In the middle of November, 2016, shortly after the election, I saw a tweet by Kai Ryssdal — host of Marketplace on NPR — noting that they were looking to interview anyone who had applied for a job in the Trump administration. Coincidentally I had just submitted my resume to the greatagain.gov website, so I replied to Kai’s tweet.
Just a few minutes later I received a Twitter DM from Nancy Marshall-Genzer asking if I’d be willing to chat about it, and a couple of hours later we talked on the phone. She was incredibly nice and we ended up recording almost an hour interview. It took a while to get rolling because we actually did the interview proper via Skype on my iPad Mini with me recording my side using my iPhone Voice Memo app, which felt wildly inefficient. But Nancy insisted that iPhone recordings were the gold standard for doing radio interviews these days.
About a month later — in mid-December — I asked her via Twitter if I had perhaps missed the broadcast. She replied that she didn’t end up using my interview for that story but was planning on doing another story on the topic and wanted to know if we could do another interview. Of course I agreed and she contacted me again in the second week of January 2017 for another interview. Once again we spent almost an hour discussing the election and how the Trump administration was going to fill the 4,000+ positions required.
This morning the interview finally aired. You can read and / or download it on the Marketplace website. It’s crazy that almost two hours of audio recordings yielded barely ten seconds of airtime in the final product and speaks to how much work goes into producing those pieces every day.
In case you’re wondering: I’m a registered Democrat and voted for Hillary Clinton. I’m disappointed that she didn’t win, but I don’t think that anyone should abandon all hope. I applied for a job with the Trump administration because fixing things is what I’ve done my whole life, and I’m expecting there to be plenty of broken things to fix over the next four years.
If I see a burning building, I’m not going to tell the best firefighters not to help because I think the homeowners caused the fire themselves. I don’t think Democrats should stop working or let the government collapse; I think now — maybe more than ever — is the time we should all be doing the best we can at whatever we’re doing.