There's No Substitute for Empathy

Beginning Inauguration Day 2017, a cynical New Yorker tours thirty cities across America in a struggle to understand the motivations of devoted Trump supporters by capturing their words and stories. Four years later, will their perspectives change? Or will his? Inspired by the gentle inquisitiveness of Studs Terkel's work, this is a literary documentary four years in the making. Crisscrossing the country with an attempt at openness and empathy, Daniel Robert Sullivan reaches across the aisle - and sometimes the bar - to present the real words of real people. A bank robber in Boston, a NASA engineer in Las Vegas, a Somali refugee in Minneapolis, a Chinese scientist in Philadelphia, a Salvadoran immigrant in Los Angeles, a spa owner in Beverly Hills, a Trump campaign exec in Indianapolis, a Mexican-born lawyer in Reno, a liberal-ish feminist in Tulsa, and Bill Clinton's former mistress in Little Rock... Will their stories have an impact on Sullivan? Or you?