Seated across from me, in her pearls and charcoal pantsuit, is Neera Tanden—one of the most accomplished political agents in America, and someone to whom I have just posed a deeply offensive question. We are in her spacious corner office at the Center for American Progress, colloquially known as CAP, the influential liberal think tank where Tanden serves as both president and CEO. She’s in the midst of a busy day, with places to go and people to see. Just a few minutes from now, Tanden will be on stage with Vermont Sen. Peter Welch, discussing how Trump’s tariffs are impacting the supply chains of the state’s cheesemakers. Earlier this morning, she was huddled in a room full of men—each brandishing neatly bullet-pointed memos—drumming up talking points about A.I. safety that will soon be disseminated across Capitol Hill. But I don’t want to talk about any of that. Instead, I asked her something I’ve wondered about for years. When I see Tanden on Twitter/X late at night, embroiled in a flame war with the socialist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, or the leftist podcaster Sam Seder, or, on more than one occasion, a random shitposter with a username like @Bot420Crazy, is she drunk?

She knows what I’m talking about. She’s seen the memes. Some of her most inventive haters have dubbed her “Beera Tanden.” Another shitposter, with a hammer-and-sickle studded in their bio, is currently operating under the username “Neera Tanden’s Wine Addiction.”

But no, she is not drunk. In fact, she doesn’t really drink much at all. “I mean maybe I’ll have a glass of wine,” she said. “But the bad tweets are 100 percent sober tweets.”

This is just what life is like for a woman who has become, without question, one of the great villains of the online left. Who has an army of trolls who fill up her mentions every day with invective. And—there’s no doubt—Tanden takes some pleasure in dispatching them. About the theory that she would only be engaging with these people if she were plastered? “I find it to be completely sexist. I don’t understand it. What, did I misspell something?” she said.

At her core, Neera Tanden is a policy wonk. Policy wonks are not typically famous: If they are, that fame is restricted to a league of Beltway professionals—famous in the way that really good brain surgeons are famous to other, presumably lesser brain surgeons. I saw her aptitude firsthand as I tailed her around CAP. She relishes the tedious sausage-making of statecraft, the kind of stuff that makes you and me bleed from our ears. Tanden can reflexively rattle off the particularities of housing protocols I couldn’t begin to decode; she titters with satisfaction upon recounting the intricacies of a long-discarded Australian cap-and-trade proposal. This is a skillset of someone who is happiest in the darkest corners of government—the swampiest of swamps—a realm of acronyms, white papers, and multihyphenate bureaucracies. And that is exactly what makes Tanden’s transformation into one of the country’s most widely derided Twitter pundits so bizarre.

It all began, like so many things did, in 2016. Tanden—who has close ties with the Clintons, and has spent her entire professional life within the ironworks of the Democratic Party—backed Hillary for president. (She served as an unofficial adviser to the former first lady and secretary of state throughout her run.) Meanwhile, an amassing contingency of voters regarded Clinton tepidly at best, and were more inspired by Bernie Sanders. As the primary grew testier, Tanden took to Twitter to defend the sanctity of normie liberal values, and to implore (some might say scold) Sanders supporters into lining up behind the establishment candidate. (“I’m old enough to remember when the left was the strongest fighters against fascist governments,” she posted, just months before the election.) Some portions of Tanden’s audience were amenable to her frustrations, but others were happy to make her a vessel for their exasperations with the........

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