The Show That’s Charting a Post-Trump Future

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.