Adam Chandler: How did you go from working on Wall Street to becoming a sojourner and a writer. What brought you to that?

Chris Arnade: I came to writing after growing tired of Wall Street and trying to find a different perspective of looking at things. My path is of having only looked at things from only the top down, like I think most people do these days—data-heavy, kind of a macro look—and I think that way of looking at things is wrong and that’s why I shifted to doing what I’m doing now, which is very first-person: Meeting people and talking to them and learning from them and getting going at the very micro level.

Chandler: With the election still fresh in mind, how do those two views clash?

Arnade: Given my past and given what I do now, I have two very different perspectives on how things played out. I see my old self, which I think is a lot of the media and the way they look at things—heavy data, big-picture—versus what I do now, which is getting into the nitty-gritty and talking to people. I feel like I can see the problems that my old way of doing things, which is the way most people do things, might have caused. You just miss things. You look at economic numbers and say “Everything’s great!” and you go beneath the numbers and things aren’t great.

Chandler: Were there any specific cities or towns you visited that made you think that the rise of Trump was more predictable than most people thought?

Arnade: There are so many stories. I think it was during the week of the GOP Convention when I went down to Cleveland. I didn’t go to the convention at all—I spent half my time in a poor, working-class black neighborhood and half my time in a poor, working-class white neighborhood. There was a working-class, white bar I spent two days in and that’s where it really struck me: This man is really resonating. This message is really taking hold and really hitting people. What sociologists and others have long talked about when you go to a poor, working-class black neighborhood is that there is this code of honor, this demand for respect. That same thing was taking place in the white bar I was seeing. And Trump was fulfilling that respect. It was all about respect, regaining respect.

I think that was something I wasn’t seeing in the press at the time. I think the general story was, “Well, these are just racists.” And the people I was talking to, they didn’t strike me as racist. They might be supporting someone whose policies a lot of people find as racist, but on an individual level, that wasn’t what was motivating them. And then I started paying more and more attention wherever I went.

It was the morning breakfast groups I wrote about at McDonald’s. How many times can you sit at a morning breakfast group and find yourself defending TARP [the $700-billion bank bailout signed by President Bush in 2008] and realize that maybe you’re the one who’s wrong?