Despair and Decision in Trump Country with Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn

Journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn revisit the struggles they found in America's blue collar communities. When the novel coronavirus came to the United States, it found a nation that was arguably already in a kind of existential crisis. America's life expectancy, a primary indicator of the nation's overall wellbeing, had dropped for three straight years by that point. Obesity, opioid use and suicide, meanwhile, were on the rise. The despair feeding these numbers, say journalists Kristof and WuDunn, was being disproportionately carried by the country's working class. And it was the stories of these Americans that the two Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists sought to tell while reporting their latest book, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope, which was published weeks before the virus grew to pandemic proportions. That despair is also credited, in part, with the rise of President Donald Trump. Now, on the eve of the presidents' re-election bid, these Americans must decide if they will continue supporting the president. For this episode of the Crosscut Talks podcast, Kristof and WuDunn tell us how the pandemic has impacted the Americans in their book, what their research portends for a possible recovery and whether they plan to support the president again.

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Credits

Host: Mark Baumgarten

Producer: Jake Newman

Engineer: Resti Bagcal