Havanna a bad time

Hello from Atlanta and Cuba,

Joining me this week is my dear friend and former colleague Patrick Oppmann, who is CNN's Havana bureau chief.

When Marco Rubio was tapped to be Trump's new Secretary of State, I immediately called up Patrick. There are many uncertainties about second Trump term but one thing is clear; Cuba is in the cross-hairs of Rubio, who sees it as his personal mission to bring down the regime.

Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban exiles, will consider the downfall of the Cuban leadership as low-hanging fruit. Times are tougher than ever - as Patrick tells me - and that makes it an extremely vulnerable moment. Beijing, Iran, Israel are all knotty problems with regional implications. Kicking down the Cubans would be a considered an easy, early win for Rubio.

I love Cuba. I reported on the historic visit of President Obama when there was a brief opening up of diplomatic relations. There was a real sense of hope that the country was moving forward. In those heady days, in a Havana park, we all watched the Rolling Stones play live. How things change. When Fidel Castro died, Patrick broke the news, and we both reported on his funeral with ever-present intelligence agents hovering around us and listening to our every word (as if they would be reporting back to Fidel in the afterlife on our 'anti-revolutionary' analysis.)

My husband Kim was running CNN's coverage during those days of breaking news. We've spent some of the best times of our life hanging out with Patrick and drinking rum in Havana. Whatever happens, I hope the Cuban people are sparred more hardships.

Havana has always been a special place with a romantic mystique that still lingers from before the Revolution. During one of those trips, after my show was over, I walked around Old Havana exploring. Kim called and asked where I was. "In the bar that Hemmingway used to drink at, " I replied while nursing a local rum on the rocks. I heard him checking with Patrick who was with him at the CNN bureau, "Hemmingway drank in every bar in Havana, you're going to have be more specific."

Trump's presidency has enormous implications for America, and the world. We cannot know how it's going to play out. But I do know, for sure, there is going to be seismic repercussions for the people of Cuba. 

Best,
Robyn

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What next, ‘Merica?

Greetings from Atlanta,

It's a brave new world and nobody knows exactly how America's choice on November 5 is going play out. Trump's first term is going to look very different to his second term. He has a massive mandate to lead and without the guardrails that were there the first time around. We are already seeing a focused, directed and clear strategy being implemented. He's going to hit the ground running (nothing like his first term.)

How did it get to this? 

Well, simple. Democrats lost, and they lost badly. Significantly, just about every part of the USA moved right in the last four years. 

What was it about the Biden/Harris adminstration that created the situation where every section of society and every corner of this country decided that Donald Trump was a better answer? The electoral map is red, red, red.

It's too simple to write off this vote as a giant nod to racism or sexism. Neither is it right to say that Trump will be President again because more than half of the country has been brainwashed by rightwing media. That's too simple. And it's unfair to the good Americans I know who voted for Trump, or chose to not vote for Harris because they didn't trust her with the country. Mostly, I think it was a vote against wokeness, unfettered immigration and day-to-day inflation (the economy is actually doing just fine.)

Let me know what you think?

Robyn

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Duh, Why Trump Won

A quick hello from Atlanta,

I was going to call this show The Why Trump Will Win Again Podcast. Or, aptly, WTF AMERICA?

In the end, I gave it a more polite title; Searching for America. 

However, the premise never changed. I wanted to know why Trump would be President again. It was clear, months ago, that it was highly likely he'd be back in the White House. I wanted to understand why my neighbors, friends and some of the nicest people I knew would vote for him (or refused point blank to trust Kamala Harris with the Presidency.)

Here's my rough take, based on what I've been hearing for months, on why good Americans across demographics swung right.

Who's to blame - that's easy. Take a listen. 

Best,
Robyn

PS. You can now listen on YouTube too. 

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The Here Be Dragons Election

Hello from Atlanta,

When early European map makers did not know what was beyond undiscovered waters and land they drew dragons on the parchment and wrote ‘Here Be Dragons.’ It is an HBD week in America. 

We are about to sail into uncharted waters, and it’s totally and utterly unclear what the waves will reveal after the election. 

In my first ten episodes of Searching for America, I asked my guests to give me three words to describe America. Three words only. In this episode I pile all the words together and add my two cents to the mix. 

Words matter. America matters. This election is crucial. 

Take a listen to a special episode of Searching for America as we get ready to wrestle with dragons. 

Best,

Robyn

PS. You can now listen on YouTube too. 

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The Election is ruining the pumkin spice vibe

It’s a beautiful time of the year in the American South. Fall leaves are various shades of mustard yellow and squash orange. The weather is perfectly gentle. Summer’s humidity is finally gone. Early autumn in America means oversized Halloween decorations are draped on the facades of houses. Giant spiders, plastic skeletons and fake cobwebs litter front yards. It’s always a charming, fun and special time of the year. This year though everyone is anxious. The election, someone moaned to me, is ruining the pumpkin spice vibe. 

It’s also a damned scary time. None of us need a Freddy Krueger mask or a polyester witches hat to remind us that there are some pretty nightmare scenarios for the coming weeks. 

The national conversation, the posters and the barrage of political ads is making everyone even more jittery. Hyper-partisan fear mongering is on steroids as both parties try to get undecided voters to the ballot. 

In the midst of this, Ben Jealous joined me to talk about his America. Ben used to head up the NAACP, a civil rights organization, and now leads the Sierra Club, which is the oldest and biggest environmental group in the States. The biracial son of school teachers, he tells stories of his family; a distinctly American family made up of the descendants of slaves, a suspected pirate and aTrump-voting lorry-driving uncle. 

Ben also has a stutter which he eloquently talks about from the perspective of being a surfer. As a child, Bill Cosby mocked his stutter which, Ben says, was the first indication he knew something was wrong with Cosby. 

Thank you for listening, 

Happy Halloween.

Robyn

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The Grateful Dead and other voters

The son of a rabbi and a sociologist and a massive Grateful Dead fan, Julian Zelizer is a historian who looks at American history from a number of different angles. When I anchored my show on CNN International I always tried to get Julian on as guest because he often had a holistic and, importantly, a judicious assessment of some of the more crazy days during the Trump presidency.

As journalists, we often record the first draft of history. It’s professors like Julian who then put our words and observations into a broader context, and fit the facts of day-to-day journalism into a historical pattern. He dislikes the word 'unprecedented’ to describe what’s happening in American politics. “Where everything is unprecedented, everything's brand new, and there's absolutely no context for what's going on, as a result, people have lesser of an understanding of current events.

We now know that Trump’s ascendancy and presidency was not an aberration in 2016. He's back, and whisker away from a second term. Julian tries to understand Trumpism as part of a radicalization of the Republican party. "If you just study Trump in isolation, you don't really get 2024.”

Julian believes the roots of polarization, culture wars and a distrustful electorate go back to 1974. Richard Nixon and Watergate, he says, is the fault-line. “It was a rupture and ‘74 was important, not just the year in itself, but it's a culmination of many sources of friction that have been happening. Battles over Vietnam, battles over the presidency, battles over how Americans saw politics and government.”

Electorate lost trust in institutions like the government and the promise of a robust middle class. Instead, out of the dust of Watergate emerged strong centralized parties and media amplified by a strong campaign finance system that thrives on discord. After 1974, he says America remade itself and its institutions to foster division rather than to push against it.  

I was interested to hear his views on single issue voters. This was something that was new to me when I covered my first US election in 2016. I’d repeatedly hear people say they’d ‘hold their nose’ and vote for Donald Trump because he would deliver a single ideological wish for them - tougher border control, or a more conservative supreme court or an anti-abortion legislation. 

Many Trump voters agree he is a morally-compromised man who brings out the worst instincts in America but they’ll vote for him just because of that one, single issue. I don’t understand that thinking; to me it is like buying a basket of rotten fruit because you liked the look of one cherry. To Americans though, this is the way they roll in election time.

More often than not, the single issues are points that are not political game-changers in other countries. No other Western democracy has such an agonized divisive debates about abortion, books, guns or religion to the extent I’ve seen in America. Why?

“In the 70s at the heyday of feminism, the argument was that the personal is political.” Julian says that concept is now baked into American politics, especially when the bogey-man of Communism was vanquished at the end of the Cold War. Since the 1970’s, private and personal issues such as reproduction, gender, Christianity or what books your kids read have been hyper-politicized by both liberals and conservatives. 

The ‘personal is political’ is not just played out in the bedroom but also in the kitchen with bread and butter issues. The cost of living and inflation might just be the single biggest issue that will decide this election. Immigration too. It just depends who you talk to.

Voters will vote only because of ONE of those issues. Strategically that’s what matters to the parties - finding what issue fires up a voter in a specific area. Localized pin-pointing of your own personal bugbear is how the presidency is won.

“Politicians play this stuff up. They focus on these narrow issues that are going to get segments of the electorate,” says Julian, “So you're doing slivers of voters. And so it's appealing to find these single issues that might, you know, change X number of voters in a state like Michigan, as opposed to searching for grand issues.”

I’m a little closer as to figuring out why Americans are so divided - the electoral system encourages voters to get fired up about one thing rather than the common good. Narrow interests triumph over wide commonalities. Take this basic structural fact and then add social media, AI and big data to amplify the aims of narrow interest groups and you have a divided country unable to see the bigger picture as well as a set of national leaders who don’t subscribe to coalition thinking. 

One thing I don't think will change, whether Harris or Trump wins, is the division. Polarization is baked in, and here to stay.

 Join me, 

Robyn

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CIA Station Chiefs and not-so-secret Secrets

I’m joined by two high-level former CIA intelligence officers in this week’s podcast. John Sipher and Jerry O’Shea were station chiefs in Moscow, Baghdad and other key posts. They now host a podcast called Mission Implausible in which they banter - as you’ll hear on my show these former spooks can certainly banter - about conspiracy theories. 

I started off by asking them how foreign intelligence services heads based in Washington DC would be dealing with the US election. What kind of reports are the men and women in MI6, French intelligence or Australian intelligence sending back to their capitals? Or the Ukrainians? 

There is so much at stake in this election for the world, so how are America’s allies making sense of the razor-slim chance that Kamala Harris or Donald Trump will take the White House?

Jerry summed it up perfectly.

“They’d be befuddled, right?” 

Frankly, all of us living in America right now are well and truly befuddled. Not just foreign spies. I just had a phone conversation with a New Yorker who said she felt like she was living in an alternative reality to me. New York and Atlanta are so far away from each other that it’s like we’re living in different universes. 

As for America’s enemies, John and Jerry rightly point out, it’s not like they can steal the results of the election. Or rig it. But Russia, China, Iran can try to put a finger on the scale and influence and manipulate via social media and other ways. “They all want to create weakness in the United States.”

The key to that? Getting Americans to turn on each other. 

That must be the easiest job right now. Americans are doing a fabulous job of hating each other, the Presidential candidates, the media, the government, the immigrants, the economy and even the weather. Death threats against meteorologists have soared since the last two hurricanes battered us. Whoever thought you’d see a country hating the weather guys for the bad weather? 

When I asked John and Jerry where they’d go if they could time travel in American history, John said he’d like to go to the 1950’s when American and global institutions were being made after World War II. Jerry cheated, as John says. Jerry wants to go to the future, not the past. Fifty years from now. He wants to know how all this anxiety and division ends? What kind of America emerges from the fragmentation of now? 

We all hope somehow the center holds and the extremes do not endure.

 Join me, 

Robyn

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Farmers for Trump

Leyla Santiago joins me from her farmhouse kitchen in rural Virginia where she has chicken coops and bee hives. After leaving CNN where she was an award-winning correspondent, Leyla moved to the countryside, became a mom and teaches journalism at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Leyla, a proud Latina with Puerto Rican roots, and I talked a lot on air when I had my show on CNN. Like with one of other regular on-air CNN guests, Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, I’ve always wanted to hear more about Leyla’s backstory and her thoughts on America. 

 She lives in Trump turf, as she calls it, now. “My neighbor has a big sign that says Farmers for Trump. There's a huge sign downtown that basically says F@#k Joe Biden right across from the church, by the way.” 

For many Americans, the rural countryside is the 'real' America. Trump and his team have been hugely successful in crafting the image of rural life as something that is pure America; untainted and disrespected by outsiders, liberals and urbanites.

“I think there is very much this us versus them mentality,” she says. “It's two Americas."

For many rural voters, immigration and inflation will be key in their choice of President. 

Trump has promised to be tough on immigration.

I asked Leyla why many Latino men have moved right and support Trump’s hardline threats on immigration even though he’s used racist tropes to describe them?

As a Latina woman with Puerto Rican background, Leyla says the Latino communities in the USA are a blend of different people in different places. “When he says they're coming over the border and they're not bringing their best, they're bringing the rapists and the criminals. Cubans don't consider themselves Mexicans, Puerto Ricans don't consider themselves Mexicans. And so it's a little bit like, yeah, he's talking about Latinos, but he's not talking about me.”

Crucially, she says the Republicans messaging on the economy and inflation really connects to many Latinos who have a historical and personal dislike of leftist dictatorships. “They really targeted those Cubans in Miami by putting out things like Biden is a socialist, right? You say socialism to a Venezuelan or a Cuban that has a voting registration card in the US and those are fighting words, right? Like that is fear.” 

Many targeted Republican political advertisements on television or online are issuing dire warnings that America will be turned into a socialist state because of Democratic economic policies. 

Donald Trump has been struggling to find an honorific by which to insult Kamala Harris. He defined Clinton as Crooked Hilary and now he’s testing the nickname Comrade Kamala - calling her it at rallies and on social media to see if it will stick. 

Donald Trump has a sharp instinct for playing on voter’s fears and labeling Kamala Harris as so left-leaning that she’s a Marxist, Communist, Socialist (even though most people couldn’t tell the difference between all three) plays well to a certain type of voters; the type of voters that might just well make the difference between whether he spends the next four years living at the White House or Mar-a-lago.

Join me, 

Robyn

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Jimmy carter is a good man

American Presidents - like England’s Kings and Queens - reflect a specific era in history. Jimmy Carter, who turns 100 this week, was a one-term Democratic President whose loss to Ronald Reagan in 1979 ushered a new type of Republicanism and the excess of the 1980’s. On his birthday, Carter’s legacy will be discussed a lot but almost everyone will be in agreement about one thing. Jimmy Carter is a good man. The same can’t be said for many other occupants of the Oval Office. 

I have known Washington Post journalist Kevin Sullivan for decades. He and his wife Mary Jordan won the Pulitzer Prize when they were based in Mexico City. They’ve always written as a team. Kevin, Mary, my husband Kim, who works at CNN, and I have shared many meals together in cities around the world. Over wine and food, I have heard Kevin’s stories about interviewing American Presidents (including Donald Trump) and I wanted to share with you all some of his insights on the country’s leaders. 

Kevin holds a special place in his heart for Jimmy Carter, who he also shared a meal with at Carter’s home in Plains, Georgia. He tells me that when he was visiting he realized Carter’s home was so modest that it was worth less than the cost of the Secret Service vehicles parked outside. 

If you want to hear where Kevin would go if he could time travel in American history, take a listen to the bonus episode. Each week I send my guests a Proust-like questionnaire and it’s always fun to hear what they answer. 

I’m Searching for America by interviewing good Americans about good Americans and trying to understand this complicated country in a time of change without hysteria or partisanship. Please recommend this podcast to your friends and family around the world. 

 Join me, 

Robyn

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Why is Jesus on the Ballot?

Unlike other Western democracies, America's politics are infused with religion. God is everywhere, all the time, especially during election season. As we get closer to the November polls, it would seem Jesus is personally invested in the outcome of the vote if you listen to candidates up and down the ballot. 

I’ve covered elections across the world for the past thirty years, and I can’t think of another country (that isn’t a theocracy)  that has such a deep sense of its own religiosity when votes are being courted and counted.

Doug Heye is a Republican strategist and even though I wasn't planning on talking about Trump, Republicans and God with him, the conversation went there and I am so glad it did. It’s so fascinating!

Doug Heye says Republicans and Democrats have used religion to attract voters in the past but evangelical fervor for Donald Trump has turbo-charged the Republican ticket in different ways. 

President Trump, who struggles to quote Bible verses and is no poster child for the Ten Commandments, has a loyal and powerful base among evangelical Christians. Trump and his supporters say they are doing God’s work because, in spite of the fact that he slept with a porn star weeks after his wife gave birth to his son, they see him as a savior on single issues around abortion, IVF and even gun control. It’s a Faustian bargain for the true believer, but it’s one that millions of Christians are willing to make this November. 

Doug Heye is wary of making a moral equivalency but he suggests that campaigning in churches has been a constant in American politics, even for Democrats. The civil rights movement, he says, was a faith-based movement that was extremely powerful. Democrats, especially in places like Atlanta where I live, continue to base a large part of their outreach to voters via African-American churches. 

But there is something more, isn’t there, about the temperature levels of religion in this election? It feels almost too hot to write about or talk about in a podcast; as if questioning why there’s the personification of Jesus in this race is an act of diabolical heresy. 

For years now, Doug points out, there's been an erosion in institutions - from the press, to the church, to government, to even Hollywood. The breakdown in institutions was super-charged by Covid. So, he says, politics has become a religion for a lot more voters than it used to be. It’s intense and it’s personal.

That made a lot of sense to me. ‘Politics is the new Religion’ helps me understand why some voters can sit with the hypocrisy of language that is thrown around so carelessly. In an age of division, extremism and identity politics, even though the pious can preach they love their neighbor, they don't.

Self-righteousness across the political spectrum is easy to find nowadays. From the left to right, it sometimes sounds like voters think their political viewpoint is divinely set in stone. “There is a tendency to want to find somebody as an apostate, or as a heretic,” says Doug. Leaders, of course, are quick to manipulate.

Take a listen, and if you’d like a more outsider perspective of America please get friends and family to sign up to this newsletter and follow us on Searching for America wherever you get your podcast. Join me, 

Robyn

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Enemies can be perceived to be everywhere, even in classrooms.

There are many frontlines in America’s culture wars. In a divided country, enemies can be perceived to be everywhere, even in classrooms.

I can’t wait for you to listen to Josh Clark, who is a head teacher and on the board of the National Association of Independent Schools. He’s also a world expert on teaching dyslexic kids. Josh has a broad, bird’s-eye view of how identity politics and censoring self-righteousness has invaded classrooms.

“Us versus Them” thinking creates children who are scared of complexity or ambiguity. Josh is emphatic that teachers need to be trusted to teach multiple viewpoints without overprotective parents thinking their kids are being indoctrinated. No teacher, says Josh, goes to work to be underpaid, overworked and to “screw over” your kid. 

I have been wanting to talk to author Sarah Smarsh for years because she is one of the few people on the national stage who can explain, with authenticity, about a part of America that is often overlooked and undervalued. Sarah grew up in a poor, white rural area of Kansas. Her mom gave birth to her when she was seventeen and she was raised by her grandparents on their farm. Her latest book is called Bone on Bone; Essays on America by a Daughter of the Working Class. 

Donald Trump won over poor, white, working class folk in rural America because he has been able to channel their anger. Sarah and her family are not Trump voters - “Can’t stand the guy” - but she is also critical of Democratic Party which she believes ignored the pleas of large chunks of ordinary Americans who were struggling with the effects of globalization and the challenges of small-town life. 

In Searching for America, I’m curious about stories and perspectives from places that are not New York or Washington. 

Josh grew up in Tennessee. His dad was a prison warden and as a young boy he lived in the warden's house inside a federal penitentiary complex in Virginia. Josh’s first friend was a prisoner called Nelson. "Nelson was an inmate who worked in our yard, who'd smuggled cocaine into the country in a private plane in the 1970s. I was seven. I thought he walked on water. But it was interesting growing up in this dynamic of the industrial prison system."

Sarah writes with empathy about her grandmother’s dentures (all her teeth were removed in her twenties because she had no dental healthcare) and helping her grandparents harvest wheat or butcher their livestock. No matter if rural folks vote for Harris or Trump, Sarah helps us understand the deep sense of frustration felt by millions of Americans towards the “elites.”

American politics is more than polls. The election is about stories; which voters feel seen and heard and which voters feel invisible and angry. One group is going to outvote the other. I don’t want to be surprised again, like we were in 2016, so I’m trying to understand by listening. 

Join me, 

Robyn

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Why I launched a podcast to decode the U.S.A. for the world (and maybe a few Americans too.)

In my search for the real America - that elusive soul of the U.S.A. - I’ve come to realize, via miles traveled and steps walked, that the sheer size of this country makes it almost impossible to pin down a single description of America or its inhabitants. The landmass is so huge and geographically and culturally diverse that I’ve barely visited a fraction of the places I want to see in the decade I’ve called Atlanta, Georgia my home. 

With the Presidential election looming, I’ve been struck by how many Americans feel unrepresented by the politicians and two political parties that dominate this gargantuan landscape. The words ‘politically homeless’ are thrown about a lot to describe a large chunk of the electorate. 

Here in the South, and across the country, there are millions of good Americans who want the best for this country, who are dismayed by the loud extremism from the right and the left and who want to mend fences with fellow Americans after years of division.

I know a lot of good Americans - soldiers, teachers, politicians, writers, comedians, chefs, journalists, singers - and the conversations we have on this podcast will hopefully help to decode the choices Americans are making. 

I travelled the world as an anchor and foreign correspondent for decades. I look at America through the lens of outsider and outlier, even though I live here. The only way to make sense of troubling times is to listen to everyone and, hopefully, laugh along the way. 

Thanks for joining me,

Robyn

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Good Americans

Lt. Gen Mark Hertling and Jason Kander

Lt. General Mark Hertling is a soldier, a thinker and a man who admits he cries at the ‘opening of a supermarket’ even though he won a Purple Heart for bravery.

When I was a CNN anchor, Mark and I spoke many times on air during battles, wars and terror attacks. I often wanted to chat to Mark after my show was over and listen to his stories.

Jason Kander 'sorta ran for President' in 2020 before checking himself into a military psychiatric ward for PTSD (he served as an intelligence officer in Afghanistan.) Jason knows Kamala Harris and is still dialed into Washington politics from his hometown of Kansas City, Missouri where he runs a charity for homeless veterans.

Searching for America gives me the opportunity - and indulgence - to go back to some of the most interesting people I’ve interviewed and ask them the questions I didn’t get time to ask during breaking news. 

What does it feel like knowing you’re willing to die for America?  Why are military veterans treated with such reverence at baseball games and airports? Why do so many civilians dress in camouflage gear and carry weapons of war? Who is Kamala Harris? Who votes for Donald Trump?

I deliberately spoke to two army veterans over the anniversary of the September 11 attacks. 9/11 changed their lives and they can articulate what it means to be American right now with a unique perspective.

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