Getting a Fix on ‘Fixers’

One of the many astonishing developments, for language mavens, in the unfolding drama of the Mueller investigation has been the casual use of the term fixer. Mainstream media outlets have taken to calling Michael Cohen, the president’s former personal attorney, Trump’s fixer. Several times, I’ve heard that Rudolph Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, has replaced Cohen as Trump’s attorney and fixer.

I’d always thought of the term as more pejorative than descriptive, so I went looking. One of the most famous uses of the term, of course, is Bernard Malamud’s 1966 novel, The Fixer — which, if you ask a typical literate person, is about a guy who gets into legal trouble for making illicit arrangements for his client. Wrong. It’s about a handyman, a guy who fixes things in a brick factory. A similar sense is embodied in the Marvel Comics hero Fixer, who’s a technological genius now turned to a life of good deeds. But the Yiddish term macher, or “maker,” generally does translate as “fixer,” notably in last year’s Richard Gere vehicle, “Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer,” where Gere plays an aspiring, amoral confidante to the powerful.

Though the term doesn’t even make it into my ancient (1967) Random House Dictionary, it appears in the Oxford English Dictionary in the sense of “one who arranges or adjusts matters (often illicitly)” as early as 1909, when Will Irwin wrote in Confessions of a Con Man: “At the head of the outfit stood the ‘fixer’, whose job it was to bribe or stall city officials so that the gamblers could proceed with reasonable security.” A reference to a “fixer of elections” is even earlier (1889), but that meaning seems slightly different to me. An election fixer, like a fight fixer, fixes the election or fight much the way that fixative fixes a charcoal drawing, or a statue is affixed to the floor: He sets the result so that it cannot be changed.

You might argue that the fixer played by George Clooney in the 2007 film Michael Clayton fixes situations much the way that Malamud’s fixer tries to fix his broken wagon wheel. Something has broken or gone wrong, and the fixer’s job is to make it whole or functioning again. But functioning, in Michael Clayton’s case, means operating the way his firm, not any objective standard, means for it to operate. Malamud’s Yakov is an upright man; George Clooney’s Clayton is not.

Full disclosure: I do not think Michael Cohen is an upright man. As my colleague Ben Yagoda put it in his April prediction of Cohen’s “flipping,” Trump’s former lawyer is “a fixer of the old school.” But as recently as 2014, according to the Corpus of Contemporary American English, the term fixer failed to carry opprobrium only in its handyman connotation, or when referring to practical necessities in corrupt regimes. For instance, on NPR’s “Fresh Air,” the journalist Matthieu Aikins described the tragedy of James Foley in part this way:

It’s not like the magazines that I write for have bureaus overseas or security consultants or anything like that. Places like Rolling Stone do give you a good expense budget which helps a lot ’cause you can hire the right fixer and pay for, you know, things that bring more security as compared to, you know, freelancers really on a shoestring budget. And actually, you know, that was one of the reasons why James Foley was kidnapped, was because he wasn’t — didn’t have, you know, proper fixer and transportation, and they were stopping in an internet cafe in Syria. You know, the problem of inadequate support for freelancers is a tricky one.

It’s true that Anthony Bourdain referred unabashedly to his Detroit “fixer” on CNN in 2014, but Bourdain was always one to sling argot. Otherwise, fixers are bad-boy characters on TV shows and in movies, or gangster associates now doing time; often, they are “fixers,” the term contained within quotes so we can all identify it as a euphemism … until you get to 2018.

Granted, an early 2017 reference by none other than Sean Hannity, talking about the Women’s March, reads ambiguously:

I’m talking about women because I was acutely aware of the, quote, “women’s march” this last weekend, and I thought of all the things that we can count and quantify, all the items that they could have listed on their list of grievances from the podium about President Obama, who was president for eight years. President Trump has been here for about eight hours. And you know, if this is your list of grievances, then at least help is on the way. At least you’ve got the greatest fixer and rescuer and brilliant businessman in Donald Trump to help fix it.

Presumably Hannity means fixer in the sense of repair person, though you never know. But with the rift between Trump and Michael Cohen making the news, articles regularly refer to Cohen (and often Giuliani) as Trump’s fixer — as if every president has had a fixer, just as he’s had a secretary of state. As Ben Zimmer recently observed, The Wall Street Journal set the trend. Since then, at least six news articles in The New York Times have simply named Mr. Cohen as the president’s fixer; only one, by way of the Associated Press, puts the term into quotation marks as if it’s something to hedge about. The Washington Post logs 14 uses of fixer in the past 10 days, with only the AP stories putting the term into quotes. Fox News’s use of fixer is confined to the canceled TV show “Fixer Upper,” but CNN is not only replete with ordinary references to Cohen as Trump’s fixer, but also to Bill Shines, the new head of White House communications, as having been Roger Ailes’s fixer. This isn’t to say that a mainstream media outlet like CNN has abandoned the notion that fixer is a pejorative term; this past May, it ran a piece about the spokesman for the family of the slain Democratic consultant Seth Rich, in which CNN said, “Conspiracy theorists portrayed Bauman as a fixer forced upon the family by the DNC to cover up a supposed crime. In the lawsuit, Bauman says he was never hired nor paid by the DNC.”

So maybe it’s legitimate to be a fixer these days. Or maybe there’s so much illegitimacy in the air that describing someone as a fixer, plain and simple, no longer raises eyebrows.

Next up: bagman?