The Forgotten and The Angry: A Search for the Trump Voter

Every day, as a new Trump embarrassment emerges from the White House, people ask, how did this happen?

Millions of words have now been written about the current state of our politics, our country and of our civic discourse. About the anger that abounds. Every publication, every cable channels, every journalist who covers politics, and many that don’t, have opined on how we got here.

There are as many theories as there are journalists, pundits, professors, and consultants. How did eight million voters who voted for Obama twice become Trump vote
rs? How did the political class miss what was going on among the group that Hillary Clinton called a “basket of deplorables,” while Obama talked of how
“they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them.”

Ben Bradlee Jr. went looking for answers and looking for America in Luzerne County Pennsylvania. What he found was both sobering and frightening and proof positive of two Americas. He reports it all in The Forgotten: How the People of One Pennsylvania County Elected Donald Trump and Changed America.

My conversation with Ben Bradlee, Jr.:

Ben Bradlee R.I.P.

The business of daily journalism is under siege. The practice of putting out a morning paper each and every day, of searching for scoops, of pushing, editing and curating great reporters and making sure that paper reaches your driveway each morning, is a craft that may soon be preserved in amber.

But forty years ago, the business reached what many thought was its apogee as The Washington Post lead the coverage a second rate, Washington D.C. burglary, that would become known as Watergate. While Woodward and Bernstein covered the story and got the scoops, they were led by Ben Bradlee, whose tenure, at Executive Editor of the Post, displayed the very best that journalism has to offer.

Back in May of 2012 I spoke with Jeff Himmelman, a one time Bob Woodward protege, who had written an authorized biography of Bradlee, Yours in Truth: A Personal Portrait of Ben Bradlee. It had stirred up some controversy, kicked at some of the sacred burial grounds of of Watergate and in some ways points to the news/entertainment  vortex we're in today.

My conversation from May 2012 with Jeff Himmelman about the great Ben Bradlee.