The Show That’s Charting a Post-Trump Future
Ten years ago, the New York Times launched a podcast that would cover the final stretch of the 2016 Presidential election. It was titled, appropriately, “The Run-Up.” These were the early days of a big bet on audio at the paper—an article introducing the show advised readers who “have never listened to a podcast before” to locate “a pre-loaded app called ‘Podcasts’ with a purple icon”—and the host was Michael Barbaro, of future “Daily” mega-fame. The inaugural episode discussed the odds that Hillary Clinton might win in a landslide, which was possible, given the state of the polls, though not assured. (Barbaro predicted that Donald Trump, who was flailing at the time, would surely “wake up one morning and realize that he doesn’t need to step in the same pile of dog poop every day.”) Representing the pro-Trump perspective was Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House. Barbaro asked him whether Trump was mentally fit to be President. “Sure,” Gingrich replied. “I mean, he is at least as reliable as Andrew Jackson.”
Fast forward six years: Trump had entered the White House, then left it under the cloud of January 6th; Joe Biden was President, and, with the 2022 midterms fast approaching, the Times revived “The Run-Up,” albeit with a different emphasis. Astead Herndon, a politics reporter at the paper, stepped into Barbaro’s former role, and told Vanity Fair that the show would look beyond “a kind of strict horse race run-up.” The midterms were shaping up to be a referendum on Trump’s enduring political strength, and the election-denial movement behind him. “People stormed the Capitol,” Herndon elaborated. “The only question isn’t who gets more votes at the ballot box.” The new “Run-Up,” he said, would also reject “the premise that Donald Trump was elected, then all this crazy stuff happened.” Instead, it would seek to situate the growing disillusionment with democracy in a longer-term context. The first full episode explored the “flawed assumptions” that politicians in both parties had made about voters, taking as a starting point the 2013 “autopsy” in which Republican leaders stressed the need to earn the trust of minorities.
“The Run-Up” went on hiatus again after the 2022 midterms, but it returned a few months later, to begin tracing the long path toward the next Presidential election. The timing, perhaps, stretched the show’s name to a breaking point. But Herndon was keen to capitalize on what he saw as a window, before the battle lines became fully entrenched, in which political insiders were “most willing to be honest about their motives and strategy.” He was also eager to explore an already rumbling dissonance between the Biden-Trump rematch that those insiders were teeing up, and the weary mood of the electorate. The midterms, Herndon said on the show, had appeared to deliver a repudiation of extremism—and thus, perhaps, of Trump. But Herndon doubted that extremism, or Trump, was finished; indeed, his goal, he told me recently, was “to make a podcast, from beginning to end, that could tell you how Trump got elected again.” Herndon wasn’t sure that this would happen, of course—and the point of “The Run-Up,” which toggled between illuminating interviews with politicos and reporting from the ground, was not to predict the future—but he did feel that many insiders were missing key pulses of public opinion, not least voters’ consistent early skepticism of Biden’s age. (One episode, recorded months before Biden’s debate collapse and his subsequent withdrawal, fielded listener questions about the race and was titled, in part, “What If Someone Dies?”) When we spoke, Herndon said that “The Run-Up” ended up being “kind of historical” in its construction of a real-time narrative. He likened the show to “The Wire.” “It didn’t win a fucking Emmy,” he said. “But everyone realizes after that you were trying to tell them something.”
Last year, Herndon left the Times and joined Vox, a digital-media darling that was founded in 2014 (by, among others, Ezra Klein, who has since travelled in the opposite direction to Herndon) and is still known for its explanatory political journalism. In the spring, Herndon débuted “America, Actually,” a podcast and a YouTube show that is a successor, of sorts, to “The Run-Up.” The formula is similar, highlighting a mix of voices from inside and outside the system, but the show, in Herndon’s telling, aims less to create a historical record than to shape the discourse and help inform voters’ decisions. “I really want our brand to be Team Voter”—or “Team Everyday American, Team Working Class, whatever you want to call it,” he told me. “The point of positioning of our show is to be an advocate for people who want politics to work better, period.”
Herndon is also attempting an audacious feat for the Trump era, and, perhaps, an unexpected one for a journalist so attuned to the stickiness of Trump’s appeal—to keep “America, Actually,” as he put it in the première, “Trump-free.” This isn’t an absolute edict, and Herndon has also pitched the show’s promise more modestly: as “Politics without T****p at the center.” And yet even this is a radical pledge; in that first episode, the culture writer Hunter Harris argued that Trump is the “only monoculture that truly exists right now.” The impetus behind Herndon’s approach—that people are exhausted of hearing about Trump, and that it is possible to cover his impact in ways that don’t involve knee-jerk responses to what Harris called the “drama queen” of it all—is certainly astute, as is his desire to create a “space to think about the people and ideas who are driving the country’s post-Trump future.” The question, of course, is what this might look like—and whether it’s even possible yet.
In the decade since the Times directed listeners to click the purple icon, the political significance of podcasting has increased exponentially, and Trump himself has wound up profiting. This, at least, is one popular theory of the 2024 election, in which Trump toured the Joe Rogan extended universe and wormed his way into the earbuds of disaffected young men. (And their eyeballs—in this age of YouTube, podcasts have increasingly reverse-engineered themselves into TV shows, albeit with a less polished, “new media” flavor.) Of course, the podcasts that boosted Trump’s appeal weren’t political in a conventional sense. His cameos made him legible—and sympathetic—for audiences that, unlike those composed of politics nerds, mostly look at life with neither T**** nor p******* at the center. (Maybe, it turns out, there are other monocultures out there.)
“America, Actually” is very much a nerdy politics podcast. It is also a journalistic one, in a traditional sense; the show’s main strength—vis-à-vis not only the manosphere, with its “just asking questions” shit-shooting, but also more direct competitors, especially those that have barely evolved from the myopic take-mongering of élite cable-news punditry—lies in how grounded it feels in both facts and the perspectives of voters, as channelled through their own words and the questions that Herndon just-asks of their representatives. (Laudably, “America, Actually” and an accompanying newsletter that launched last month have also incorporated the voices of local reporters.) When we spoke, Herndon recalled how, fresh out of college in the aftermath of the 2016 election, he felt “viscerally angry at media” that, as he saw it, “had done no work to prepare me to understand the country.” This frustration came across clearly enough in his work at the Times, despite the fact that the paper, perhaps more than any other, is “the media.” Vox is “the media,” too—and it isn’t all that “new” anymore. At the same time, “America, Actually” has a refreshingly colorful and loose vibe. When viewed on YouTube, certain episodes—a dispatch from a controversial A.I. data center in New Jersey; vox pops (small “v”) from Pennsylvania gas stations—do feel a bit like TV.
Herndon is a reporter, not a Rogan, but at Vox he has more freedom to inject his own voice, too—a factor that informed his decision to jump over from the Times. “Institutional trust is not where people derive credibility anymore,” he said. “The banner of journalistic integrity I wanted to stand under was my own.” That being said, Herndon’s voice complements those of his subjects, rather than drowning them out. In perhaps the strongest episode so far, he sat down with the veteran congressman Jim Clyburn, who needed relatively little prompting to offer an excruciatingly tone-deaf defense of the Democratic establishment, in the course of which he blamed many Black voters for Trump’s return in 2024. Wrapping up, Herndon made explicit what was already apparent in his tone: that the exchange had made him feel “a little sad.” In a lot of ways, he said, “it reminded me of a conversation you might have with an older family member who just won’t budge, no matter the evidence in front of them.”
In short, “America, Actually” is a balancing act. The same applies to its policy of Trump avoidance. A few weeks in, Herndon acknowledged that he fails “every week” to maintain a Trump-free space, and even the less strict metric, of decentering Trump, has proved harder to hit than he imagined. Still, I’ve found myself pleasantly surprised by the extent to which Herndon and his guests have managed to resist the President’s gravitational pull. Hunter Harris may have noted, in the first episode, that Trump is an attention hog, but she also suggested that he is not a disciplined agenda-setter. Whether you agree probably depends on your definitions of discipline and agenda-setting; Trump certainly knows how to flood the zone. And yet his increasing reactiveness, and relative absence from certain key policy debates, does afford an enterprise like “America, Actually” the space to explore topics that were, already, much bigger than one man: the backlash against data centers; potential, if long-shot, reforms to a broken political process, such as a single national primary day; what “affordability” even means anyway. (As the Clyburn interview showed, Herndon has been particularly insightful about voters’ rising anger at Democratic élites.) The apt metaphor for the show might not be decentering Trump as much as placing a stencil over his face and coloring in the political universe that swirls about him.
Another balance that the show must strike, especially in its more forward-looking moments, is between the “why” of politics and the “who”; whether or not Trump is constitutionally capable of acting like a lame duck, his era is ending, and something—and someone—will have to take his place. “America, Actually” is not lazy horse-race fodder—it’s about much more than who’s “up” or “down” in a given week—but it is pitched, in part, as an early guide to the 2028 Presidential election, and episodes have already included an analysis of Kamala Harris’s comeback chances and a fantasy candidate draft with the journalists Kara Swisher and Don Lemon, in which one of Lemon’s picks was himself. (Unsettlingly, he didn’t seem to be joking.) Any foray into such terrain, especially this far out, is necessarily fraught with uncertainty, and right now that feels especially true of the Republican side. This points to a bigger conundrum for “America, Actually.” Even beyond the question of personnel, it has so far had more to say about the Democrats’ future than the G.O.P.’s.
Herndon told me that this is attributable, in no small part, to Republicans’ lesser availability; many Party leaders, he says, won’t talk to him. But I think there’s a deeper difficulty here, too. The civil war inside the Democratic Party, while often oversimplified by pundits, is at least being waged in the open; the battle for the soul of the G.O.P. is no less real, but much of it is playing out in the shadow of a President whom precious few right-wing voices dare criticize—or, if you prefer, in the part of the canvas underneath the stencil. And any dynamic involving Trump is hard to predict, and subject to whiplash. In the fantasy draft, for example, Swisher’s first pick was Marco Rubio, in part based on the impression that he seemed to be winning Trump’s favor; then again, recent media reports have suggested that Trump increasingly seems set on J. D. Vance, in part because he’s been impressed by Vance’s weight-loss journey. Even if Rubio, say, were to become the nominee, it’s hard to forecast what that would mean. Maybe he would quietly retcon the MAGA era. (Herndon, in response to Swisher, said that Rubio might be “a Democrat’s version” of a Republican; Lemon called him “old school.”) Or maybe he’d spearhead a new Red Scare as Emperor of the Greater Americas.
Given these profound blind spots, I’ve found myself going back and forth, in recent months, on whether it even makes sense to start thinking about a post-Trump politics yet, and, if so, on what terms. I haven’t fully resolved these questions. “America, Actually” hasn’t, either. But, as the answers become clearer, it wouldn’t surprise me if they become clearer there first. For now, I asked Herndon whether there’s any issue—akin to Biden’s age in 2024—that he sees political insiders underestimating in the present. His answer, perhaps inevitably, centrally concerned Trump, whose unpopularity, Herndon said, “is a through line among people and a passing sentence among élite media.” The latter, in his view, seems more interested in litigating wokeness, the broader perceived failings of the Biden era, and the Democrats’ identity crisis and credibility problems. At this point, that is “a three-year-old story,” Herndon said. “I think right now it’s much more about the man in office.” And, of course, what comes next. ♦