The Internet went nuts before the interview was even over. Blogs reported that Tapper had “crushed” and “taken down” Conway. Samantha Bee tweeted, “We are all that crease between Jake Tapper's eyebrows.” Van Jones tweeted that Jake Tapper “is a GOD.” Alyssa Milano tweeted to him, “You are giving me hope. Thank you for all you do.” (His reply: “Are you saying I'm the boss?”)

He became a screen grab, a meme, a Facebook avatar to people not named Jake Tapper. A woman on the Internet wrote a song about him. Oh, Jake Tapper, you are making me swoon, it goes. You ain't taking no shit, I think I'm over the moon. Thank God someone kept the receipts.

"It's nice to be recognized, but I also know that a lot of the people who are happy with me now are not going to be happy with me in four to eight years."

But Tapper seems almost weary with the attention. Why, though? It must be so gratifying to suddenly be hoisted upon our shoulders and favored as our crisis anchor, our wartime consigliere, here to sort through the befuddlement and fear six hours a week, then on Twitter in between.

“You think that,” he says. “I think that I'm doing my job, and it's nice to be recognized, but I also know that a lot of the people who are happy with me now are not going to be happy with me in four to eight years and that I'm just going to keep doing what I'm doing. A lot of people sending me nice tweets today were cursing me when I was asking questions about Benghazi in 2012.”

Finally, he concedes this: “I'm definitely getting some attention right now, at this period, that I wasn't before. It also might be gone in a week. You know what I mean? I'm not counting on it.” He looks down at the chicken on his plate and blows air out of his cheeks.

Tapper thinks Trump could be a surprisingly effective president, “but he keeps undermining himself.”

It'd be easy to think that the Jake Tapper WTF Face—that unique look through which he transmits his seeming disbelief and outrage—is just a singular expression, that it's just one face. In fact, the Jake Tapper WTF Face contains multitudes.

There is the JTWTFF that is a mere frown, the depressor supercilii muscles creating a hood over his downward-turning, disappointed eyes. There is the JTWTFF wherein the muscles you'd most associate with the apples of the cheeks rise to his eyes while his eyebrows reach skyward toward that hair. Me? My favorite Jake Tapper WTF Face is the one where his eyebrows arch but also corrugate into small bowl-shaped caterpillars, and his frontalis, the muscle of the forehead, rises and lowers at the same time, all of which forces his glabella to form a very satisfying omega sign.

While so many anchors feel obliged to maintain their Ron Burgundy anchor-y-ness, Tapper allows an incredulousness, and maybe even a smidge of disgust, to sneak on through. In those moments, when he augments the standard newsman persona to include his own come-off-it realness, he has a way of embodying all of us. This may be his biggest public service.

“Jake is rising to the moment,” says Jim Rutenberg, media columnist for The New York Times. “Just by doing very basic fact-checking and calling things out bluntly, it kind of comes as this giant cathartic act for the audience, because they're all so anxious and they want to see a lie called a lie so badly. So they're just desperate for fact-checking, even though it's the most basic thing we do.” But also, it's his style. “He doesn't let anyone off the hook.”

It can be risky, this asking question after question, repeating himself as often as is necessary. “Any other television interviewer would let it go,” Rutenberg says. “You have to admit that that's a dangerous proposition on TV. You might lose your viewers. No one's done it quite to that degree.”

It's also the kind of thing that, if not tempered, could veer into pompousness. “I want to dislike him,” Politico's media columnist, Jack Shafer, says, “if only because of the way he puffs himself up to anchorman size, sort of like Jerry Dunphy,” the L.A. newscaster who partly inspired *The Mary Tyler Moore Show'*s vain and fatuous Ted Baxter. “But having puffed himself up, the boy delivers. He's probably the best interviewer TV has these days, as unshakable as that diamondback that chases you in your dreams. His reporting seems to come from the heart. He's probably the only genuine romantic in TV news.”

As much as he seems born for this, as much as any anchor seems like he or she has been gunning for the chair from the cradle, Tapper backed into this life. He grew up in Philly, the son of a nurse and a pediatrician, in a house where the conversations often “focused on injustice,” Tapper says—crooked politicians, children in poverty. He went to Dartmouth, then a semester of film school, then worked for a congresswoman. He didn't seem to have a plan. He thought for a while that he might go into cartooning. He wrote a novel, but it was never published. In 1998, for Washington's alt-weekly City Paper, Tapper wrote about a date he'd recently been on with a woman who was just then beginning to appear in the news named Monica Lewinsky. (He does not regret the story, but he does regret using the words “chubby” and “zaftig.”) He freelanced for a number of magazines, including this one, and worked at Salon for several years, notably covering the Bush-Gore election. After stints at CNN and VH1, he turned up at ABC News and started then to become the Jake Tapper who is now a household name. Diane Sawyer, who was co-anchor of Good Morning America at the time, was instantly impressed. “You could send him an e-mail and within 15 seconds get the entire history, back to the War of the Roses and three references to Saint Augustine and the movie and the remake of the movie and how he felt about the casting of each. It's all in his brain,” Sawyer says. “It's not that he learns the facts and that he studies. It's that he wakes up in the morning so curious, and I think you can tell.”