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The Town Where Trump Can Do No Wrong
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Mike Dang
Mike Dang 
Donald Trump arrives to speak at a campaign rally in Johnstown, Pa. in October 2016. (AP Photo/ Evan Vucci)
It’s been one year since Donald Trump was elected president and he hasn’t fulfilled many of his campaign promises, like building a wall or repealing Obamacare. For Politico, Michael Kruse visited a town in western Pennsylvania where voters helped win Trump the presidency and learned that many of them don’t care about what he has or hasn’t been able to achieve in office — they will support him no matter what. Here’s Kruse talking with Maggie Frear, a retired nurse:
He said he was going to bring back the steel mills.
“You’re never going to get those steel mills back,” she said.
“But he said he was going to,” I said.
“Yeah, but how’s he going to bring them back?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “but it’s what he said, last year, and people voted for him because of it.”
“They always say they want to bring the steel mills back,” Frear said, “but they’re going to have to do a lot of work to bring the steel mills back.”
He hasn’t built the wall yet, either. “I don’t care about his wall,” said Frear, 76. “I mean, if he gets his wall—I don’t give a shit, you know? But he has a good idea: Keep ’em out.”
He also hasn’t repealed Obamacare. “That’s Congress,” she said.
And the drug scourge here continues unabated. “And it’s not going to improve for a long time,” she said, “until people learn, which they won’t.”
“But I like him,” Frear reiterated. “Because he does what he says.”
What might account for this kind of devotion? As Kruse puts it, “his supporters here, it turns out, are energized by his bombast and his animus more than any actual accomplishments.” They feel angry, and identify themselves in Trump’s anger.
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
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Longreads
Longreads Photo by bass_nroll via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
This week, we’re sharing stories from Eliza Brooke, Aaron Cantú, Michael Kruse, Lucinda Chambers, and Lucas Reilly.
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1000 Days of Trump
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Catherine Cusick
Catherine Cusick Brendan Smialowski / AFP / Getty Images
It’s been 1000 days.
I doubt the definitive retrospective on this presidency and administration will ever exist. No one book or story, no matter how long, will be able to cover this kaleidoscopic history — let alone its fallout — in its entirety.
Three months after Trump was inaugurated on January 20, 2017, we shared a collection of longreads from Trump’s first 100 days in office in an attempt to capture a cross-section of some of the early, often breathless stories that came out of that hectic period of adjustment (and refusals to adjust). The month after, we looked back even further, examining his war with the past.
Here are some of the longreads from Trump’s first 1000 days that Longreads editors and contributors chose as some of the best political writing of each year, as well as all the stories about the presidency and the administration that headed up our Top 5 Longreads of the Week emails since Trump’s inauguration.
1. Donald Trump: He Was Made in America (Kirsten West Savali, The Root)
The question is not “Where did Donald Trump come from?” It’s “Where have our so-called allies been?” It is not “Why is he resonating with so many people?” Rather, it’s “How could he not?”
But we already know the answer to that.
“I don’t trust any journalist in the world more that Kirsten West Savali,” Kiese Laymon wrote in 2016, when he picked this story as one of the best political analyses of that year. Written eight months before the election, Laymon singled this piece out for making it clear “to any one willing to listen what this nation was going to do on November 2” — and for anticipating so many clear answers to questions that are somehow still being asked years later.
2. The First White President (Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic)
“Few writers have done more to expose the racist truth of the Trump presidency than Ta-Nehisi Coates,” Longreads Founder Mark Armstrong wrote while highlighting this excerpt from We Were Eight Years in Power as some of the best political writing of 2017:
Replacing Obama is not enough—Trump has made the negation of Obama’s legacy the foundation of his own. And this too is whiteness. “Race is an idea, not a fact,” the historian Nell Irvin Painter has written, and essential to the construct of a “white race” is the idea of not being a nigger. Before Barack Obama, niggers could be manufactured out of Sister Souljahs, Willie Hortons, and Dusky Sallys. But Donald Trump arrived in the wake of something more potent—an entire nigger presidency with nigger health care, nigger climate accords, and nigger justice reform, all of which could be targeted for destruction or redemption, thus reifying the idea of being white. Trump truly is something new—the first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president. And so it will not suffice to say that Trump is a white man like all the others who rose to become president. He must be called by his rightful honorific—America’s first white president.
While reading one of its most iconic passages, Longreads editor and writer Danielle Jackson shares how this segment from Coates’ excerpt echoes James Baldwin’s commentary in the 1964 documentary Take This Hammer, on “the creation of a class of pariahs in America.”
3. The Loneliness of Donald Trump (Rebecca Solnit, LitHub)
The opposite of people who drag you down isn’t people who build you up and butter you up. It’s equals who are generous but keep you accountable, true mirrors who reflect back who you are and what you are doing.
Solnit’s Grimm fairy tale was one of our No. 1 story picks for 2017. For another poetic retrospective, read Brit Bennett’s essay on “Trump Time” in Vogue:
In Trump Time, the clock moves backward. The feeling that time itself is reversing might be the most unsettling aspect of a most unsettling year. What else is Make America Great Again but a promise to re-create the past? Through his campaign slogan, Trump seizes the emotional power of nostalgia, conjuring a glorious national history and offering it as an alternative to an uncertain future. He creates a fantasy for his base of white Americans but a threat for many others. After all, in what version of the past was America ever great for my family? “The good ol’ days?” my mother always says. “The good ol’ days for who?”
4. Johnstown Never Believed Trump Would Help. They Still Love Him Anyway (Michael Kruse, Politico)
He said he was going to bring back the steel mills.
“You’re never going to get those steel mills back,” she said.
“But he said he was going to,” I said.
“Yeah, but how’s he going to bring them back?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “but it’s what he said, last year, and people voted for him because of it.”
“They always say they want to bring the steel mills back,” Frear said, “but they’re going to have to do a lot of work to bring the steel mills back.”
He hasn’t built the wall yet, either. “I don’t care about his wall,” said Frear, 76. “I mean, if he gets his wall—I don’t give a shit, you know? But he has a good idea: Keep ’em out.”
He also hasn’t repealed Obamacare. “That’s Congress,” she said.
And the drug scourge here continues unabated. “And it’s not going to improve for a long time,” she said, “until people learn, which they won’t.”
“But I like him,” Frear reiterated. “Because he does what he says.”
Chris Smith, author of The Daily Show (The Book), contributor to Vanity Fair, and contributing editor at New York Magazine picked Kruse’s story as one of Longreads’ Best of 2017. Longreads Editor in Chief Mike Dang also selected it as an editor’s pick, alongside Adam Davidson’s New Yorker story, “Donald Trump’s Worst Deal.”
5. I Walked From Selma To Montgomery (Rahawa Haile, BuzzFeed)
Rahawa Haile’s story on hiking the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail was one of our No. 1 stories for 2018:
On Feb. 9, 2017, 20 days after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions was sworn in by Vice President Mike Pence as attorney general. The travesty of that sentence, the sinister potential of it more than a year later, fuels my anxiety still. It is the reason why, mere months after returning from the Appalachian Trail, I emailed my father on Feb. 22, 2017, to see if he might be interested in meeting me in Alabama for a thru-hike of sorts. I wanted to walk from Selma to Montgomery — following in the footsteps of the civil rights marchers who had come before me — to protest Jeff Sessions’ entire political career, specifically his most recent and wildly dangerous appointment as the head of the Department of Justice. […] I traveled to Selma, Alabama, because I had to, because no other walk on Earth made sense to me, or my rage, at a time when walking was the only activity for which my despair made a small hollow. And fam, let’s be clear — I did it for us.
6. How Russia Helped Swing the Election for Trump (Jane Mayer, The New Yorker)
Jane Mayer has written several blockbuster stories on the Trump administration, including this year’s “Fox & Friends” and 2017’s “The Danger of President Pence.” Here was another of our No. 1 stories for 2018:
Jamieson said that, as an academic, she hoped that the public would challenge her arguments. Yet she expressed confidence that unbiased readers would accept her conclusion that it is not just plausible that Russia changed the outcome of the 2016 election—it is “likely that it did.” […]
Her case is based on a growing body of knowledge about the electronic warfare waged by Russian trolls and hackers—whom she terms “discourse saboteurs”—and on five decades’ worth of academic studies about what kinds of persuasion can influence voters, and under what circumstances. Democracies around the world, she told me, have begun to realize that subverting an election doesn’t require tampering with voting machines. Extensive studies of past campaigns, Jamieson said, have demonstrated that “you can affect people, who then change their decision, and that alters the outcome.” She continued, “I’m not arguing that Russians pulled the voting levers. I’m arguing that they persuaded enough people to either vote a certain way or not vote at all.”
7. Trump Engaged in Suspect Tax Schemes as He Reaped Riches From His Father (Russ Buettner, Susanne Craig, and David Barstow, The New York Times)
Last year’s ground-breaking investigation into the potentially illegal financial schemes, tax evasions, and grandiose lies employed by the Trump family was one of our No. 1 stories for 2018.
President Trump participated in dubious tax schemes during the 1990s, including instances of outright fraud, that greatly increased the fortune he received from his parents, an investigation by The New York Times has found.
Mr. Trump won the presidency proclaiming himself a self-made billionaire, and he has long insisted that his father, the legendary New York City builder Fred C. Trump, provided almost no financial help.
But The Times’s investigation, based on a vast trove of confidential tax returns and financial records, reveals that Mr. Trump received the equivalent today of at least $413 million from his father’s real estate empire, starting when he was a toddler and continuing to this day.
Much of this money came to Mr. Trump because he helped his parents dodge taxes.
8. Hideous Men (E. Jean Carroll, The Cut)
E. Jean Carroll’s excerpt from her memoir, What Do We Need Men For?: A Modest Proposal was one of this year’s No. 1 stories:
Which brings me to the other rich boy. Before I discuss him, I must mention that there are two great handicaps to telling you what happened to me in Bergdorf’s: (a) The man I will be talking about denies it, as he has denied accusations of sexual misconduct made by at least 15 credible women, namely, Jessica Leeds, Kristin Anderson, Jill Harth, Cathy Heller, Temple Taggart McDowell, Karena Virginia, Melinda McGillivray, Rachel Crooks, Natasha Stoynoff, Jessica Drake, Ninni Laaksonen, Summer Zervos, Juliet Huddy, Alva Johnson, and Cassandra Searles. (Here’s what the White House said: “This is a completely false and unrealistic story surfacing 25 years after allegedly taking place and was created simply to make the President look bad.”) And (b) I run the risk of making him more popular by revealing what he did.
Further listening: The Daily covers this story in “Corroborating E. Jean Carroll,” which Longreads editors discuss on an episode of the Longreads Podcast, “All Things Being Unequal.”
Behind the Scenes of Longform Storytelling: A Reading List
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Em Perper
Em Perper Photo: Taylor Starek
That’s me in the photo. June, 2011: my first time interning at a daily newspaper and the first time I read Joan Didion. She blew my mind, of course. Eventually, I started sharing my favorite longform pieces on my personal blog, which led to a variety of opportunities, including my gig here at Longreads. If you’re new around these parts, like I was just a few years ago, the stories below will give you an idea of the strength and skill that goes into creating engaging literary journalism.
Each of the four stories below has been featured on Longreads before, minus the annotations, of course. The interviews with the authors are just as fascinating as the essays they’ve written. Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Adrian Chen, and Brian Kevin discuss their research methods, their writing style, and how they choose which details to include and which to let go. There are literally dozens of other Annotation Tuesday stories I could’ve featured — it was hard to pick just three! — so be sure to take a look for yourself on the Nieman Storyboard website.
1. “Annotation Tuesday! Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah and ‘If He Hollers Let Him Go.’” (Elon Green, October 2014)
Part of successful longform storytelling is a seamless blend of the macro and micro. In recounting her journey to Yellow Springs, Ohio — where comic Dave Chappelle lives, where he grew up, in part — Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah does just that. She never interviews Chappelle himself; she interviews several of the people surrounding him, including his mother, scholar Yvonne Seon, and Neal Brannan, co-creator of “Chappelle’s Show.” Ghansah and Elon Green share a fascinating back-and-forth about the impossibility of objectivity, the n-word, and comedy as a weapon.
2. “Annotation Tuesday! Adrian Chen and ‘Unfollow.’” (Katia Savchuk, January 2017)
Tech reporter Adrian Chen — formerly of Gawker, now The New Yorker — wrote a marvelous profile of Megan Phelps-Roper, who was once a devoted member of the Westboro Baptist Church. When Phelps-Roper took over the church’s social media accounts, her life changed. In between hate speech and emojis, she engaged with people of different backgrounds and worldviews. Chen explains that it took a long time for Megan to feel comfortable opening up to him and sharing her story publicly. But when she did open up to Chen, she gave him access to her emails, her journals, even her private messages on the Words With Friends app. They spoke for hours, and the result is a nuanced portrait that demonstrates the nonlinear nature of healing.
3. “Michael Kruse and the Woman Who Disappeared in Her Own Home.” (Paige Williams, August 2012)
I remember reading this piece when it was first published in 2011. I was interning at a daily newspaper and learning about feature writing and reporting for the first time. Michael Kruse and the Tampa Bay Times (previously the St. Petersburg Times) came highly recommended to me, and this story, “A Brevard Woman Disappeared, but Never Left Home” — is a contemporary classic. Journalist and professor Paige Williams dissects the story on an educational basis; Kruse answers her questions and adds commentary.
4. “Annotation Tuesday! (Back to School Edition): Josh Roiland and His ‘Literary Journalism in America’ Syllabus.” (Josh Roiland, August 2015)
During my senior year of undergrad, I embarked on an independent study of longform journalism — reading hundreds of essays, interviewing Ben Montgomery, and analyzing what makes different stories tick. Ready to embark on an independent study of your own? There’s no better place to start than this syllabus — I wish it had been around when I was in school. Roiland, presently an assistant professor with the Department of Communication and Journalism at the University of Maine, goes into glorious detail about each of his reading selections.
Longreads Best of 2017: Political Writing
Posted by Longreads
Longreads We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in political writing.
Gabriel Sherman
Special correspondent for Vanity Fair and author of the New York Times best-selling biography of Roger Ailes.
The French Origins of ‘You Will Not Replace Us’ (Thomas Chatterton Williams, The New Yorker)
Anyone wanting to understand the forces that propelled Donald Trump to power needs to read Thomas Chatterton Williams’s fascinating profile of the French racial theorist Renaud Camus. Camus — no relation to Albert — popularized the alt-right theory that Muslim immigrants are reverse colonizing “white” Western Europe through mass migration. He is an unlikely progenitor of a political movement built around closing borders and preserving traditional culture. Camus works out of a 14th-century chateau and once wrote a travel book that describes itself as “a sexual odyssey — man-to-man.” Allan Ginsberg once said, “Camus’s world is completely that of a new urban homosexual; at ease in half a dozen countries.” While Williams doesn’t shy away from shining a light on the ugly racism that underpins Camus’s writings, he challenges liberals to reckon with the social and cultural effects of immigration in an increasingly globalized world. Read more…
New York in the 1970s Gave Us Hip Hop, Madonna, and the Chip on Trump’s Shoulder
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Ben Huberman
Ben Huberman Image by Bin im Garten (CC BY-SA 3.0)
New York’s chaotic 1970s — when the city was on the brink of bankruptcy and crime rates reached record highs — have been mythologized as the last great period of unfettered, gritty creativity before yuppies, and later hipsters, ruined everything. It’s a complicated narrative, and the election of Donald Trump, a city-hating city-dweller, makes it even more so. Here’s a man who’s unquestionably among the most provincial New Yorkers of all time, yet he’s just as unquestionably an iconic one. And his rise to prominence came about right at that moment when New York was (supposedly) at its worst and at its best. Michael Kruse, writing at Politico, dives into what we might call Trump’s Studio 54 period, the years when desperate politicians allowed Trump to build an impressive real estate portfolio underwritten by huge tax breaks, and when public (specifically, Manhattan elite) derision shaped his politics of resentment for decades to come.
If he had expected New York to grant respect the way it had handed out tax breaks and opportunities for sheer publicity, he was mistaken. Critics in the pages of the Times called him “overrated” and “totally obnoxious.” It bothered him that he could put up such a glossy building and still be so readily dismissed as an arriviste. “If I were Gerry Hines in Houston,” he told Marie Brenner for a profile in New York magazine in 1980, referring to the billionaire real estate entrepreneur in Texas, “I would be the most important man in the city—but here, you bang your head against the wall to try to get some nice buildings up, and what happens? Everybody comes after you.”
But Trump attacked New York, too. He had, for instance, valuable art deco friezes jackhammered off the face of the Bonwit Teller building during its demolition—even after he had promised to donate them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was a literal and visceral assault against the exact sort of New Yorker who found him so distasteful.
They were “nothing,” Trump said. They were “junk.”
They were not, said a man from the Met. “They were irreplaceable architectural documents.”
“Obviously,” huffed an editorial in the Times, “big buildings do not make big human beings.”
‘No Woman’s Career Is Straight’
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Mark Armstrong
Mark Armstrong Image via hillaryclinton / Flickr
In conversations, though, with many of them over the past couple weeks, they all agreed: This, in the end, is probably how it had to be. A woman who operated purely as a feminist would have condemned herself to fighting a permanently outside fight. And a woman who never tested the limits of the role she agreed to play—tested it over and over—wouldn’t have built the thick skin and the savvy needed to keep going.
“Those experiences and changes she made to forge a path are so reflective of women of her generation,” said Sally McMillen, a 1966 Wellesley grad who recently retired as a professor of history, and women’s history, at Davidson College in North Carolina. “I have always maintained that our generation was the transition generation for women, pulled by traditions but grabbing for new opportunities as we could—constant compromises and even reinventing ourselves as needed.”
-At Politico Magazine, Michael Kruse has an outstanding history of Hillary Clinton’s career — and the compromises and concessions she had to make along the way.
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Posted by Longreads
Longreads Photo: Bob Jagendorf
Below, our favorite stories of the week.
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RNC vs. DNC: A Reading List Examining the Conventions
Posted by Em Perper
Em Perper In the past two weeks, Cleveland, Ohio hosted the Republican National Convention and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania hosted the Democratic National Convention. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton earned the nominations from their respective parties; they will face off in November. Not everyone is thrilled with this outcome. Ted Cruz urged delegates to vote with their conscience and didn’t endorse Trump, and Bernie Sanders supporters walked out of the DNC or protested outside the convention. I’m equally intrigued and exhausted by the political realm right now, so I’m relying on the thoughtful analyses and on-the ground reporting by talented writers.
1. “The R.N.C. on TV: Ivanka’s Weaponized Graciousness.” (Emily Nussbaum, The New Yorker, July 2016)
The dangerous choices of the postergirl for the Family Trump, who, you know, probably isn’t actually a Republican. If you haven’t read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s short story about Melania Trump, read that, too. Read more…
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