Olivia Nuzzi: The Latest Turn on the Appalachian Trail

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by WILL FOLKS

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Former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford has found life on the American political stage increasingly unnavigable in the age of Donald Trump. The man once touted as the GOP’s best bet to oust Barack Obama not only failed to live up to those lofty national expectations… he’s become a cautionary tale. An afterthought. A relic of a bygone era.

The heady brand of civil discourse Mark Sanford fancied himself as epitomizing was instantly fossilized by the meteoric impact of Trump – as was the introspective-indulgent brand of journalism which thought Mark Sanford’s musings on the meaning of life were worth exploring to Challenger Deep-level fathoms.

To hear his supporters tell it, Sanford’s collapse is attributable to his status as an oft-meandering “idea man” in a decidedly throat-punching political climate – a head in the clouds dreamer postulating inexorably at a time when swift kicks in the ass are what the electorate demands.

In other words, Sanford’s tune is off – and as such, he’s been tuned out. In the age of Trump, GOP primary voters have made it clear they yearn for the blunt-edged, hardcore riffs of MAGA Megadeth metal – not the Simon & Garfunkel strummings of this naval-gazing faux free marketeer.

“Peace Sells,” Dave Mustaine once crooned. “But who’s buying?”

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Exactly… which is why when Sanford launched his 2020 presidential campaign outside of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, no one showed up.

Seriously, no one.

It’s also why no one talks about Sanford anymore – unless they are schadenfreuding his collapse or indulging in idle gossip over his adventures in two-timing. Once revered as a politician who hovered above such coarse contemplations, Sanford has now become good for little else.

It’s worth noting, too, that the craving for triple servings of America First red meat in the Republican ideological diet is not the real reason for Sanford’s long-term descent into irrelevance. The “Luv gov” long ago morphed from a courageous ideologue into a status quo sellout… choosing to sacrifice his purported principles on the altar of self-preservation (during his final year as governor of South Carolina) and thereafter as he plotted his comeback track (which thankfully terminated with his unceremonious ouster following a disastrous second stint in the U.S. Congress).

Sanford’s auctioning of his integrity actually began well before his infamous hike on the Appalachian Trail (i.e. before his affair with his ex-fiancée, María Belén Chapur, was exposed for the world to see)… but the momentum it amassed following his fall from grace propelled him firmly across the event horizon into the black hole of ideological irredeemability.

And political inviability…

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RELATED | MARK SANFORD IS A LONG WAY FROM THE TRAIL

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Now comes a return of the tiresome tawdriness for which Sanford will forever be remembered – in this instance, a weepy volume of beta bitching published by scorned scribe Ryan Lizza, who is driving traffic to his new media endeavor by documenting the “devastating” betrayal he endured at the hands (or rather via the loins) of his former fiancée, Olivia Nuzzi.

According to Lizza – former chief Washington correspondent for Politico – his intended (a former New York magazine reporter who now writes for Vanity Fair) had an affair with Sanford during the 2020 presidential primary campaign. The dalliance was uncovered in early 2020 when Nuzzi was, in Lizza’s words, “spending more and more time in South Carolina… which was a good thing, I thought, considering how politically important the state was.”

To set the stage, Lizza retrieved a scrawled hotel note from the floor of a walk-in closet where he’d previously “spent an afternoon on my knees carefully arranging scores of her boots, high heels, sneakers, and slippers on an enormous shoe rack.”

“Olivia almost cried when she saw the results,” Lizza recalled. “‘Nobody has ever done anything like that for me,’ she said.”

Wait… is this an intimate exposé? Or cuckold Literotica?

Is this guy baring his soul? Or sharing his fetish?

The deeper one delves into this heavily metaphor’d daytime soap opera script, the worse one feels for Lizza – who insisted his “heart stopped” when he realized who his wife was sleeping with.

“Our relationship was improbable in so many ways, but every time it survived its own contradictions and weathered another storm, we took it as a sign of strength and a shared fate,” he wrote on his new platform, Telos.

That sounds… Sanford-esque.

Which, of course, leads us to the note’s big reveal…

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“I flipped to another page and saw a name and the first line of an unfinished love letter to him that included enough details to confirm a physical relationship and the hint of some kind of falling out,” Lizza wrote.

According to Lizza, his fiancée’s (latest) lover was “a famous politician, 32 years older than Olivia, and well-known for a sex scandal.”

Sanford…

Nuzzi later explained to Lizza that she had become “infatuated” with this politician, that “she couldn’t get him out of her head, and that as her obsession intensified, she sent him increasingly risqué pictures and texts, secretly followed him on the campaign trail when she told me she was out covering other candidates, and fantasized about a rendezvous, which was consummated at his home in South Carolina one night after she went dark on me and made up a story about how she was dealing with a crisis concerning her sick mother.”

Honestly, Nuzzi seems an impressive get for Sanford… a man who went from almost being the leader of the free world to running a last-mile package delivery service in the South Carolina Lowcountry.

Nuzzi has been dragged relentlessly following the latest affair allegation – which comes on the heels of revelations regarding her “non-physical” relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. during the 2024 campaign. In fairness to Nuzzi’s haters, though, she kinda asked for it – having previously mocked Hollywood portrayals of reporters who “sleep with their sources.”

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Nuzzi not only acknowledged her text-based affair with Trump’s health czar, she publicly psycho-analyzed it… or, him.

“Like all men but more so, he was a hunter,” she wrote of Kennedy. “In a literal sense, he used not a bullet but a bird. It was not about a chase but about a puzzle of logic and skill that amounted to a test of his self-mastery. He was the mouse and the architect of his maze. The giver of his own pleasure and torment.”

Damn… no wonder she wasn’t turned on by the guy rearranging her shoe closet.

“He desired,” she added. “He desired desiring. He desired being desired. He desired desire itself. I understood this just as I came to understand the range of his kinks and complexes and how they fit within what I thought I understood of his soul.”

So… when should we expect to read Nuzzi’s postmortem on Sanford’s “kinks and complexes?”

Will she go into his rumored pee fetish? Or contrast his response to her Cornholio-esque interrogatories with Kennedy’s?

Guess we’ll have to wait and see… but when you consider the extent to which everyone connected to this saga seems intent on sharing every last detail, odds are we won’t be waiting long.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR…

Will Folks is the founding editor of the news outlet you are currently reading. Prior to founding FITSNews, he served as press secretary to the governor of South Carolina. He lives in the Midlands region of the state with his wife and eight children.

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