11.01.2018

Journalist Ben Bradlee Jr. on His Book “The Forgotten”

Ben Bradlee Jr. sits down with Walter Isaacson to discuss politics in the era of Trump and his new book, “Forgotten: How the People of One Pennsylvania County Elected Donald Trump and Changed America.”

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Luzerne County, with Wilkes-Barre as its sort of main town up in Pennsylvania for 30 years or so, it's gone democratic.

It went Democratic twice for Barack Obama and then Trump wins by 20 points.

You went up there right after the election that December to find out why.

Give me some of the reasons that that struck you.

I've been obsessed with Trump as most of the country has, the rise of this improbable politician and more improbably his election.

And you know the working assumption behind the book was that much of the country remains shocked that a candidate as unusual as Trump got elected president of the United States and searching for a way into this story, I went through the three battleground states, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin which decided the election of those three of Pennsylvania was perhaps the most important.

It had the most electoral votes.

And I discovered this county, Luzerne, which, as you say, had was traditionally Democratic, it surged in the other way in the other direction for Trump and in that sense this was a useful prism into the Trump electorate.

And what I found was people that were totally alienated from Washington.

You had called them forgotten.

Well, that plays off Trump's phrase 'the forgotten people.' And that really resonated with them because they did feel forgotten, they felt like no one was paying attention to them anymore.

They felt disrespected.

They felt they were being mocked by liberal elites.

And they latched onto this guy.

They felt heard and listened to by Trump.

There was a man that plays a big role in your book, Lou Barletta, who's now running for the Senate, and he was among the first to really push anti-immigration as a sentiment.

He captured that.

How much did anti-immigrant sentiment play in?

It was big.

And this fellow Lou Barletta had adopted Trump's anti-immigration rhetoric ten years before he did.

So they became simpatico.

Barletta became one of the first congressmen to come out for Trump and how do you say he's running against Bob Casey, the two term incumbent Democrat in Pennsylvania.

And I found that that was really an important issue in the county and statewide and I think around the nation.

In Luzerne, people kept talking about how their grandparents came to this country legally through Ellis Island and they couldn't understand why the immigrants today don't follow the same rules and they resented that.

It wasn't just immigration, it was the fact that they felt that they were invaded by a rising Hispanic population and you put it in that harsh term.

Yes, well the second city in Luzerne County after Wilkes-Barre is Hazleton, which overnight practically within the last ten years has become majority Hispanic and Trump's slogan 'Make America Great Again' really resonated, it seemed to sort of harken back to a simpler whiter era and people looked around today and in their neighborhoods, their communities look different from what they remember and they felt uncomfortable with that.

Tell me about the people and there are a lot of them in the county who voted for Obama twice and then voted for Trump because clearly racism doesn't explain that.

It doesn't.

And that is such a leap for people who would you wonder how it's possible someone would vote for Obama and then vote for Trump.

One fellow told me, a state senator in Wilkes-Barre said that Obama represented hope and change, but Trump represented knocked down the door and change.

I think people were just fed up.

They wanted someone who would break the china and didn't care or were willing to take a gamble on what the results of that would be who's going to clean up the china.

But you know this guy, he's adopted policies that really go against his constituency.

You know the the tax cut overwhelmingly represents the rich.

He's added with his 2018 budget seven trillion dollars to the deficit.

He had said that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were too costly.

But he's added 200 billion dollars to the defense budget.

He said that he was going to hold the line or increase Medicare and Medicaid but Medicare's been cut by 500 billion.

So in some ways he's voting against, I mean he's adopting policies that go against the constituency that he said he was going to help, but they just love the guy.

They like him.

Do you think there's going to be any change or do you sense any change in their feelings about Trump given some of the policies?

All the people that I interviewed, I concentrated on 12 people, and of those 12 or 11 at the moment are strongly with Trump for re-election.

Do you think that the Kavanaugh hearings we've been through and rest of the Me Too movement.

do you think that is going to have any impact on women voters you spoke to?

Not my voters.

They're still with them through thick and thin.

And but it remains to be seen around the country whether that will hurt him among suburban women swing voters.

It could.

The opioid crisis seems to have hit Luzerne like a lot of similar places with a real wallop.

I think they were in 1997, how many drug deaths were there in the county?

Yeah like 45.

And how many in most recent year?

And now it was about you know 200 in the county.

It's exploded.

It's a huge problem.

And, you know, I interviewed the county coroner down there and he's sort of fit to be tied about it, went to the local newspaper for help.

And this really cuts across the entire county, it affects people you know very few families it seems down there didn't have a relative or a friend who had not been affected by this.

Did the people you talk to give you any explanation of why it's hitting so hard?

Yea, they thought that it's was fueled by economic hard times and high unemployment, you know, despair- that they felt isolated and unheard, so they turned to drugs.

Do you think there was a massive failure in our community of journalists of not going back to the roots and noticing Trump, Trump, Trump signs and saying let's do the type of reporting you've just done but let's do it in 2015 and 2016.

I'm afraid so, Walter.

I hate to pile on our embattled profession.

But I guess we, I guess the cliche is true to a certain extent that we don't get out of New York, Washington, Los Angeles, the big cities on either coast and spend enough time in or what some call flyover country.

It's hard not to conclude that we did not see the Trump phenomenon coming and these the signs that you mention and the crowds, he drew huge crowds and that was sort of written off as well, maybe people are just coming out because they're curious to see the Trump phenomenon and it won't translate into votes, but it sure did.

And in that area, when Hillary or Joe Biden, her primary surrogate who is from Scranton just up the road, when they came to town they would draw a fraction of the crowds that Trump did and we didn't pay enough attention to that.

But didn't Biden kind of get it?

At one point in your book he said, wait a minute, this guy's going to win.

He said he saw the videotape of Trump's final rally in Luzerne County maybe a week before the election and he said boy, we could lose this thing.

And yet.

Do you think there are people like Biden who could bring some of these people back to the Democratic Party?

Hillary took the white working class for granted and this story is really about the white working class and how they've become disconnected to the Democratic Party.

And I think they need, the Democrats need someone with more of a heartland sensibility.

And someone who doesn't tend to immediately write off the Trump constituency as racist or deplorables which is an unfortunate word that came back to hurt Hillary.

Do you think Wilkes-Barre and Luzerne County are ever coming back in a strong way?

Well I think it's going to be tough because the coal is gone which was their base, manufacturing which replaced coal, is gone.

And Trump keeps talking about clean coal, but I don't think that's really realistic.

I don't I think the outlook is pretty grim.

Do you think the midterms will be a referendum on him especially in Luzerne County?

Absolutely, I think the midterms bolstered by the incredible fallout we're seeing from the Kavanaugh hearings and the Me Too movement will be absolutely a referendum on Trump.

Ben, thanks for being with us.

Thank you.

I enjoyed it.