Tamara Keith

Oddly enough, NPR White House Correspondent Tamara Keith began her path to the Trump White House while covering Hilary Clinton on the 2016 campaign trail. Her experiences provide an insightful look into the rise of President Trump and the highly unusual campaign that has become an unprecedented presidency. Relying knowledge gained during years as NPR’s Congressional correspondent, Ms. Keith makes sense out of what’s happening in Washington, clarifying issues and providing colorful commentary on the stories behind the headlines. Read More >

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• Fake News: Why it’s Bad For All of Us. “Fake news” plays on the power of our emotions and capitalizes on the biases we all have. Learn how to detect fake news and identify your own blind spots.
• Continuing Gridlock in Washington. Ongoing political divisions continue to create the impasses and standstills that voters hate so much. From the emergence of the Tea Party movement to the fiscal fights of 2011-13, to the trouble President Trump is having wrangling his own party, Tamara Keith explains why winning definitely didn’t paper over the problems of the Republican Party.
• An Unprecedented Presidency. From the role of First Daughter to the preeminence of Twitter, President Trump is doing things differently. Tamara Keith looks at how the old order has been disrupted—for better and for worse—and how the press and citizens need to respond.

In 2011, Keith launched an ambitious year-long series following the lives of several Americans who started the year unemployed and searching for work, called The Road Back To Work. In the wake of the Great Recession, getting back to the lives that had before would prove immensely challenging. Disillusionment with institutions and politicians ran deep and all these years later, still does. Keith takes her audience into the lives of the people she profiled and explains what their experience says about this moment in American political and economic life.

Tamara Keith started listening to public radio when she was still strapped into a car seat, now she’s one of NPR’s top journalists, covering the White House and hosting the successful NPR Politics Podcast. How she got here from there is a funny story of not knowing one’s limits that offers valuable lessons for anyone who dares to dream big.

Women have never had more representation in congress than they have today and yet the numbers are far from representative, at only 19%. And as the 2016 demonstrated once again, breaking the "highest hardest glass ceiling" remains elusive. Keith brings her experience covering Hillary Clinton's campaign to this look at women in politics and the barriers they continue face, both internal and external.

Keith describes balancing family and the two years she spent covering the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton as “complicated but not hard.” For Keith it was a logistics challenge, but for many people finding that balance is nearly impossible. She shares the stories of those she’s covered and looks at the demographic shifts that have prompted policy makers in both parties to propose (though not pass or enact) more family friendly policies.

Tamara Keith has covered the ongoing healthcare debates from both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, through both the Obama and Trump administrations and campaigns for the presidency and Congress. Bringing insights from inside Washington and the perspective of everyday Americans that will be impacted by reform, Keith provides context on the very latest developments (which change by the minute). She also explains the political dynamics at play and provides insightful background on how we got to where we are today.

The opioid crisis is killing approximately 142 Americans a day. That's the equivalent of the death toll from 9/11 every three weeks. Add to that the toll on families and the economy. The nature of the epidemic has changed the way the public and politicians talk about addiction and has prompted bipartisan action in Congress. Tamara Keith has been covering the politics of the opioid crisis since 2015, and shares both the personal stories of those affected and the latest on the efforts of policy makers to make changes that save lives.