Writer Salena Zito, who is best known for her insightful reporting on Donald Trump and why he won over America's heartland, has a new piece in the New York Post based on her travels in the industrial heartland, titled, "The Day that Destroyed Youngstown, Ohio."

With her always-present humanism and honesty, on Twitter she writes what the story meant to her:

I poured my heart into reporting this story. I'm not gonna lie I did cry. "Youngstown sure died hard" https://t.co/oeAByDg4XI #BlackMonday

— SalenaZito (@SalenaZito) September 16, 2017

Which is why everything she writes is so worth reading. How many reporters put out notices like that? Her long piece on the demise of Youngstown, Ohio, which she pinpoints to 1977, takes a hard look at what happened among the workers in that city, how it came into decline through a massive layoff and its knock-on effects, how that drove thousands from the city, how the workers tried to stop it, how Jimmy Carter and the Beltway crowd didn't care one bit, and how it came to be as it is, which led to the rise of Donald Trump. She reports it objectively, even allowing a leftist to take a heroic, protangonistic role in order to get the story out, going exactly where the facts lead her, rather rely on any pre-set ideas.

The result is a fresh perspective on why the city came to be the way it now is, and according to her headline, how it set the stage for the rise of Donald Trump. It's a story the mainstream media occasionally scratches around to try to report, but which hasn't been really reported until now, and certainly not with the heart Zito puts into it. Only author Robert D. Kaplan, in his book, Earning the Rockies, writes with any comparable insight.

Zito is the best person for telling these stories, because she listens closely with the aim of finding understanding. Zito was the one who brilliantly summed up tthe Trump phenomenon with her observation that:

The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally. 

Which gives a whiff of why her new piece is worth a look. Read her new piece here.