House. I wanted to know why Trump was not tweeting or telling folks to get out of there and to stop shattering windows. My job for the next week or so with Ashley Parker and other colleagues, was to try and write a definitive story on Trump's inaction. Like, exactly what happened that day, that the commander in chief sort of watched the Capitol burn and didn't do anything about it for a long period.?

I teach a journalism fellowship program in Washington. I have told them it felt totally surreal that day because the city put in a curfew at 6pm that night and you couldn't leave your house. All the stores started closing and it was almost like a hurricane, there were huge helicopters overhead all over the city. It was like nothing I've ever seen before.?

In the aftermath, some top editors at The Post, Matea Gold and Steven Ginsburg understood the government was not going to write a comprehensive report in the immediate aftermath of J6. No one was going to do an entire reckoning with what happened. So they put together a team of us reporters and the goal was to write without having the subpoena power to make people talk to us, the closest thing we could to a report on why this happened, what happened that day and what were all the factors that led up to it. Overall, it ended up being a little over 35,000 words with beautiful graphics and visuals. It was meant to put the reader there. We worked on it for five months and it was journalism at its core. It felt like we were doing what needed to be done.?

The second Pulitzer package came together because of the school shootings across the country and other public shootings. We didn't want to write a package of stories that felt judgmental towards gun owners. I grew up in a house with guns, I grew up with families that hunt. But since so many of these mass shootings involve AR-15s, we wanted to explain the AR-15 and the unique place it has in the American psyche. The first piece was an investigation into how the AR-15 went from being a gun that even the NRA didn't really market and believe in to becoming one of the most owned and revered guns. After that, many different colleagues fanned out across the country to write about the AR-15 and how it shaped public life. One of the stories that Ashley Parker and I did together that was really difficult to report. After Sandy Hook, a lot of blue states didn't want AR-15 factories in their towns anymore. We went to a town in North Carolina where an AR-15 factory moved and wrote about what happens when the AR-15 becomes the biggest employer in town. We spent a week there reporting on it. Some of our colleagues had really powerful reporting about what happens to the human body and particularly a child's body with the AR-15s. It was the most unsparing look that's probably ever been published about what happens. We wanted to paint sort of a holistic comprehensive portrait of the AR-15 in America, how it's used in every facet of life and I think we accomplished a lot of that.

The Trump years were incredibly good years for The Post, audience wise. People were really engaged with our work. We went to almost 3 million subscribers. We've lost some of those people, but we've gained some of them back too. I feel really lucky to work there because of the reporting, the history and all of the things that the institution is amazing at. And also the really smart people I get to work with every day.?

Things were not great at the Post in 2012 or so… The reason the Graham family who had owned it for decades sold it is because it was losing money and they were tired of laying people off. The paper did not really have a functioning web presence, more just the beginning of one. It was a different culture. Jeff Bezos bought the Post for $250 million, still a lot of money, but not that much for a media company, really… I mean Politico sold for a billion dollars (more recently). There were real questions on what the future of The Post was, right? There's obviously been a lot of public reporting and concerns in the last couple of years about The Post. But if you look at where The Post is right now compared to it was in 2012, I think it’s a remarkable story of growth. There's always things we could do better. But in totality, I think The Post has really come a long way. I don't think it's a story of decline. It's a story of exponential growth in a lot of ways.

How do I unplug? My dog Pepper is a big part of my life. In 2021, after Trump lost, I got a dog because I needed to rebalance my life a little bit. In a period of three weeks, I got vaccinated, bought a condo and got a dog. I was making all these life changes from 2020.

Before the pandemic, working on a really important story or challenging project meant having to be in the office. I was there five days a week. That was just what you did, right. This summer, I’ve written or co-written probably 100 stories and have felt really busy, but I've done it from all sorts of places. I was away a lot of weekends. Everyone understands you can work from wherever now. You can't always be gone, but I have recalculated my life where I feel like I do some of my best work out of the office. Some people say that's not healthy and you need to vacation and recharge and totally unplug. But I've just never been that way. The idea of turning off my phone and not looking at my email would stress me out more because I would be like, is there something I'm missing? I try to be in fun places, have friends around and not chain myself to the desk in the way I used to.