Julie Tsirkin started May 23 as White House and Capitol Hill correspondent at NBC News. She ended Memorial Day weekend as the reigning meme of the season.
The unexpected development began with gunfire near the White House Saturday night. Standing on the North Lawn preparing for an NBC Nightly News broadcast, Tsirkin heard a succession of 20 to 30 shots.
Her puzzled expression, a kind of confused grimace, was accompanied by a simple question: “What is that?”
Since then, Tsirkin’s look of confusion and her question have been everywhere. She’s been edited into a scene in Star Wars depicting the destruction of the Death Star. Placed in front of H.G. Wells’ fearsome Tripods as they destroy all in Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds. In one contribution to the meme, President Donald Trump unveils a portrait of Tsirkin’s bewildered expression in the Oval Office.
“I’ve gotten texts about that from people who work for the president, which is so funny,” Tsirkin, 30, tells New Jersey Monthly.
“Listen, you’ve got to be able to laugh at yourself,” she says. “Either that or you’ll cry.”
It’s a truism the broadcast journalist is able to embrace partly because she’s from New Jersey.
“I have deep Jersey roots,” Tsirkin says, and she believes that can build resiliency in a person. “I really do feel like Jersey girls and boys have a have a certain edge to them.”
An edge and a sense of humor.
“I’ve been laughing at myself my entire life, because my family has laughed at me my entire life,” says Tsirkin, who grew up in Jersey City and Monmouth County.
“Some of the memes were just hilarious,” she says. “I actually really love the Godzilla one…I give people props for creativity.”
Tsirkin reporting in the field. Photo: Frank Thorp/Courtesy of NBC News
The morning after the footage came out on NBC Nightly News, she spent four hours diving into the memes. Her producer, who found this quite amusing, took a photo of Tsirkin smiling next to a computer screen showing her confused meme face wearing a Trojan helmet.
“I just couldn’t believe that someone was doing this from my picture,” she says. “I was laughing, genuinely—it kind of created some levity.”
Tsirkin doesn’t duck out of the way in the news clip, but the meme deluge arrived just weeks after she had to take cover under a table because of another shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
“I’m glad I could take one for the team with @nbcnsl on summer break,” Tsirkin posted on X (formerly Twitter), sharing the photo of her meme research session.
“Jersey folks don’t flinch,” Senator Andy Kim replied.
***
Tsirkin was born in Brooklyn two years after her family immigrated to the United States from Crimea, in Ukraine.
They arrived in the early ’90s—first her father, who was in the Navy, and then her pianist mother with her older sister. Her father worked delivering pizzas and driving soda trucks, and her mother cleaned houses. “They built themselves brick by brick here, and Jersey contributed a lot to that,” Tsirkin says. “My parents have instilled resiliency in me.”
She spent early years living on Staten Island before the family moved to Marlboro, where they bought a house. “It was a big deal,” Tsirkin says.
Her father, who still carried his maritime spirit, also bought a boat “instead of a Shore house” in Long Branch, she says. “We would go up and down the water and all over New Jersey and the coast, and it was just awesome.” Later, Tsirkin attended middle school in Hoboken and her family moved to Jersey City, where she was a student at McNair Academic High School (“Go Cougars!” she says).
Tsirkin at 6 years old, on her family’s boat in Long Branch. Photo: Courtesy of Julie Tsirkin and the Tsirkin family
Her father attended Rutgers Law School in Newark for a career change in his 50s, when Tsirkin was in high school. “We graduated at the same time, actually,” she says. The law was her original plan as a student at Rutgers in New Brunswick, where she also applied to be a pre-med student.
“All my best friends still are the friends I met on day one of freshman year, some at orientation, some for my sorority—and my husband I met at Rutgers as well,” says Tsirkin, who has been married to her college sweetheart, a Highland Park native, for almost three years.
She originally planned to pursue a career as an attorney because her immigrant parents considered it a stable, successful vocation. A change of heart and new guidance from her father redirected her to major in journalism and media studies. She was preparing for the LSAT, but a journalism professor, Steven Miller, allowed her to sit in on camera-training classes. Tsirkin, a writer at Rutgers’s student newspaper The Daily Targum, applied to internships “at all the news stations in New York” for her senior year. By 2016, she was interning at MSNBC.
Tsirkin thought she’d be a writer, but her ascent at NBC News landed her in front of the camera. MSNBC executive producer Omnika Thompson looked at her résumé, which was largely devoid of media experience. “She said, ‘Jersey girl, I love it!’ And she totally took a chance on me,” Tsirkin says. It wasn’t long before she became a producer at NBC News working with a senior Washington correspondent.
Tsirkin says she was pulled into on-camera work in the wake of January 6, 2021, after the insurgent attack on the Capitol. “It was surreal,” she says. “I practiced on Zoom with one of my friends. I didn’t know what I was doing…transitioning to in front of the camera also just bloomed my confidence so much.”
***
Before she heard the gunshots near the White House on May 23, Tsirkin had recently returned from several days of reporting in Kentucky.
She covered the primary election that saw Republican Rep. Thomas Massie lose his seat to the Trump-endorsed candidate Ed Gallrein. Her other work that Saturday included reporting on a potential deal with Iran.
“I walked outside at 6 pm to take what we call a ‘stare’—which is basically when you stare into the camera for 30 seconds, and they use that to introduce all the reporters in the little Brady Bunch boxes at the start of the broadcast for Nightly News,” Tsirkin says. “And I just got out there, and I even thought, Oh my gosh, it’s 6:03, I’m a little bit late…I walked out there, and I had just put my water down. That was the start of the clip, when I kind of looked surprised.”
It had only been four weeks since the reporter and her colleagues were at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, where a gunman, suspect Cole Tomas Allen, opened fire and was later charged with attempting to assassinate the president.
“In that case, it sounded different,” she says. “I heard the ricochet, I heard the two sounds, the crack-thump—and on top of that, my colleague, José Diaz-Balart, shoved me under the table, so I was like, ‘Oh gosh, OK, this is serious.’ That was just a completely different experience, but in this case, it was so rapid, and I knew it was coming [from] directly in front of me, and I had a moment where I thought,…Unless this is some kind of Navy SEAL with a jet pack, like, busting through 50 Secret Service agents and snipers on the roof, I just cannot imagine.”
During last weekend’s moment of confusion inside the White House gates, Tsirkin looked back to see what Secret Service agents were doing. Her hostile-environment training made her think about hiding behind a tree or heading inside the White House. An officer who had his gun drawn told her to run into the briefing room.
“Sounds like fireworks,” Tsirkin’s colleague can be heard saying in the news footage. The shots, which came from 17th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, caused the White House to go into lockdown. As Tsirkin and her colleagues at NBC later reported, officials said that suspect Nasire Best, 21, of Maryland was fatally shot by Secret Service agents after he allegedly opened fire on officers at a Secret Service checkpoint. A bystander was shot during the gunfire and hospitalized.
Some chatter around Tsirkin’s response to the gunshots—turning around, looking and asking a question instead of immediately ducking—riffed on a perceived lack of alarm. That same night, after hugging her husband and her dog, Tsirkin saw comments where people criticized her as “clueless,” with some even suggesting the moment was staged. She calls the criticism “a little bit hurtful.”
“I do think I have a fairly good trauma response, just from having been through things, and…what [my parents] went through, and just being brought up with this sense of awareness, growing up in a city,” she says. “I’ve never been unaware, I guess, is what I’m trying to say—contrary to some of the comments on my meme.”
“People who were suggesting that I’d be the first one to go in a scary movie—that is so funny to me, because every time I watch a scary movie, I’m always like, ‘Why would she go into that house?’ Like, ‘why would they run into the woods?’ I don’t think I would ever do that.”
After the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Tsirkin had to start reporting from outside the hotel, wearing a scarf over her blue sequined gown. While she had been hiding under the table, some worst possible outcomes flashed through her mind.
“I did have a moment thinking, like, Oh gosh, my phone’s on the table—like, what if I die? I can’t even text my husband or my parents or my friends or see my dog again on my home screen’…When we jumped into work mode, I was looking out for everyone who was more panicked around me to try to stay calm, and that’s kind of what I [continued doing] on Saturday.”
Her husband, Gavi Reichman, also got in on the meme, using Tsirkin’s confused face in an Instagram post for PlayerVault, his sports memorabilia and autograph company. “I gave him permission, don’t worry,” she says with a laugh.
Tsirkin with now husband Gavi Reichman, whom she met at Rutgers. Photo: Courtesy of Julie Tsirkin and the Tsirkin family
As the glare of social media intensified, loved ones from back home rallied around Tsirkin.
“In typical Jersey fashion, I have the most loyal friends and family in the entire universe,” she says. “The night that Nightly News aired, my sister Pauline saw the broadcast. She said, ‘That’s gonna be a viral meme.’”
When it came time for Pauline’s birthday days later, Tsirkin had been so busy that she didn’t have much time to work on a present.
No worries—her sister said the gift had already arrived.
“Your video was the best present I’ve ever gotten in my 43 years,” she told Tsirkin.
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