Duca’s rise after taking on Trump
ON A cool, damp night last weekend, Lauren Duca, 25, sat at a corner banquette at the Red Cat in Manhattan, sipping white wine. She had spent her day trekking around the city, getting a blowout in Chinatown, meeting some friends for brunch in the West Village and stopping home in Brooklyn for some relaxation time with her dog, a Shiba Inu puppy named Demi.
Duca was a little nervous. “I need to slow down my heart rate,” she said. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes and raised her glass. She had a big night ahead. She would be appearing on stage as a guest monologuist for the improvisation company Upright Citizens Brigade. Previous guest monologuists at UCB have included Gloria Steinem, Amy Schumer and the hosts of the 2 Dope Queens podcast, Jessica Williams and Phoebe Robinson. So, you know, no pressure.
It might surprise some that Duca – who in the past two months has gone from a relatively obscure freelance journalist to a national newsmaker – is susceptible to the jitters. On December 10, Teen Vogue published a scorched-earth opinion piece she wrote titled Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America on its website. It went viral.
On December 23, she appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News and managed to get these words in edgewise: “You’re actually being a partisan hack who’s just attacking me ad nauseam and not even allowing me to speak.” The video clip went viral.
On January 8, she complained to Twitter that Martin Shkreli, the Pharma Bro and a professed supporter of Trump, was harassing her after she declined his invitation, delivered via private message, to be his date at the inauguration. In a public tweet, she said, “I’d rather eat my own organs.”
“There’s been a lot of crazy things like this happening,” she said.
Before the presidential election, Duca was writing for publications like Teen Vogue, focusing mostly on pop-culture fixtures like Kylie Jenner and her unexpected passion for cheap ramen noodles.
After the election, something changed. “It felt like nothing I was working on mattered anymore,” she said.
So she started writing about Trump. The Teen Vogue piece accused the then-presidentelect of “gaslighting”, a type of psychological manipulation intended to make people doubt their own perceptions. (The term comes from a 1938 play by Patrick Hamilton called Gaslight, in which a man tries to persuade his wife that she is going insane.)
She wrote: “Trump is not going to stop playing with the burner until America realizes that the temperature is too high. It’s on every single one of us to stop pretending it’s always been so hot in here.”
With close to 1.3 million hits, the piece became the most-read article on the Teen Vogue site in 2016.
Her new purpose has brought a lot of new opportunity, like the invitation from UCB. She arrived at the theatre on West 26th Street a few minutes early. She wove past the packed crowd lining up for $2 Pabst Blue Ribbon cans and slipped backstage.
Shannon O’Neill, the artistic director of UCB New York, and Tami Sagher, a cast member and former writer for 30 Rock, warmed up the crowd and then welcomed Duca to the stage. Sagher called her “my hero” and urged the audience to check out Teen Vogue for its unvarnished political cover- TeenVogue age. O’Neill then asked for suggestions for a word that Duca could riff on to start the show.
“Blooper!” someone in the crowd called out.
“Ah, OK,” Duca said, haltingly. “‘Blooper’ makes me think of messing up, which is something I am terrified of doing now.” The stakes are higher, she said, because she has a lot more Twitter followers now than she did six weeks ago – 142,000 more to be exact. And more followers, she said, means more people are parsing everything she does.
“I could tweet the word pea- DonaldTrumpIsGaslightingAmerica, nut and they would be like, ‘Don’t you know that, like, my son’” is allergic, she said, clutching her iPhone in her right hand like a security blanket. The crowd laughed. She seemed to get more comfortable.
Her final anecdote was the most personal and generated the loudest response. Reacting to the audience prompt “blue bloods”, Duca went straight to her parents, conservative Republicans who live in New Jersey and voted for Trump.
“They have no idea where I came from,” she said.
After Hillary Clinton’s de- feat, Duca told the audience, she asked her mother, a physical therapist, to read her political writing, hoping it would sway her opinion.
The elder Duca praised her daughter, telling her she was “like the Michael Jordan of writing”. But even maternal pride couldn’t stop her from taking a jab at Clinton. “You have to admit that we really didn’t know what happened with her emails,” she said.
“So,” the younger Duca said, ending her monologue, “I can’t be that good of a writer.”