“I’m glad you didn’t start your journey in D.C.,” one of the experts we met in the nation’s capital told us.
I had to agree. Most of the news we follow from the United States back home originates from Washington, D.C., such as the White House, politicians and other powerful forces.
In reality, America isn’t defined by its coasts, but is shaped by the vast stretch of land in between.
Over the past six weeks, our group has traveled from the Canadian border in Minnesota down to the southern border near Mexico in Arizona. We’ve driven past endless fields of soybeans and corn in Iowa, the heartland of America, and experienced the fast-paced urban life of Chicago.
Along the way, I’ve spoken with farmers, small-town residents, high school students, entrepreneurs and academics. Each of them painted a picture of the United States they live in. They said what happens in Washington may echo in their lives, but it doesn’t define their everyday reality. The America I’ve seen on this journey feels very different from the one often portrayed in the news coverage.
That said, after weeks on the road, I was excited to arrive in Washington, D.C. It felt like coming home. Everything looked familiar, yet so much had changed since the last time I was there.
Washington was my hometown from 2018 to 2020 during President Donald Trump’s first term, when I worked there as a visual journalist. It was a captivating time to be in the capital: the White House had a new kind of leader and something unexpected seemed to happen almost every day.
But little did we know what was to come. During Trump’s first term, he was surrounded by people who often tried to restrain or steer him. Now, as one expert from a conservative think tank put it, “the president is surrounded by people who want to liberate him.”
To better understand the current administration, we spent a week in Washington meeting with experts and journalists. We visited major news outlets such as CNN, The Washington Post, CBS, Politico and Axios, and had the privilege of speaking with their journalists and managing editors. In those off-the-record conversations, they openly discussed the shrinking space for the media to operate.
For instance, on the day we visited CBS, major U.S. news organizations had just pushed back against a new Pentagon policy limiting press access.
Beyond the media, we also got a look behind the scenes of political advocacy. Meetings at the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute offered a rare chance for us, as foreign journalists, to hear firsthand from people shaping U.S. policy right now.
The weeks we spent traveling across the nation before arriving in Washington helped put everything we heard in the capital into perspective.
I deeply value the time these experts gave us. Their insights provided a broader context that will definetily benefit my work back home.
