Playboy Interview: Seth Abramson

A candid conversation with America’s most dogged pursuer of the Trump-Russia story — a professor, poet and “metamodernist” out to prove collusion.

Seth Abramson is a hard fellow to read. A Twitter-savvy commentator on the president’s alleged Russia ties and author of the 2018 book Proof of Collusion: How Trump Betrayed America, he doesn’t look like a natty legal analyst, nor does he come across as an investigative reporter or a goggle-eyed conspiracy theorist living on rage, Adderall and likes. Instead, he could be a regional manager for a call center chain, wearing roomy jeans, a suit jacket and extremely sensible shoes. Not long ago, he says, he wore nothing but athleisure pieces with sports logos. This suit jacket represents a recent, if only occasional, addition to his ensemble. With his book advance, he also bought a homely new Subaru sedan.

As with the best normcores, Abramson’s rejection of style reflects its own punk defiance. Roomy jeans notwithstanding, he knows how to calculate an aesthetic effect. On Twitter, Abramson helped pioneer the literary form of the “thread.” Both admired and reviled, the thread uses a string of tweets to create a kind of argument in epigrams. Threads are personality driven, and readers (including hate-readers) of Abramson’s tweets have gotten to know the eccentric New Hampshirite through his meticulous attention to the evidence of Trumpworld’s alleged collusion with the Kremlin. His threads demonstrate his almost robotic recall and gift for sequential thinking, his love of asterisks as italics and, above all, his sometimes tedious prolificacy. An Abramson thread can run to thousands upon thousands of words, which is no mean feat on a platform meant to inspire thoughts consisting of 280 characters or fewer.