“Dad, it’s not true,” I said, fighting to keep my voice steady through tears.
My 81-year-old father had just seen a Huffington Post headline — “Take Salena Zito Neither Seriously Nor Literally On Trump Voters” — with a picture of me next to it. The piece accused me of fabricating stories and omitting facts. None of that is true, but that didn’t stop the attack from ricocheting to every corner of political journalism’s Twitter-sphere.
It began days earlier with a story I wrote for The New York Post about President Trump’s followers continuing to support him after Michael Cohen’s guilty plea and Paul Manafort’s conviction. Facebook took that story down from my Facebook page, and others who re-posted it soon found it removed from their pages as well. With the story marked as “spam,” or not meeting “community standards,” I tweeted, then wrote about the experience.
That’s when things got worse. Within hours, an anonymous troll with an account created only a few days earlier went on the attack. The thread tossed false accusations that I withheld information from the book I co-authored this year. The troll and his followers alleged that some Trump supporters who struggled with their decision in the 2016 election and were profiled in the book are actually elected Republican officials who (in the trolls’ opinion) could not possibly have struggled with that decision.
First, that wasn’t true. Half the thesis of the book I co-wrote with Brad Todd, “The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics,” is that Trump’s polarizing style causes many Republicans to fit uneasily, if at all, into his coalition. Many people in the book were profiled explicitly because they are Republicans, not in spite of it.
Within minutes, the initial Twitter attack was retweeted by other anonymous trolls and online bullies who have attacked my writing before — some continuously since I first reported in the summer of 2016 that this political shift was happening. They demanded that the publications for which I write, including The Post, the Washington Examiner and Crown Publishing, address their allegations or fire me.The idea that I owed anonymous trolls on Twitter an explanation for the straw-man argument they invented is utterly laughable. But soon enough two things happen. First, they swarm—these brave souls who like to anonymously harass women online prefer to do so in numbers. Second, partisan journalists looking for a scalp join in, which lends it credibility.
Soon the pile-on makes using Twitter miserable.
This is the sad state of American public and political discourse today. This is the state of social media.
The crux of the criticism of my writing, in hundreds of columns and in my book, is what Ashley Feinberg of the left-oriented Huffington Post wrote: “Much of her gimmick rests on the idea that her interlocutors are apostate populist Democrats who swung to the Republican Party.” Feinberg continued: “This is the story many conservatives prefer to tell about Trump — that he is a populist phenomenon, not the product of regular country-clubs-and-chambers-of-commerce Republicanism.”
Except that’s not my “gimmick” or my view at all. The book, and many of my columns in the run-up to the 2016 election and afterward, are not only about Obama voters who voted for Trump; they’re about the realignment underway in American politics and the changes making it happen.
The book profiles seven surprising archetypes of Trump voters, four of those almost exclusively Republicans. These Republicans might have been expected to defect from Trump in a campaign that saw many Republican celebrities and opinion leaders do exactly that. Hillary Clinton ran ads featuring Republican testimonials claiming they were going to cross the aisle just this once; senators, congressmen and even the head of the Republican Governors Association denounced Trump.
One of those archetypes detailed in the attack of my work was Amy Giles-Maurer. The complaint is that I did not say Giles-Maurer was a Republican. Of course, I never said she wasn’t a Republican. And in a preview for the book published in The Post, my story is online with a large photo of her wearing a Kenosha GOP board pin. The idea that I was trying to hide her affiliation is nonsense.
Another similar criticism regarded Erie suburban mom Patty Bloomstine. My critics said Bloomstine could not go from Democrat to Republican between 2008 and 2010 — which shows that there are many people covering or observing American politics who don’t understand a swing voter who lives in a swing district and who feels squeezed by the leftward lurch of the Democratic Party on social issues. My critics should get out more.
Another example: My portrayal of Erie voter Dave Rubbico. Feinberg: “The problem here is with Zito’s characterization of Rubbico as some sort of swing voter.” Well, he says quite clearly that he voted for Obama twice, had voted Democrat all of his life, but by the second term had soured on Obama. Feinberg points to Rubbico’s disenchantment with Obama in a 2017 op-ed he wrote as proof he could not possibly be a swing voter. Feinberg and others can call a lifelong Democrat who swung his vote to the GOP in 2016 whatever they want, but “swing voter” is so obviously correct that it’s baffling we’re having this conversation. Readers and listeners can decide for themselves: The audio of my interview with Rubbico is included below.
Other accusations are more serious. One is that a teenager I interviewed named Mathilde couldn’t really have used the phrase “people young and old.” I record many of my interviews on audio tape, then send them to a transcription service. Those transcripts show that Mathilde did indeed use that phrase.
Another: In a February story for the Washington Examiner on Shannon Edwards, I’m accused of cribbing from a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette piece without crediting the Post-Gazette. In fact, the citation was removed during the editing process, I noticed and asked for it to be restored.
Another: Folks who didn’t recognize the word “stagery” — a word I’ve heard repeatedly and used myself — insisted I’d made up an interview because a quote contained that word. That accusation is also false.
Some of the accusations, in addition to being malicious, are just lazy. I stand accused of misrepresenting the socioeconomic standing of people profiled in one article because the headline included the term “blue collar.” Obviously, reporters don’t write their own headlines, so this accusation tells you something about my trolls and the journalists who fell for the trolling.
The most interesting, and lasting, story of the 2016 election is not Russia or Facebook or Jim Comey — it’s whether or not Republicans, now at the apex of their political power, can hold the new Trump coalition together to win more elections. It’s an open question, involving a great deal of tension in holding old-school Republicans under the same tent as new, edgy populists. The jury is still out on whether that can happen; personally, I have my doubts. It will be news either way.
And I will be on the road — just as I was, for more than 27,000 miles, to research my columns and the book — to find that news.
The upside of social media and the internet for me has always been that my stories could be read by a wide variety of people beyond my Western Pennsylvania base, or New York and Washington.
But there’s a dark downside to both, too: A lie can spread faster than the truth can ever catch up.
A few journalists, particularly those who rarely if ever leave the Washington Beltway or Midtown Manhattan, want to discredit my work because of what it reports. They want to silence the voices I listen to and record. They think of 2016 as a fluke, of the voters who elected Trump as victims of some mass temporary insanity. They don’t believe there really are Trump supporters who are complex, who defy traditional party lines, who are central figures in the good, bad and ugly aspects of what has and still is happening in and to America. They don’t just dislike such people, they dismiss and disparage them.
Many of those who voted for Trump in 2016 are people who stepped outside their comfort zones, whether as an evangelical Christian, a suburban mother, a long-time Democrat or a college-educated Republican. Many have seen their communities collapse while those in power — in both parties — barely seemed to notice, let alone care.
I have no personal stake in Donald Trump; his success or failure is up to him and the voters. But I do have a stake in my integrity as a reporter. I don’t report what I want to happen, or what I wish had happened. I report what is happening. And the Twitter harassment isn’t going to stop me.