The first time Lisa Rubin was in the same room as Donald Trump, the reporter and former president were in Miami, where Trump was being arraigned on charges that he mishandled top secret documents and refused the government’s demands to return them.

“It was also the first time that I saw him do something that I have since seen him do many times,” the MSNBC legal correspondent recalled, “which is to stand up and look at the crowd and try to ascertain if there are friendly faces there and really scan to look who’s there. And I remember finding it really chilling at the time.”

Why? “Because it struck me as something you would do if you were trying to commit to memory who was there to document something that you would rather forget,” she said.

Trump has been doing the same kind of note-taking while on trial this spring for falsifying business records in Lower Manhattan, where Rubin has been at the courthouse day in and day out, observing him up close and explaining the proceedings to the public. It’s a role that has been particularly important since the trial is not televised. “We have to bring all of those vivid details to people’s living rooms,” Rubin said. “Everything that our eyes can ingest and our ears can hear, we have to recast for the audience at home. Because without it, all they have is, at best, a transcript and court sketches.”

Rubin stands out among the scores of journalists who are bearing witness to the Trump trial, thanks to both her history and her trajectory. At age 47, she endearingly calls herself a “baby journalist,” having spent most of her career in a high-paying corporate law job. Like broadcast journalism, the field once seemed like a dream—but she later found it to be closer to a nightmare: “Private practice, particularly trial practice in New York, is as cutthroat and competitive and all-consuming as TV shows make it out to be.” Now, she uses that experience to shape her trial coverage on TV.

On a recent Friday at 4:30 p.m., she stepped off the court-coverage treadmill for a Zoom call with Vanity Fair, offering to describe her day-to-day with the caveat that she had to be back on MSNBC at 6 p.m. for The Beat.

She had finished up the night before with an appearance on The Last Word at 10 p.m., and was back at 6 a.m. for Morning Joe, leaving her just enough time to go home and squeeze in a little nap. She returned to 30 Rock for live shots during the 2 and 3 p.m. hours and used the rest of the afternoon to draft a story for MSNBC.com about Trump’s campaign-surrogacy operation at the courthouse, which helped formulate her thoughts for upcoming live shots. “I’m always thinking about what can I share from my reporting,” she said.

I witnessed this firsthand when I appeared alongside Rubin on MSNBC's Alex Wagner Tonight during one of the first days of the trial. Rubin came armed with hyperspecific examples from court as well as citations from past cases. It was easy to see why she has become a favorite of the sometimes fickle MSNBC base. Even in the cesspool that is Elon Musk’s X, Rubin’s posts fill up with praiseful replies from fans (“Thank you for being our eyes and ears” is a frequent one).

On a channel full of veterans like Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O’Donnell, and Chris Hayes (who have been anchoring since 2008, 2010, and 2011, respectively), Rubin is still a veritable newcomer: She only started appearing on the air in 2022. But, as a sign of how warmly she has been welcomed by both the anchors and the audience, Rubin will be one of the featured voices in an upcoming prime-time special, “Prosecuting Donald Trump: Witness to History,” on Sunday, June 2.

When I suggested that she’d taken off like a rocket, she framed her career trajectory very differently: “A five-year metamorphosis.”

“I would say I had an accidental and fortuitous pivot, for which I am grateful every day,” she said. “And that the second would never have been possible without the first—and staying in the first as long as I did.”

Rubin is a case study of how successful careers are not always built on a straight line. She graduated from Stanford University in 1998 with a bachelor’s degree in political science and master’s in organizational behavior, and moved to Washington two weeks later to be a congressional aide, first for the late Senator Dianne Feinstein, then for former Representative Nita Lowey. Her next stop was Yale Law School, partly with an eye toward representing victims of domestic violence and sexual assault. Rubin married her Stanford college sweetheart Jon Oram, graduated from Yale in 2004, clerked for a federal judge, and then entered the heady world of private practice in New York City.

If it’s possible to condense her next 15 years into a paragraph, it would go something like this: The legal work was grueling and rarely very satisfying. Being “the guy behind the guy”—that is, working 80-hour weeks and writing briefs for more senior lawyers to argue in court—was exasperating. “I felt like I was the Sisyphus of my own life,” she said. “The code-switching required to advance—‘Be an inexhaustible killer in the courtroom! Be unthreatening and smiling always in the office!’—was especially exhausting and something I was not good at.”

Around the time Rubin turned 40, her husband’s legal career was taking off, her own career at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP was stalling, and one of her two young daughters “was going through a really, really rough time.” Rubin had a “What am I doing for the world?” moment and decided to leave the law profession altogether. She felt a deep sense of failure. But she also saw ways to apply her skills in the nonprofit space, having been a Planned Parenthood of New York City board member for 10-plus years. “I thought I wanted to do gender equity or reproductive justice work,” she said.

A call from a longtime mentor changed her course. It turned out that Maddow wanted to hire a legal consultant-slash-producer with litigation experience to advise her show.

“We found Lisa not through TV connections, but through friends who are fancy lawyers,” Maddow told Vanity Fair. “We wanted no-fear-or-favor straightforward advice from someone with real legal chops—someone we could not just book as a guest for the show, but call on throughout the day for research and reporting.”

Rubin was perfect for the position. She desperately wanted to work again—“I needed that mental stimulation and satisfaction”—and saw how she could help Maddow’s team. Though there was, in retrospect, one amusing question during the interview with Maddow’s senior producers: “You don’t ever want to be on camera, right?”

“Oh God, no,” she responded. The question didn’t even make sense to her at the time, since she didn’t know that off-air producers sometimes try to elbow their way into on-air jobs. “It is hard,” she said, “to overstate how green I was at the time.”

Rubin quit the Planned Parenthood board (as a condition of employment at MSNBC) in the spring of 2019 and quickly settled into her cubicle at 30 Rock. She likened Maddow’s production meetings to Socratic dialogues and loved the chance to “increase the public’s fluency and facility with law and legal concepts.”

“I hadn’t felt that intellectually engaged since law school,” she recalled.

In 2021, Maddow signed a new overall deal with NBCUniversal that led her to move to a weekly format the following year. Rubin wondered if her role would be affected. Furthermore, when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, wall-to-wall war coverage meant that legal matters weren’t getting on the air. So Rubin began to blog. She wrote for MSNBC.com about topics like Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearings and the leak of the Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade.

Eventually, a mutual friend urged her to meet with an NBC talent executive, which is how Rubin wound up as a guest on an MSNBC newscast one summer weekend. As is so often the case in TV news, one live shot begets another—and pretty soon, the home studio judges at @RateMySkypeRoom were giving her 10 out of 10. In retrospect, she said, Maddow’s production meetings—the rapid-fire questioning, the requests for explainers—“were the best preparation one could ever have for being on TV.”

Rubin fit naturally into the ensemble of MSNBC legal experts who analyzed the E. Jean Carroll trials, the Trump indictments, and other cases. It helped, she noted, that some of them—like Andrew Weissman, Barbara McQuade, Joyce White Vance, Katie Phang, and Chuck Rosenberg—“were my sources” when she worked for Maddow’s team. “The breadth and depth of our legal bench is amazing.”

Earlier this year, Rubin shifted from an analyst role to a correspondent, which means she is there to supply the raw reporting that others analyze and dissect. MSNBC PR tallied her live shots and found that she’s been on air more than 275 times since January. With closing arguments getting underway in the hush money trial, there are dozens more live shots to come. “The only true norths for me,” she said, “are ensuring the public can see and hear observable truths and upholding the rule of law.”