Politics, Loyalty, and Survival: A Conversation with Salena Zito

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Journalist and author Salena Zito will join Hudson Senior Fellow Paul Sracic to discuss her new book Butler: The Untold Story of the Near Assassination of Donald Trump and the Fight for America’s Heartland. Zito’s work offers insight into the communities and cultural forces driving American politics during President Donald Trump’s campaign for reelection and in the wake of the assassination attempt at his Butler, Pennsylvania, rally. Drawing on years of on-the-ground reporting, she explores the values, frustrations, and loyalties shaping the nation’s political realignment.

Event Transcript

This transcription is automatically generated and edited lightly for accuracy. Please excuse any errors.

Paul Sracic:

Good afternoon. I’m Paul Sracic, adjunct fellow here at the Hudson Institute, and it’s my pleasure to welcome you to today’s event featuring our distinguished speaker, Salena Zito, who will discuss her new book, Butler: The Untold Story of the Near Assassination of Donald Trump and the Fight for America’s Heartland. Salena Zito, as you all probably know, is a national political reporter for the Washington Examiner and a special contributor to The Washington Post as of today. She’s also a New York Times bestselling author.

Salena Zito:

Number one.

Paul Sracic:

Her book is number one on the nonfiction charts today, so we are so happy to have her here today. If you’re familiar with my work, you know that President Trump and I don’t always agree on all the issues. But the one thing we do agree on is that Salena Zito is the best political reporter in the country right now, and I would argue she’s been the best political reporter for the last 10 years. In 2015, 2016, she was among the first to recognize how Donald Trump’s message was resonating with working class voters, many of whom were former Democrats. She continues to amplify their voices with unmatched insights.

This is a bit of an unusual event here for the Hudson Institute. We focus here on foreign policy and international affairs, usually not domestic politics. Domestic politics, however, defines the parameters for US foreign policy. Arguably, this has always been the case. Whether our concern is with the situation in Ukraine, in the Middle East, on the Korean Peninsula and the Taiwan Straits, it is becoming increasingly clear that we need to learn to engage with the voters and the places that Salena Zito writes about.

Before I bring Salena up here, I want to share a quick confession. When I began reading Salena’s book to prepare for this event, I thought I would already know the story she was telling. After all, I’ve known Salena for over a decade and we spoke or texted almost every week during the campaign. And even after the Butler incident. I assumed I had the full picture of what happened during that time period. I was badly mistaken. Salena has a remarkable ability to see the larger narrative where many of us only see the fragments, and that’s the story that she’s going to share with us today.

So with that, please join me in giving a warm welcome to Salena Zito.

Salena Zito:

Thanks, Paul. Thanks you guys, or as we say from Pittsburgh, thanks yinz. Anybody from Pittsburgh? Oh, thank God. Someone. I really appreciate being here and it’s really quite an honor, and I should tell you that Paul is widely quoted in the book, and he’s always someone I rely on to agree with and disagree with. But, his understanding of the working class and understanding of international issues and sort of how they converge in ways that people don’t think about is really, really important in helping me report everything that has happened in this country. I was born in Pittsburgh. My family first came here, not the Italian side, they didn’t come till the 1900s, family came to this country in the 1630s, settled in Butler in the 1740s, and so my family has been very rooted in the region.

Throughout the book, you will learn, if you read it, how important rootedness and place has to do in American politics in ways we don’t often think about. Strategists often miss it, pollsters totally miss it, and very few politicians actually get it. I can name four that are very good at it. Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, Dave McCormick, the republican senator from Pennsylvania, John Fetterman, Democrat senator from Pennsylvania and Donald Trump.

Now, I should tell you a little bit about my background first. I’ve been a waitress. I’ve worked in a sewerage treatment plant. I’ve been a cafeteria lady at the local high school and been a shampoo girl. I really have an understanding of what it’s like to grind it out in the working class, and those are the people in the communities that have surrounded me all my life, even the people that make it to the C-suites and make it to become CEOs or become small business owners that start as a landscaping company and then become a construction company and then all of a sudden are millionaires. A lot of them their influence isn’t power in the way that we think of it in D.C. Power in D.C. is very, very different than power in the middle of the country. Power has to do with you are two blocks from your grandchildren and three blocks from your parents, and that matters a lot more than what kind of bonus you might get from your company. There’s so much more value in that. And that sense of place impacts in how people vote and keeps people out of the silos that you think that they belong in.

In particular, in counties in this country that are important. Most important county in the entire country is not located in Washington D.C. It’s not located outside Washington D.C. It’s not located in the suburbs of New York City. It’s Erie County, Pennsylvania. Hands down. Period. That’s it. It’s the most important county. Those people will tell you how an election is going to turn out. Mostly they voted for Democrats, but they have swung wildly in the past three cycles. Fetterman, Shapiro, McCormick, Trump, Trump again, Biden and Trump again, so it’s important to pay attention in my profession to the people that decide elections as opposed to people who say really cool things on Twitter or say really great intellectual thoughts on cable news. They’re great. They’re really, really smart. But they’re not telling you what’s happening in this country.

The challenge that has been in our country in journalism, but also academia, don’t get mad at me, think tanks, institutions of all sorts, corporations, Hollywood, even the NFL, these are all pretty much centrally located in seven super zip codes across the country in D.C. and New York. This doesn’t make them bad. That just means they don’t have cultural connection to the people that they’re trying to influence or trying to get to buy their products or trying to send their kids to their school or trying to find themselves being reflected naturally in a news story.

Another part of the big problem with my profession is that I don’t think y’all realize the massive news desert that is in the country. Family-run newspapers, which used to have a guy who sat in the same pew with you at church and coached your kid in little league who was also the cops reporter, those are gone. And with them goes that pressure on local authorities to do the right thing, the power is not being held accountable. But also, when a big national news story happens, when a big tragedy happens, their story is not being told in a real and authentic way, and oftentimes they look like zoo animals. Nothing would be more, a great example of that than East Palestine, Ohio. My great-grandfather was born in East Palestine, Ohio. He actually ran as a free-silver Democrat for state rep in that historic election of 1896.

East Palestine, it was awful. I don’t live far from there. As soon as it happened, I was there. I was on the ground. I was there every day. I would go home with terrible headaches. I felt very bad for the people that, that was their home and something they loved, and it was now forever changed. The way that the press covered it, the way that the administration comported it, was shameful. These were people’s lives and it was not treated with the respect that they deserved.

I’ll remember covering Donald Trump coming to the site maybe a week later. He was with J.D. Vance, a brand new US senator, and it was a really crappy Appalachian day, like the kind you find in every February. It’s gray, it’s raining, it’s snowing, it’s all the things. But he shows up, and at the time, if you remember February 2023, President Trump was down in the polls to Ron DeSantis. This is February 2023, people are not happy with him after 2022. There was a level of expectation that the Republicans were going to take the US Senate. People blamed him for the people that he supported, and they did not win. So people were mad and they didn’t know what all this lawfare meant, and they kind of were unhappy with the chaos, and he was down in the polls to DeSantis by 14 points in the first New Hampshire poll, and it was not a good time for him.

He shows up, he rolls in on an 18-wheeler filled with water, which is something that people needed there. In fact, there was two 18-wheelers filled with water. It was Trump water because he’s Trump. Okay. Let’s not pretend anything different. But then he gets jumps out of that truck and he’s got galoshes on and his pants tucked in them, he’s got a trench coat and a hat. The day was so ugly out, and he walks around with the people that live there. He sees them. He listens to them. He tells them that. Nine days later he’s ahead of the polls and he never looks back in that primary. If there’s two towns that tell us everything about American politics in 2023 and 2024, it was East Palestine and 42 miles to the west in Butler, Pennsylvania. These are the people that decide elections.

The book will take you on an exploration as to why he went to Butler. Nobody knows where Butler is. It’s just this far away county that’s sort of on the Ohio State line. It’s rural. It’s its industrial. There is a wealthy section of people that want to get out of Allegheny County. Allegheny County is the county that surrounds the city of Pittsburgh. Taxes are ridiculous. I’m one of the people that moved out. And so there’s right along the line of Allegheny and Butler, there’s new wealth. When I was a kid, that was rural farms. Today it’s wealthy. But there’s also industrial, there’s rural, a ton of agriculture in that county, and it’s my favorite place to go see a rodeo every summer.

Presidents don’t go to Butler. There’s only been two United States presidents who have campaigned for president in Butler. Those are JFK and Donald Trump. That’s it. Along with Shapiro and Fetterman and McCormick. That’s his secret sauce. And so the book will take you through what happened that day. I was supposed to interview him. I was with my daughter, she’s a photojournalist. If you look at the book, my daughter took that photo. She’s a photojournalist. We were supposed to interview him five minutes before the event. And then when you’re a reporter, you expect nothing to be as planned. Five minutes before, then that change to five minutes after, and then I get a phone call from Susie Wiles, who at the time was a co–campaign chair, is now the president’s chief of staff, and she said, so, hey, the President was wondering if you’d like to fly to Bedminster. Didn’t have that on my Bingo card, but okay, we’ll do the interview there, and then I would get back home.

And so about five minutes before the President is supposed to go out the campaign press lead, his name was Michel Picard III, a lovely young man, he grabs me and my daughter and my son-in was there too. We had vainly brought, my daughter and I, vainly believed we would make him carry the lighting equipment and we wouldn’t get hot and sweaty. Well, when it’s 101 degrees, you get hot and sweaty just by breathing. And so he grabs us and says, it’s go time. I’m like, guess they changed their mind again. I get taken. They weave through the crowd. We get behind the stage. President Trump does this thing called a click line. I think a lot of politicians do this. Where they’ll have local law enforcement and local do-gooders, people who have done things of significance in the community, and oftentimes he’ll grab 20 people out of the crowd. They get to go back and meet him. It’s actually very endearing. There’s a lot of hugs. There’s a lot of conversations about what they do in their life.

So that’s where he is, and I asked Picard, where are we doing this interview? And he’s like, I don’t know. He goes around this blue curtain and President Trump tells, him he just wanted to say hi to me. I was like, okay. So I go around and he always says my name, Salena, and he asked about my grandchildren. That’s mostly what we talked about. We have five minutes together and we both talked about how much we love our grandchildren and what they’ve been doing lately, and that was it. Then he said, I’ll see you on the plane. Look forward to the interview.

I go out because Lee Greenwood’s song is coming on. If you watch a Trump rally or if you’ve attended one, that’s the song that comes on when he walks out. That’s why we captured that photo because as he’s walking out we’re sort of going into the buffer. The buffer is the area traditionally just for Secret Service and photographers. I was a rare journalist that’s ever in there. Now my daughter would be right there, she’s a photographer. And then Picard said, just sort of work your way around and end up over on the other side because the motorcade will grab you and we’ll go after the event. So she grabs some photos of him walking up. There’s a significance to that photo. It was really important that we use that for the cover because you see that transactional relationship between him and the people that vote for him. He feeds off of them, they feed off of him. And that’s important to understand. People think occult, that’s what it is. Now, that’s about being seen. People want to be seen. He wants to be seen, but so do people. These are the people that both parties really, really ignore.

We make our way over to the other side. He does two things he never done before that I’ve seen. He puts a chart down. Now, once in a while he’ll do a chart, but it’s at the end on the other side. So this chart goes down. I’m like, “What is he, Ross Perot? What is going on here?” And then he does something, and this goes back to that photo. He does something that he never does. He never turns his face away from the crowd. Now, he might turn his body to look in different ways, but he’ll never turn his neck around, and he does that. It’s at that moment that those four shots go right over my head and right over my daughter’s head. I watch him. I see this blood streak across his face. I watch him grab his ear, and I go watch him go down.

I’m probably the distance right here between Paul and myself. So I’m that close. There is a sea of Secret Service that’s around him. At the same time, there’s four more shots. I don’t get down. There’s this thing, oftentimes people talk about trauma and time slows down. That was true for me as well. It was more like layers of time. It felt like everything was happening in a layer. And so I kept working. I knew there was something in front of me that was happening. I have a gift that God gave me, and that’s as a reporter, so I have an obligation to fulfill my purpose. I’m also a history nerd. I don’t know how many witness to history books I’ve read about McKinley, and Lincoln, and Reagan, and Kennedy. So I knew I had a job to do.

A few seconds after the shots rang out, the second set, the second round, Picard takes me down like hard, he just tackles me and then lays on top of me. There’s some very iconic photos of him covering me and protecting me, which I thought was amazing. I only met the kids six hours earlier, right? A 28-year-old kid, cancer survivor. I don’t know him all that well, and yet he’s taken this protective stance. The president, I watched the president. There’s a funny moment here because I can see him, I can see he’s okay. I understood he was at least mobile, and I can hear him arguing with the agents about putting his shoes on, which was a little bit funny. I can say that now in the aftermath. I didn’t say it was funny. And the crowd is chanting USA. And I just have this peculiar angle that I can see him saying USA.

He’s not shouting it, but I can see him mouthing along rhythmically. And then he gets up, and they want to take him off the stage. He goes, “Wait, wait, wait, wait,” and he turns around and he does the fight, fight, fight. Now, the next morning, President Trump will call me bright and early in the morning and say, “Hi, Salena. This is President Donald J. Trump,” like I don’t know that, right? I mean, his voice is pretty. And before I could say anything he said, “I just want to make sure you and Shannon are okay. And I also, I want to apologize for not doing the interview.” Then I did something that’s not going to make my parents proud. I swore like a truck driver. And I was also embarrassed that I did that in front of the president. But I said, “Are you bleeping kidding me? Sir, you’ve just been shot. I feel like I’m okay with the interview.”

He would go on to call me seven more times that day. We had some profound conversations about God, and faith, and purpose. I could tell he was going through something. I was going through something. It’s hard to put your finger on it. Everybody reacts in very, very different ways. I almost felt like out of body, just watching myself think about what this all meant, and he was having the same thing too. I didn’t press him. I could tell he was going through something. And he came to the conclusion that he had purpose, and that God was there in that moment, and that he had an obligation to live up to that purpose if he became president again. Now, I only asked him one question at the time on the record. I got his permission to talk about our other conversations for the book, and they’re very moving in the book.

But I asked him why he said, fight, fight, fight. And he said, “Salena, nobody is going to believe me,” you know how he talks. “But I wasn’t Donald J. Trump in that moment. I was representing the country, America, United States. I was representing everything that we stand for, the grit, the exceptionalism, the getting up when you get put to kick down and being resilient, and having resolve. And so I knew I had to do that. I had to do that. We could not let anybody think that anybody has hurt this country, that has cracked what is so important to who we are. And so that’s why I did it. I knew it would have an impact not just on the people that were there.” And by the way it did. That place was immediately, everything was very zen, which is wild when you think about it. And he also knew that there could be chaos in streets if he had been taken out on a stretcher. Walked off in the gravel in his socks, very different imagery, very different, and not as symbolic as the country could possibly be.

And so the book will go on to teach you so many things that you did not know that happened in that election cycle. As Paul alluded to, I don’t fly. Not because I’m afraid to. I don’t take the interstate. I won’t take the turnpike home when I go back to Pittsburgh tonight, which I can’t `wait to go back to. I only take the back roads. That’s where I understand what is happening in the country. I talk to people in the barbershops. You talk to people in their homes and their diners, and their small businesses, and wherever they are, there has been a real lack of respect for the middle of the country from both parties, and priorities have not been their priorities. And so you really quickly find out how much this country has changed. I kept writing about the youth vote was changing.

I kept writing about the black vote was changing. In fact, the black vote is not the black vote, or it’s not the Asian vote, and it’s not the Hispanic vote, and it’s not the white vote. We keep putting people in silos in my profession, that’s BS. People vote their community. They don’t vote their race. I mean, some will, but most people vote like, “What’s best for my family? What’s best for my community? Who’s talking to me about the things that I care about?” Well, it wasn’t Harris and it wasn’t Biden. And that’s really something that wasn’t chronicled in the most authentic and our earnest way. And I remember just, there’s one section in the book, and I’ll leave you with this and we can go to our questions. There’s one section in the book where I’m in Erie County, I know Erie County like the back of my hand.

If you are working class from western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, Panhandle, West Virginia, Erie beaches were your ocean. That’s where you went on vacation. That’s the closest thing that you had to going to the beach. You went to Lake Erie. So we went to Lake Erie, and there’s been a significant loss in Erie County because of deindustrialization because of trade, because of internationalism, and because of tariffs. Sorry, sorry. I know the crowd. But if you all want to understand it, this is how you understand it. There have been losses. There is a reason there are 4,732 Steeler bars located all over the world, including Rome and Mexico, and in Hong Kong.

Why are there Steeler bars there? Because everybody freaking left because they couldn’t get a job because all the jobs were gone, and that is a loss. And they were still tied emotionally and traditionally to everything that the Steelers represented, everything that was good for them. And so they tried to recreate it in other places. I’m driving around, I’m going to interview then, Senator JD Vance. It’s his first visit to Erie County. Everyone’s talking about cats and cat women, and weird, everyone’s talking about weird. He’s weird. And JD Vance is a very talented young man, by the way, incredibly. It’s worth paying attention to this kid. He is a kid. He’s 39.

And because I’m going to interview the then senator, I have to go in the motorcade from point A to point B, because I’m interviewing him at the second stop, which was a diner, well, actually it’s called Gordon’s Butcher Shop. So I’m in the motorcade. It’s about a four-mile drive. And there’s all these reporters from New York Times, Washington Post, I think Politico, I forget, but DC based journalists are in the car. And they’re all looking down on their phones. And I’m pointing out, “That used to be GE where 10,000 people have a job and now 800 people do.” It’s now Webco or Webtech, I don’t know. They changed their names all the time.

“That used to be that,” I’m trying to show them why Erie is important and the change that was happening. And the other point I just looked down, they’re all looking at their phones. I’m like, they don’t care. They don’t care to know why this county matters. They don’t care to know that this county could change everything, and it did. It did. Erie changed everything in the McCormick race and in the Trump race, but they didn’t want to know the context of it. So that’s the challenge with my profession, but also all of our other cultural curators. That’s why you should read the book. Should I leave it here?

Paul Sracic:

Well, thank you so much.

Salena Zito:

Thank you.

Paul Sracic:

Thank you so much for being here today. Unfortunately, you’ve anticipated all my questions, so we can just move on now. But you have, some of the-

Salena Zito:

I’m really terrible. It’s been really busy. And I didn’t look at the questions, he told me he was going to ask me, so I’m sorry. But that shows you how much you and I are on the same page.

Paul Sracic:

Yeah, we think alike. We think alike. It’s funny because you told the story about diaspora from Pittsburgh, and I’m part of that because my father and mother were from outside of Pittsburgh, and I’m a Steelers fan, even though I grew up in New Jersey.

Salena Zito:

Johnstown.

Paul Sracic:

Johnstown, right.

Salena Zito:

Yeah.

Paul Sracic:

Because they brought the Steelers with them. And then I went full circle from New Jersey to Youngstown, Ohio.

Salena Zito:

You came back to the place.

Paul Sracic:

That’s true. That’s true. This is unusual, right? Because I get to ask you questions.

Salena Zito:

I know.

Paul Sracic:

Normally you have to ask me all the questions, right?

Salena Zito:

I’m usually hammering him on questions.

Paul Sracic:

I want to start with a quote from your book, which is, “Our current reporters in the national media don’t understand how a doctor, a rural farmer, Hispanic small business owner, and a street worker from Butler could be all voting the same.” And I thought about this because back in 2016 and when we first started talking about politics, and she educated me about what was going to happen in 2016, including on election night when she called me up and said, “I told you he was going to win.” But after that election, I’m the former chair of the Department of Politics at Youngstown State University, so I was living in Youngstown just north of East Palestine. And it’s pronounced Palestine, by the way, not Palestine, just like it’s Vienna, Ohio, not Vienna. We have our own pronunciations in Ohio of things.

Salena Zito:

Oh, like Versailles and Versailles.

Paul Sracic:

So anyway, after that election, I decided to look at something called the political abstracts. So you can see how different precincts voted in an area, different political subdivisions. So I looked around Youngstown because I wanted to figure out, because Youngstown was one of those places that used to be very blue, right? Very democratic, and suddenly it’s—

Salena Zito:

It’s the center of the earthquake.

Paul Sracic:

Yeah. It was becoming Republican. But I wondered where that took place within the area, because it wasn’t the city of Youngstown.

Salena Zito:

Right.

Paul Sracic:

But it was really the suburbs that moved around it. And what I found was the biggest movement from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party was not in the most working class suburbs. It was actually in a place called Boardman, Ohio where I lived at the time. And I thought about my neighbors around me. They were lawyers, small business owners, school teachers, all in my neighborhood. So what I’m wondering is we have these different terms, working class voters, blue collar voters, white working class voters. We don’t seem to know how to define those Trump voters. So can you help us with that a little bit?

Salena Zito:

Sure.

Paul Sracic:

How do you define these new voters?

Salena Zito:

I often think of it as the placed and the placeless. How many of you are from somewhere else in Washington, D.C.? Okay, so how many of you were born in Washington, D.C., and never left? Okay. So how many of you, since you’re all from somewhere else, feel very rooted to your hometown? Like you share its values, it’s important to you. Okay, you are placed. That defines you, the traditions that came before you and your family and your community and the traditions that are still there. Those are the people that are often missed in American elections. And it’s really hard, if you’re a strategist or a pollster or whatever, trying to figure out how to penetrate and understand how much place means to someone. But it is defining.

That’s why so many people missed that Black, white, Hispanic, Asian, working class were all voting in unison because they’re voting for the community. They’re voting for their family. They’re voting for the ability to live by their grandchildren and live by their parents. And that’s really, really hard to try to figure out when you’re a pollster. It’s a multi-layer question to get at the heart of it. That’s why a lot of people were missed.

Look, most of the people that are in the upper middle class in Boardman, how many generations do you think that’ve been there?

Paul Sracic:

Forever.

Salena Zito:

Forever? Forever.

Paul Sracic:

Forever. And mostly with the blue-collar background too.

Salena Zito:

Right, right. The Pittsburgh Steelers are not called the Pittsburgh Google, even though Google employs more people than steel does right now, currently. That’s going to change.

But why? Why aren’t we called that? Well, people that live in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, that vote for Trump, their grandfather and their father worked at US Steel. They still identify with that work ethic, the traditions that go along with it, even the religion that goes along with it. You go to church, you go home, you have dinner, or you have Sunday supper, which is usually around 1:00, and you watch a Steelers game.

That’s hard to figure out when you’re a pollster. You can’t nail that person because you don’t know how to get to that nugget. And it doesn’t matter what their race is. They’re looking at people that are speaking to them in an effective and emotional way.

Paul Sracic:

Thanks. You don’t only talk about the Trump campaign in your book. You also talk about the Harris campaign and how inept—

Salena Zito:

Yep, I covered it.

Paul Sracic:

First of all, what do you think her biggest mistake was in ’24? And, this is a question I’ve been dying to ask you, do you think she would’ve won Pennsylvania if she had chosen Josh Shapiro instead of Tim Walz?

Salena Zito:

No. No. Josh Shapiro, you’ll find out in the book about Josh Shapiro and why he wasn’t the vice president. I don’t think it’s what everybody thinks. He’s a guy that understands place.

There’s not one big mistake. It’s a multitude of . . . It’s a confederacy of bad decisions. It is an inability to talk to the press. It’s an inability to engage with people. There was not one event in Pennsylvania, and I covered dozens of them, that was open to the public for Harris. Not one. You had to be member of SEIU, Social Justice Union, or a Democratic Committee member to get anywhere near in the room, not close to her, but in the room with her.

People want to kick the tires, man. They want to see what you’re all about. They do not want to be held at arm’s length. They want to know that you’re authentic, that you hear what they’re talking about. Not a series of . . . She spoke like she had read a bunch of tweets that someone she likes said, and that was it. There wasn’t an aspiration to be part of something bigger than self.

Paul Sracic:

I want to talk to you a little bit about President Trump and his voters, that relationship between them. A lot of people expected, because we think of Trump voters as restraintist isolationists, that there would be this big backlash against President Trump when he decides to bomb the nuclear facilities in Iran. But that didn’t happen.

Salena Zito:

No.

Paul Sracic:

Can you explain to them a little bit why that didn’t happen?

Salena Zito:

Yeah, absolutely. Again, it goes back to aspiration, part of something bigger than self.

I just happened to be at the steel mill that day, the US Steel mill in West Mifflin, Pennsylvania, Irvin Works. I was with a bunch of the steel workers, and it happened. They were cheering it. Why? Because they were made the bombs. They made the planes. They were part of something taking out of something, taking out something that was potentially harmful to them or their families or their next generation. They loved that. It was a facility, not people.

That’s another one of those nuances, where you don’t understand why people are tied to something, but they are in ways that we don’t imagine. That’s why it’s important to listen to people where they are. That’s why it’s important to people go to places where they are. That’s why it’s important what Trump does, Shapiro does, Fetterman, McCormick. I keep saying that over and over again, but those four guys, and Vance too, those guys get it.

Paul Sracic:

A little bit related to this, you talked a little bit about this already, you talked about trade. But I want to delve into that a little bit more because I think it’s of interest to many people in this audience.

Salena Zito:

Uh-oh.

Paul Sracic:

Can you help—

Salena Zito:

I’m going to have an unpopular . . . Yes.

Paul Sracic:

Well, you’ve already talked a little bit about this under the sense of place and how it relates to Trump’s approach to international trade. But if you could talk to foreign leaders and advise them about how to approach the president in matters of trade, what would you tell them? What would you suggest to them is important to him, that needs to be emphasized, when we talk about trade agreements?

Salena Zito:

One of the things that this is a really weird nuance, and I found this out in the first book that I wrote, and I just repeated in the second one. People like bilateral, one-on-one trade. I’m going to work with you. I’m not going to work with all of you, just one guy, rather than a whole contingent of foreign leaders. So there’s that.

In terms of what would be the advice, he likes to make a deal. Look at Nippon. He likes to make a deal. He’s always willing to make a deal, but he always wants that deal to be the best thing for the American worker.

He has a powerful relationship with the working class, and I saw that on display the first time I interviewed him for The Atlantic. It’s in that moment that I said, “Voters take you seriously, but not literally.” A lot of people have stolen that. “My profession takes you literally, everything literally that you said, but they don’t take you particularly seriously.” They still don’t. That’s not changed. Nothing has changed.

In that first interview, after the interview, and this has become a running joke between him and I, ever since that first interview where he always says, “You want to go out on stage with me?” I’m like, “No, sir.”

But in that first interview, we leave the green room. He goes, “Come on. Take a walk with me.” No cameras. I’m not recording anything. He’s just taking a walk. Just him and I and his security. And he goes around, and he talks to the janitors. He goes around and talks to the guys pushing the carts full of water, the caterers, the plumbers, the electricians, everyone that’s working to make this convention look beautiful from the outside. They’re in the back. Nobody sees them. They’re the busy working bees.

And I watch those conversations that happen, and they’re, “What’s your life like? What do you do? What’s your family like? Where are you from? Why do you live here?” He has this unbelievable curiosity.

People think, “Oh”, and I remember thinking this too when he first ran, “he lives in a gold tower in Manhattan.” He still loves gold. However, I’ve just been in the White House. It’s very gold.

But people forget. Has anybody seen the movie The Age of Innocence, the Scorsese movie? It’s about all the different layers of New York elites and how much new money was looked down on. This is a hundred years ago. It still holds true. He was from the outer borough, and his dad was German, his mom was from Scotland. They punched their way up. And he made it, but he made it off of the backs of the men and women in the construction business, in real estate. Where did he spend most of his time? On those construction sites, whether it was apartment building or a tower or a casino. That’s where his comfort level was. It wasn’t with the C-suite guys at this event. It was in Pittsburgh at a shale conference where he glowed, where he really felt connective tissue, was talking to those people.

Paul Sracic:

Do you think it’s partially his background too, in construction too?

Salena Zito:

Yeah.

Paul Sracic:

That as he was growing up, these were people that he worked with.

Salena Zito:

Yeah.

Paul Sracic:

We dressed and he learned from. I want to move to Ukraine for a second.

Salena Zito:

Okay.

Paul Sracic:

President Trump has recently taken a more aggressive approach towards Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. How do you think the president and his supporters understand the danger that Russia represents, not just to Ukraine, but also to the Baltics, to Europe? And do you sense any conflicts between President Trump, Vice President Vance, and Secretary Rubio over the situation in Ukraine?

Salena Zito:

No, not at all. I think you can hold two very different opinions at the same time. You cannot want to be involved in a war. You can not want to . . . Of course, we’ll always help Ukraine. You can also not want us to hold the largest burden in saving and protecting Ukraine.

He has shown great empathy. I don’t know if you’ve seen that interview between him and the Ukrainian reporter. She talked about her husband on the front lines. You just saw that moment with him, and you understood that he has great empathy and sympathy and wants the war over.

He does not like war, period. He doesn’t want war. He also wants to protect the country. His patience with Russia, I would accurately say, is done. He’s done.

Paul Sracic:

I was thinking there was a photograph that just came out with him and President Zelensky, and it’s a classic photograph. You keep seeing pictures like that coming out of this administration, classic pictures.

Again, going back to 2015, I remember I was in Cleveland in August of 2015. It was the first Republican debate. A lot of people we don’t even remember ran for president back in 2015. But seeing them live and watching how each of them acted, there was only one candidate on that stage who was completely aware of the camera all the time, this sense that he reacted to what everybody else said when he did it, whereas the other candidates didn’t seem to be aware that the camera could go on them at any minute. But he got that, that media savvy.

I don’t want to promote Jake Tapper’s book, but in Tapper’s new book, he talks about the walkthrough before the debate and how Trump was the only one who showed up. Biden doesn’t show up.

Salena Zito:

He took it very seriously.

Paul Sracic:

But Trump asks where the camera’s going to be during that. I wonder if this media savvy that he has, did that play into, you think, his reaction at Butler and also his whole presidency, how he operates at this understanding of the media?

Salena Zito:

Well, he understands image and projecting a strong image. Well, of course he understands cameras. He’s been in front of the camera since 1975. I’m old. I remember him with a construction fight he was having with City Hall in New York City over something his family was trying to build. He came with all the receipts. I remember him showing up. I can remember this press conference. As a kid, I loved the New York Post, just New York Post, just always the crazy headlines. It was just always fun to read. There was nothing like that in Pittsburgh. Yeah, he is definitely, he’s always known how to work the cameras. Absolutely. I would argue Vance does too.

Paul Sracic:

But you think that the, “Fight, fight, fight” was also an awareness that this was being covered, and there was—

Salena Zito:

Well, as I said in my talk, he understood that he needed to project strength for the people there, but obviously the people in the country.

Paul Sracic:

Do you think the speed of all the executive orders and things like that is also awareness of the low attention span of the press?

Salena Zito:

No, I think it has everything to do with purpose and God, everything. Look, the other day—people laugh at me when I say that—I’ll just give you an example how much this has impacted him.

The other day I was doing a . . . I interviewed the president. He famously before event said, “Where’s Salena?” Embarrassed the heck out of me because there’s all these people. That’s in his opening remarks. “Where’s Salena? She’s the best reporter in the Rust Belt. She loves the Rust, she loves the Belt.” It was really freaking funny.

But afterwards, we do the interview, and the photographer that’s with me has covered President Trump with me forever. Not particularly, he’s not very political, so it’s not his thing. But his dad loves President Trump. He told me that his father was terminally ill, and I had a book in my backpack. I have never asked the president for anything. It’s unethical. “Can I have that? Can I have that pen?” Whatever.

But I took my book, and after it was over, I said, “Mr. President, the photographer, you know him, his father is ill.” Just found out the night before. “Would you sign a book for him? I don’t mean to ask you to do something, but I think it would lift his spirits.”

“Of course, Zito.” Grabs a book, he signs it, and he looks over at the photographer and you can tell that the photographer is very moved. And he said, “Roll that video, kid. I’ll give your dad something really special.” He holds the book up with his dad’s name on the front of it and his signature. And he says to his dad, he says in the video, “You have a good boy. He works really hard. I’ve seen him hustle. I see him grind it out. I see him with Selena all the time. These two hustle. And your boy is a very hard worker.”

What Dad doesn’t want to hear that about their son? What dad doesn’t want to hear that? And he said, “God does things that we don’t expect, so don’t lose faith. And I can’t wait to meet you the next time I’m in town. Just make sure you make that happen.” And that was it. I looked up and there wasn’t a dry eye. It’s like all Secret Service guys and they’re like . . . So that is a long way of saying that everything he does, whether you like it or not, this is a man that understands that there’s no tomorrow guarantee. There’s absolutely no guarantee for a tomorrow.

Paul Sracic:

I have more questions, but I want to throw it open to the audience now since we’re running a little short on time. So if we have questions, please raise your hands. You want to pick or do you want me to . . .?

Salena Zito:

Just whatever, you guys pick.

Paul Sracic:

Gentleman up here.

John Gizzi:

Hi. Pleasure to listen to you. And I’m just kind of blown away by the things you say. Two quick questions for you, please. Paul—

Paul Sracic:

Can you introduce yourself? Sorry.

John Gizzi:

Oh, yeah. John Gizzi, White House correspondent for Newsmax and friend of Melissa Hart who told me about you years ago.

Salena Zito:

Oh, thanks, John.

John Gizzi:

And first the elephant in the room with this crowd I’m sure is Epstein. Does it resonate—

Salena Zito:

It’s not a thing.

John Gizzi:

Okay.

Salena Zito:

Not a thing. I said this to last night on Special Report when Bret Baier asked me, it’s not a thing. I was at a rodeo over the weekend. I must have interviewed 70 people. You can’t get more down to the earth like Trump supporters than what you find at a rodeo. And to back that up on CNN today, they had a poll that came out and said he’s now even more popular with Republican voters.

John Gizzi:

The other question I was thinking about before I even got here, Trump does have this special connection that you spelled out well with the Steelers fans, with the diaspora in Pennsylvania, is there in the Republican Party who can carry on for him when he has to step down in 2028?

Salena Zito:

I think there’s a variety of really interesting and compelling people within the Republican Party. Some you might not even be thinking about. JD Vance immediately rises to the top. I don’t think people even still understand the scope of that young man’s talent. I have been covering him.

First time I saw JD Vance was, we were both working for CNN as contributors. It was inauguration day. We’re on one of those massive half circle panels. We’re both on the far ends and I cannot remember who the host was, but they were really crapping on the voters. And I looked at him and he looked at me and went, then we’re like, “Oh God, I hope nobody got that.” We immediately started talking after that. And I just recognize that this young man has an extraordinary amount of talent.

Paul Sracic:

Okay. Over here.

Baden Firth:

Thank you very much. Great to hear you speak. Baden Firth with Mitsubishi. But you can probably hear from my accent, I’m not local, so forgive my ignorance. But there’s something that really fascinates me about what you said in the earlier part of your discussion around Pennsylvania and Erie County and the importance in the election. But at the same time, people are struggling there and it would seem to me the sensible approach if you’re one party, or the other, or both that you would want when you’re in power to give that community everything it needs so that you can secure your support base. Why is it that that doesn’t happen?

Salena Zito:

Actually, I forget the program. It’s Tim Scott’s program. Gosh, the name escapes me, but it’s a federal program that invests in poverty-stricken city blocks. I wish I could remember what it’s called.

Baden Firth:

Opportunity Zones.

Salena Zito:

Yeah, Opportunity Zones. So there’s a great Opportunity Zone project that is underway there with affordable housing, new businesses, and it’s injecting a lot of money and opportunity in there. And so there are things that are definitely happening in that region, but it’s not sexy. So you don’t read about, I wrote about it, but you all didn’t hear about it. But I went down and spent several days in Erie, talked about the difference it was making in people’s lives, talking about the jobs that are created.

You also got Erie Insurance there. You also got UPMC and Allegheny General or AHN Allegheny Health Network. You’ve got three universities, Penn State, Mercyhurst, and I’m going to forget Gannon. So the Eds and Meds are making things work there. The city itself, the zip code in the city itself is the poorest in the country. But there are things that are happening there and that’s important to pay attention to.

Baden Firth:

Thank you.

Paul Sracic:

Gentleman in the back I think has had his hand up for a while.

Audience Member:

Ms. Zito, thank you very much for this informative interview. And I would like to ask you regarding your findings, because you’ve specifically focused on the Midwest on what people call the Rust Belt, but I would also like to ask you if your findings are transferable or can be extrapolated to the Western states because they were also swing states like Nevada, Arizona, where there is much less rootedness of place, but also similar working class dynamics in some contexts.

Salena Zito:

So I didn’t put it in the book, but I spent time in Arizona and Nevada and those areas have a lot of similarities to the Midwest in terms of tradition, values, place. And I understood that Trump was going to win Pennsylvania. If he won Pennsylvania, I knew he was going to win Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, and North Carolina. Pennsylvania’s five percentage points more democratic than those states. So if he was winning my state, the other ones were going because of very similar values, traditions and immigration.

The Hispanic population right now that is in its second generation or in their forties in the first generation, they’re behaving very much like my Italian immigrant families. They open small businesses, they have HVAC companies, they’re very assimilated into the country, very proud to be in this country. They want their children to have the education and opportunities and ability to express their faith. And so if you look at Italians 50 years ago, that’s the same as the Hispanic population.

Audience Member:

Thank you.

Paul Sracic:

I think we have time for one more question.

Audience Member 2:

Thank you for being here. My name is Zineb and I do freelance journalism. My question more is about—

Salena Zito:

I would totally mess that up.

Audience Member 2:

Sorry.

Salena Zito:

No, no, that’s okay.

Audience Member 2:

My name is Zineb and I do freelance journalism. My question for you, there are a lot of Muslims and Arabs who helped Trump win in Michigan especially because he promised that he will stop the war between Gaza and Israel. And so far what kind of challenges is he facing to do so because the war is still happening till now.

Salena Zito:

Right. So I am heading up to Michigan next. So I was in Michigan a lot for this race, and you could see on that issue and the issue of religious freedom, that election was very, very important. I don’t know what’s going on right now. I need to go up there and I am heading up there in two weeks. I would have a better answer for you. You can certainly give your contact information. I’d be happy to tell you what I’m seeing on the ground. I’m mostly comfortable understanding what’s going on in the country by actually being there.

Paul Sracic:

So we have two more minutes. One more question.

Audience Member 3:

Thank you. Ms. Zito between election day 2016 and election day 2024, the Vogue and the Democratic Party was to try to win over these working class, middle America voters. That’s less so now because they’ve lost everyone. So that particular demographic is less particularly emphasized. But I’m curious because you did mention Josh Shapiro as well. Do you think there’s anything or anyone on that side of the aisle that is giving anything that could possibly win back voters or do you think that it’s really just completely bereft? Thank you.

Salena Zito:

John Fetterman and Josh Shapiro.

Audience Member 3:

And why do you think they’re unique in that way?

Salena Zito:

It has to do with place and understanding showing up. They show respect to the working class. They’re both good at governing. They’re not too far left. They’re just like right in the center. That’s a sweet spot for a lot of voters. Look, John Fetterman, and Josh Shapiro, and Donald Trump share a lot of the same voters, a lot of the same voters.

People don’t realize that. Shapiro and Fetterman are very cognizant of that. Shapiro, we had an amazing energy AI conference in Pittsburgh on Wednesday. Unbelievable. I’ve never seen anything like it. Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh and specifically, well right outside the city, is going to be the center of the AI revolution. We have the intellectual capital there with Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. We have the working class workers, the tradespeople, the union members. We also have an abundant energy with natural gas and nuclear, but also, at least about 20 percent of coal also needs to be there. These are all reliable, safe.

There is an unprecedented $93 billion in investment announced at that event. And who was there? Fetterman, and Trump, and McCormick, and Shapiro. And so they’re not afraid, Fetterman and Shapiro, to buck the, no offense to you all DC people, they’re not afraid to buck the DC Democrats. The narrative coming out of the DNC.

So I would conclude that probably the best thing for our institutions, and our academia, and government agencies, for a lot of them to scatter and get out in the middle of the country. Move your locations, that goes to the RNC, DNC, everything. The alphabet soup of this entire city. A lot more needs to have at least satellite operations in the middle of the country, not you, you guys are perfect. But you don’t understand the people that put people in office, there’s basically only eight counties in this country that really, really matter. Erie is the most important one and if you don’t know them, then you don’t understand what’s happening in the country.

Thank you everybody.

Paul Sracic:

Thank you very much.