dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/november-december-2018/selective-hearing/

If it weren’t for Donald Trump, Salena Zito would likely still be unknown outside of Pittsburgh. Zito, a former political staffer and consultant, was forty-six when she was hired to write about politics for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review in 2005. The paper was then owned by the late conservative billionaire activist Richard Mellon Scaife. It was Zito’s entry to journalism. For eleven years, she served as a hybrid reporter-columnist, filing moderately conservative opinion pieces leavened with folksy, on-the-ground interviews of the everyday people she met driving around small-town Pennsylvania and nearby states.

By the time Trump entered the political scene, Zito was well positioned to document the psychology of his voters—a subject of intense national fascination. A column from August 2016 captures the spirit of her dispatches. Marveling at the number of Trump lawn signs in rural and small-town Pennsylvania, Zito chided “pundits” for underestimating Trump’s popularity and looking down on his base. “While Trump supporters here are overwhelmingly white, their support has little to do with race (yes, you’ll always find one or two who make race the issue) but has a lot to do with a perceived loss of power,” she wrote, clarifying that “these people see a diminishing respect for them and their ways of life, their work ethic, their tendency to not be mobile.” Zito seemed to empathize with this sense of aggrievement. After quoting an unnamed woman who criticized Obama for not commenting enough during tragedies, Zito observed, “Voice such a remark, and you risk being labeled a racist in many parts of America.”

Zito had discovered a promising new beat: the sympathetic Trump voter profile. In September 2016, she made a splash with an Atlantic article in which she observed that, when Trump says something obviously false, “the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.” Around the same time, she took a buyout from the Tribune-Review and joined the Rupert Murdoch–owned New York Post as a columnist. The election results, which guaranteed at least another four years of interest in the Trump coalition, only raised Zito’s profile further. The Washington Examiner, a conservative tabloid in D.C., hired her as its national political correspondent. Then came a CNN contributor gig, a Harvard fellowship, and a book deal—leading no less a literary tastemaker than Trump himself to tweet, “ ‘The Great Revolt’ by Salena Zito and Brad Todd does much to tell the story of our great Election victory. The Forgotten Men & Women are forgotten no longer!”

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