Ian Birrell

America sees red: how fury prompted the slide into Trumpism

Evan Osnos focuses on three places — Chicago, Greenwich, Connecticut and Clarksburg, West Virginia — to explain the dislocating anger that erupted in the US

The desolation left as schools close in the depopulated mining towns of West Virginia. [Getty Images] 
issue 11 September 2021

After leaving college more than two decades ago, Evan Osnos landed a job on the Exponent Telegram, one of two daily papers published for the 16,400 citizens living in the West Virginia town of Clarksburg. Like many local reporters in those far-off days before the internet, he covered pretty much everything in his community, from boxing bouts and house fires to local politics and miners’ strikes.

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