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Act Two: Metro-North Train

Producer Neil Drumming talks to someone who was not happy with the results of Tuesday’s election. Janelle, who’s black, is bracing herself for the coming days.

Act Three: Trump Tower

Producer Karen Duffin visits someone who actually knows the man who’s going to be President: Donald Trump’s neighbor.

Act Four: Los Angeles

Producer Jonathan Menjivar listens in on parent-teacher conferences the day after the election at a bilingual school in Los Angeles.

Act Five: Long Island

For some people, this election wasn’t just about choosing a politician. It was about choosing their new boss.

Act Six: Times Square

Ira talks to a Muslim woman who tweeted on election night that she was worried she would no longer feel safe wearing a hijab.

Act Eight: Greenville South Carolina

We’ve been talking to Trump voters all year—a time during which they’ve watched their candidate’s chances evolve from laughable, to likely, to striking distance, to victory. Producer Zoe Chace checks in with a father and son who’ve been Trump supporters since February, when their guy was an underdog.

Act Nine: Salt Lake City

Elna Baker talks to a Republican woman who voted for Hillary Clinton this year, and has suffered consequences in the Mormon community she lives in.

Act Ten: New York City

Producer Zoe Chace hung out with some immigration lawyers who are getting calls from their nervous clients.

Act Eleven: Toledo

On election night, producer Emmanuel Dzotsi was the last person at our office. Just before midnight, he got on the phone to his mom in Ohio, and recorded their conversation.

Prologue

There’s a political parable about Hillary Clinton that’s made the rounds this year. Host Ira Glass interviews contributor Jack Hitt, who says that in this parable you can see almost every version of Hillary that exists in the popular imagination: the A student, the opportunist, the mastermind, the rat fink, the pragmatist, the truth-twister.

Act One: Server Be Served

Sean Cole talks to reporter Garrett Graff, who read the 247 pages of interview summaries of the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. Graff concludes that it’s not the scandal most people thought it was.

Act Two: Knowing What We Know

After Huma Abedin’s emails were discovered on her husband’s computer by the FBI, and after FBI Director James Comey publicly declared the agency would be investigating those emails, Hillary Clinton’s poll numbers dropped. What was the conversation Huma Abedin then had with her boss, Hillary Clinton? Actors Tami Sagher and Cady Huffman tried to imagine it.

Prologue

There’s a seismic, historic change going on in the Republican party this year. Producer Zoe Chace tells Ira about a place you can eavesdrop on a group of Republican friends as they fret and argue about that change week after week: a podcast called Ricochet.

Act One: Party in the U.S.A.

One way to understand the split inside the Republican party is to look at immigration. It’s this urgent, emotional issue for so much of the party these days.

Act Two: Party Guy

(Podcast and Internet Only) Another tragic figure this year is the head of the Republican National Comittee Reince Priebus, who has the job of holding the whole party together. A grueling and thankless job, this year.

Prologue

Ira talks about what’s alarming him about this year’s election: facts seem less meaningful than they ever have, and the gap between the mainstream media and right-wing media’s versions of the world have never seemed further apart. CNN’s Jake Tapper explains what it was like to be on the air live when Donald Trump tried to take a huge, obvious lie and pass it off as the truth.

Act One: Lies Become the Truth

Ira's quest continues. He calls his Uncle Lenny, who gets his news from Fox and the Wall Street Journal, and lives with an entirely different set of facts, and Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration expert at the CATO Institute, who explains that the central issue in Donald Trump’s candidacy is based on something that isn’t true.

Act Two: Judges with Grudges

In this election year we look at the story of one small ballot initiative, in one state. We heard this referendum would gut Georgia's Judicial Qualifications Commission (JQC), an independent organization that investigates ethics complaints about judges.

Act Three: Aw, Do We NAFTA?

Ira explains that when Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton all seemed to be against free trade agreements, he got genuinely confused. Is free trade good or bad? Was NAFTA good or evil? Are we down with TPP? He asked Jacob Goldstein of NPR’s Planet Money podcast to explain, once and for all, the pros and cons of free trade.

Act Four: Seriously?

We’ve been wondering about some of the things President Obama thinks about the current election, but can’t say publicly. But since he hasn’t told us his thoughts explicitly, we asked singer/songwriter Sara Bareilles – who did the Broadway musical “Waitress” – to imagine those thoughts for us.