Salena Zito

Salena Zito is a veteran political reporter with more than twenty years of award-winning experience in print and broadcast journalism. With her trusty Jeeps that have clocked well over 400,000 miles on their odometers and a refusal to travel on interstates, Zito is a reporter who harkens to an older generation of journalism, one who listens to the stories of everyday Americans in places far outside the artificial bubbles of Manhattan and the Beltway. One of the last scribes of Middle America, she famously popularized the root cause of their failed coverage and underestimation of Donald Trump by the phrase coined by Brad Todd saying, “The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.”

Zito is a national political reporter for the Washington Examiner, and a special contributor to the Washington Post. She has been a columnist for the New York Post and has contributed to The Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal and the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. She has also taught journalism at Harvard University, Washington and Lee University and Hillsdale College with an unconventional curriculum of having the students leaving the comfort of the classroom and teaching them how to go out in the country and learn firsthand the experiences of people in this country.

Zito is also the author of "The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics" and "It's Complicated: How Our Nation Is Coming Together and Falling Apart." Her latest, "Butler: The Untold Story of the Near Assassination of Donald Trump and the Fight for America's Heartland," is due to be published in 2026.