VISITING DIGNITARY OLD HAUNTS

When Stephen Colbert landed in New Zealand in 2019, his ride from the airport was Jacinda Ardern, the Prime Minister.

- -Andrew Marantz

They filmed a segment in her car, greeting rubberneckers and singing “Bohemian Rhapsody”; the filming continued at her house, culminating in a barbecue with the second most important woman in the country, Lorde. (Peter Jackson, the third member of the Kiwi Power Trinity, appeared on “Colbert” later that week.) Those were Ardern’s glory days. She was in her thirties, the youngest Prime Minister in New Zealand’s history. Her brand at the time was something like the Obama of the antipodes: a liberal media darling, icon of the global anti-Trump resistance, transitioning smoothly from lofty oratory to easygoing relatability. After a mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Obama gave a poignant speech and called for an assault-weapons ban, which didn't pass; after a mass shooting at two mosques in Christchurch, Ardern gave a poignant speech and called for an assault-weapons ban, which did. At the U.N. General Assembly, Trump rambled from the lectern (“My Administration has accomplished more than almost any Administration”); Ardern sat next to her fiancé, Clark Gayford, who held their newborn in his arms.