The Swedish ambassador’s search for answers in Trump country

The new Swedish ambassador to the United States was wedged into the back seat of a Honda Civic headed south out of Pittsburgh in search of some true-believing, climate-change-denying, anti-free-trade, “America first” Trump voters.

On one side of Ambassador Karin Olofsdotter sat a former German defense minister and on the other a Washington think-tanker, a former Obama White House official who had organized the Trump country excursion.

Olofsdotter was only a couple of months into her stint as Sweden’s ambassador and still struggling to make sense of a country that seemed as though it had been flipped upside down politically since her last U.S. tour six years ago, when she was the embassy’s second-in-command. From her car window on a late October afternoon, she watched as stately stone houses, built during the steel booms of an earlier era, gave way to the sleepy, well-lit strip malls of Peters Township and the Pittsburgh suburbs.

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