Editor’s note: This story, which was originally published April 29 at 3 p.m. was updated April 30 at 5:14 p.m. to correct the order of events of Asma Khalid’s grandparents moving to America.
It’s rather quiet at Sound Bites, the cafe on the ground floor of National Public Radio’s headquarters on North Capitol Street in Northeast Washington, D.C. As a few people stroll in to pick up lunch, the radio feed in the lobby of the building airs news reports about the previous night’s speech President Donald Trump delivered to a joint session of Congress. March 4 was a late one for many who work here, including White House correspondent Asma Khalid, who, after broadcasting live and recording The NPR Politics Podcast, didn’t get back to her Bethesda home until 1 a.m.
Although she’s tired—and because she’s fasting for the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, unaided by coffee—she’s animated as she discusses the speech and her remarkable journey from a small Midwestern town to one of the most prestigious journalism jobs in the country.
“I have to take a step back sometimes and remember that the job I have is beyond my wildest imagination as a kid,” she says. “It is an amazing, amazing privilege to be able to try to help Americans understand the deluge of news that they are facing every single day.”
Maybe it’s her 5-foot-5-inch build or her youthful exuberance when she discusses politics or her profession, but Khalid seems younger than 41.
Her voice has been a fixture on NPR since 2015, when she joined the network’s Washington team to fulfill a job posting for a reporter focused “on the intersection of demographics and politics.” Born in Elmhurst, Illinois, and raised in Crown Point, Indiana, she’s a Hoosier through and through, having earned degrees in journalism and political science from Indiana University in Bloomington before going on to obtain a master’s in philosophy at the University of Cambridge in England.
Her reporting has taken her to Pakistan, the United Kingdom and China, but some of her greatest personal challenges have come at home. While covering the 2016 presidential campaign, Khalid, who wears a headscarf, faced hatred and harassment that would have shattered a less dogged reporter.
“Sometime in early 2016 between a Trump rally in New Hampshire, where a burly man shouted something at me about being Muslim, and a series of particularly vitriolic tweets that included some combination of ‘raghead,’ ‘terrorist,’ ‘bitch’ and ‘jihadi,’ I went into my editor’s office and wept,” she wrote in a piece for NPR.
Incidents like this hurt but don’t hobble Khalid, who keeps a generally positive outlook on life. She moved to Bethesda in 2019, where she now lives with her husband and their two children, and says that despite the hurdles she’s living her dream.
“Today in the Metro, a guy I didn’t know tapped me and said, ‘Thank you. I really appreciate the work you’re doing,’ ” Khalid says. “That was incredibly kind. When those moments happen, it reaffirms my belief that what we are doing is important. In my core, I believe very deeply in the idea of public service journalism. I believe deeply in the value of a free press for the health of a democracy. These are not just slogans to me.”
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
You spent last night covering President Trump’s address to Congress. What did you make of it?
I was struck by how much was a celebratory look back at what he’s accomplished in his first six weeks. And he’s done a lot. He talked about withdrawing from the World Health Organization, freezing foreign aid, his idea of a gold card for wealthy, successful people to sort of buy residency into the United States.
I had expected to hear more about inflation, given that when the president won, he said he won because of the border and because of grocery prices. We heard a lot about the border. We didn’t hear that much about grocery prices. We also didn’t hear as much as I would have expected about his legislative agenda.
What’s on your agenda for today?
We’re working on a project that is beyond the White House. It’s a look at politics and culture in this moment in time. We had a meeting with a couple of historians, some folks within our podcast team, a few editors. It’s the stuff I love best about NPR. I think that we do a really good job of giving you the 30,000—let’s say the 90,000—foot view not just the incremental developments on what’s happening day-to-day.
I’m also trying to keep an eye on the tariff news. You have your White House days where you’re physically at the White House, and when I’m not on White House duty I’m either hosting The NPR Politics Podcast or working on a feature.
When did you first become interested in journalism?
At a very young age I read a kids version of a biography of Nellie Bly, who was this muckraking journalist in the [late 1800s to] early 1900s. And I fell in love with her. I remember we had this thing at school where you could dress up like a character from a biography or a book that you read. I don’t remember how exactly I did this or what my character looked like, but I wanted to dress up like Nellie Bly. I just fell in love with her story of how she was able to speak truth to power. And at a very young age, I resolved I wanted to do something like that.
So I ended up as the editor of our high school student paper. I went to the School of Journalism at Indiana University and also majored in political science and worked on the student paper there. I mention the student paper because for much of my life I thought I was going to be a writer. It wasn’t until after I graduated and ended up in the U.K. and I did an internship with the BBC that I fell in love with the power of audio.
What do you love about it?
I think there’s an intimacy and aesthetic that is really, really hard to find in any other medium. You hear the intonations in a person’s voice. You hear the pauses and the pacing. It’s beautiful and powerful. I felt that it could tell me more than what I could write with a pen and paper.
You’re a true Hoosier. What was it like growing up in Crown Point, Indiana?
Crown Point is in northern Indiana. I would say it’s a suburb of Chicago—Chicagoans might disagree. But it was very different than being in a metro area. My family is Muslim. There were not a whole lot of Muslims at that time in Crown Point. It was not a particularly diverse racial or religious community to grow up in, but I also really loved it. It’s a fairly small town, and so as a result, people knew us, knew our family. And there’s something to be said about Midwestern hospitality and being seen as an individual.
I was always treated and seen as an individual, which frankly, living now on the East Coast and being much more public facing, I haven’t always had that experience. It’s very strange to have people make assumptions about who you are based on what you look like or your religion because I didn’t actually have that happen growing up in this very small town in a fairly red state.
About
From: Crown Point, Indiana
Live in: Bethesda
Age: 41
College: Bachelor’s degrees in journalism and political science from Indiana University, Master of Philosophy from the University of Cambridge.
Occupation: White House correspondent for NPR. Contributor to ABC News. Previously held other positions at NPR, including political reporter and producer.
Did your experience there change at all after 9/11?
It didn’t. My sisters and I were recently trading notes about this because I was wondering if I had a false memory, but I have no recollection of anybody saying anything to us after 9/11. I recognize this is not the experience that other people had who were Muslim growing up in other communities. It may have also been the fact that I knew a lot of people in this town. 9/11 happened when I was a senior in high school, so I had gone to high school with all of these same kids. If anything, I remember shortly after 9/11 there was a homecoming game, and my best friend and I decided to tie-dye my headscarf the school colors. I remember walking around school and a bunch of people complimenting me on it. The jocks were like, ‘Hey, that’s great.’
As I recount the story, it sounds like a Hallmark movie. You’re like, ‘Oh, this really wouldn’t happen.’ But it did. And it makes me nostalgic for a time and a period in which I think we as Americans really did see people. Maybe not everywhere. I realize my experience is not the experience many other people had. But I feel very lucky that I got to grow up and be seen as an individual.
What was your first professional job in journalism?
My first internship was for the Post-Tribune, which was the newspaper in northwest Indiana. It was our local newspaper that our family used to get. My first full-time job was at NPR as an overnight production assistant on Morning Edition. Working the nights teaches you a lot about this job, about this craft. Over the years I have worked for some member stations, including WBUR in Boston. I have worked within the family of public radio my entire adult career.
Why is public radio so special to you?
[Growing up], we did not subscribe to any of the prominent newspapers like The New York Times or The Washington Post. I did not know those papers. I know that might sound strange, but I don’t recall reading a single thing in The New York Times until I was in college. If I wanted to read a big-city paper, I would read the Chicago Tribune.
But we did have access to NPR as a family, and I distinctly remember hearing NPR as a kid and being infatuated with the idea that this source of information could tell me about things that were happening far, far away from Indiana. I’ve always been a curious soul. And as much as I love my hometown, I was always very curious about what else was out there.
Now as an adult, I believe deeply in the idea of people having access to good, reliable information, no matter where they live, and no matter whether or not they can pay to access that information. NPR tries to do that.
I spent many years, going back to covering the 2015-2016 election cycle, where I traveled all over the country interviewing people. It was such a gift to really see America in all of her beauty and sometimes warts.
When you worked at WBUR, you happened to be at the 2013 Boston Marathon just before the bombs exploded. What was that day like?
We were new to the city and everyone told us, ‘You have to go to the marathon. It’s the thing to do.’ So of course my husband and I went. I tend to get rather hungry and cranky when I don’t eat, so at some point in the afternoon I said, ‘I really want to go and eat something.’ My husband wanted to go to the finish line, so we were debating what to do. We ended up going home, and really soon after we sat down, we started hearing about the bombings. We were very thankful that we were not at the finish line. Immediately I got in contact with my editor, who asked me to go to Mass General Hospital, where a number of victims were being taken. I was so new to the city, I didn’t know how to get there. So I Googled it. I grabbed my cellphone and charger and a bike because I knew all the roads were closed. When I got there, I was one of the first journalists outside the hospital. It became a huge reporting scene by the end of the night.
It was a really hard week. You think you feel tired when you cover election campaign cycles, but this was different. It was a very traumatic event that hit a very celebratory sporting event in the city. And I think all of us who were covering [it] felt the emotional baggage as well as the sheer physical tiredness of covering the story every day, attending funerals and memorials for the victims. And then, of course, there was the manhunt. It was a tough story.
You rejoined NPR in Washington in 2015 to cover ‘the intersection of demographics and politics.’ What does that mean?
The politics team that I joined didn’t have that job in existence before. The editors were interested to understand, given the changing demographics of the country, how that would intersect with politics. It was an amazing beat. I got to do all kinds of stories about different voting groups. I also ended up covering all of the Republicans that were running that cycle and the Democrats, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. I feel like I saw the full scope of what was happening politically.
Oftentimes as a beat reporter covering politics, you don’t get the full scope of what’s going on. But that election cycle, I went to so many different states and I got to see all the different candidates running. I was at Trump events, I was at Ted Cruz events, Marco Rubio events. And I covered different voting communities. Exit polls slice and dice different demographics. The thinking was, in my view, to put a human face to what the exit polls actually say.
When you were reporting throughout the country, what bigotry or skepticism did you face?
2016 was a hard election cycle to cover. This election cycle was less difficult, actually. I don’t know that I fully have ever reflected on how challenging that election cycle was for me. I journaled throughout it. Maybe one day I’ll write a book. The climate in the country was really different.
I think that the first thing some people saw—and perhaps the only thing that some people saw—was my headscarf and the fact that I was Muslim. That moment was particularly volatile. Donald Trump made a number of comments about Muslims and Islam. I was yelled off of someone’s doorstep in Ohio. This woman started shouting about there being a Muslim on her property. Things like that hadn’t happened before. And I will say I don’t know that they’ve happened so much after. I relish the fact that I’m from the Midwest. I’ve often thought of the Midwest as a very hospitable place. And so it was strange and hurtful to me in particular that that incident happened in the Midwest.
I’m not an immigrant. My grandparents [who were born in India] moved to this country [from Pakistan in 1962], so at some point you sort of wonder, how many generations does it take to be a complete part of the American fabric and story? Because I don’t feel like any other place is my home. I only feel at home in America. And so that was strange.
You became NPR’s White House correspondent in 2020. Over the course of his four years in office, did you notice any cognitive decline in President Joe Biden?
What I will say is that we as White House reporters did not have tremendous access to Joe Biden. Did I notice physical struggles at times? Yes. We’ve all seen moments where he perhaps tripped going up the stairs of Air Force One or over a sandbag. But the White House press corps as a whole did not have tremendous access. If I look at the [first] six weeks of Donald Trump, I’ve had an opportunity already, in a cabinet meeting, to shout a couple of questions at [him].
Donald Trump has spoken a lot of times. Every time that there is a foreign leader here, there are multiple questions [asked] by the press. For Joe Biden, foreign leaders would come and sometimes there’d be press conferences. It was somewhat different during his last press conference that he gave at NATO, where he took a bunch of questions. I was called on during that press conference, but prior to that I will say we didn’t have tremendous access to the president.
You posted a video earlier this year on Instagram from your radio booth in the White House, with an accompanying message that read, ‘I’m not sure the job is the best fit for me. My favorite stories are the ones that touch on people and policy. (Not politicians!)’ What did you mean by that?
When you’re covering the White House, you’re often covering what a president says and not the implications of a particular policy. And I love policy. I did a whole series around what it means to make things in America during the Biden years. We went out and interviewed a manufacturer in Minnesota who was frustrated by the China tariffs that were put in place by President Trump but were also kept in place under Joe Biden. And I thought it offered a real human element of what this means to have tariffs. That to me is the great power of radio, right? The intimacy of it.
When you cover the White House, it is the president, whether it’s a Democrat or Republican, who drives the news of the day. And so often there’s interesting stories that I think are on the periphery, but we can’t do them because the news of the day dictates what we have to cover. And I understand that. But sometimes it feels like those other stories, you don’t have the time or the capacity to do.
That being said, what’s the best part about the job?
Look, it is a tremendous privilege to be witness to what is happening. I know a lot of people get news via social media, but I think there’s still tremendous value in taking a beat and having four or five minutes of really good explanatory journalism to explain the context of what’s happened.
Sometimes I get to ask the president of the United States questions. [In February] at his cabinet meeting, I had an opportunity to do that. And there are not very many people who get a chance to do that. With that privilege comes a lot of responsibility. I think about that a lot. That’s not lost on me.
Do you just shout your questions or does someone call on you?
At the cabinet meetings we just shout the questions. If you’re in the Oval Office, you can just shout questions. At press conferences, in the Biden years, they would often call on you explicitly. Under this president, he’ll sort of motion to you, it seems. But if you’re in an Oval Office setting, or if you’re catching the president on Air Force One, you can just ask questions. At the cabinet meetings I try to get in front. I’m not too tall, so if you get in front of a tall person, you have at least the line of sight.
You’re all over social media. What’s your relationship with it? Is it a healthy thing? Is it sometimes scary?
I wonder about this all the time because I think social media offers a tremendous value, but I also think it can be tremendously toxic. There are specific journalists who I follow on X. It’s sort of [like] creating my own little personal newspaper. You can find things about places or communities you want. For example, I have a little list on [my phone] about Indiana. I have a list on here about fashion. Things I like in addition to the political news. But there is a sense of toxicity also where I think people feel very liberated with the anonymity of social media to say harmful things that they might not otherwise say. It takes a lot more effort to write somebody a handwritten letter or an email than it does to spew off something particularly hurtful online.
How is the climate here in Washington these days toward journalists?
What I can say is that one of the questions that’s been on my mind a lot is the value that we as journalists provide to everybody. A lot of people I know, whether it’s friends or family, don’t necessarily consume traditional mainstream news on a regular basis. They’re not unique. People are consuming their news a lot through social media, which is part of why I see the value in being there. But it has made me wonder: Do people not trust us? I would argue the trust deficit is not necessarily just on the right or the left. I think it’s on both. Are there ways in which we can be more transparent that could yield greater trust? I think the burden is on us to figure out how we can convey to people that what we are doing is really important. I think about this a lot.
What role does your faith play in your life?
I don’t talk a lot about my faith, but since you asked, my faith is a very big part of my life. When things feel very difficult, I find comfort and solace in God and prayer.
I also think that it has helped me to not get frazzled by some of the very hurtful things that have been spewed at me over the years. It gives me sort of an inner calm and peace.
You moved to Bethesda in 2019. What do you and your family like about living there?
When we first moved there, we didn’t really know what to expect. I sort of chose it based on the fact that it’s on the Red Line. And I heard it had pretty good schools. I think Bethesda is such a lovely place, especially with small children. There’s a lot to do. We like to go on the Capital Crescent Trail for walks. There are beautiful parks everywhere. We like to go to the Great Falls entrance on the Maryland side, which I feel is a hidden gem because it’s never as crowded as the Virginia side.
Are you a fan of any particular restaurants?
I have little kids, so we enjoy Andy’s Pizza, which is exceptionally good. Beyond the confines of Bethesda, there’s some really unique cuisine. Z&Z [in Rockville] makes this really good Palestinian flatbread with za’atar, which is so delicious. … One of the best things about living in Bethesda is being in such close proximity to so many ice cream shops. We’re particularly big fans of Sarah’s Handmade Ice Cream and the unusual flavors they have.
During Ramadan, when you break your daily fast at sunset, is there a certain food you look forward to the most?
I’m working like a crazy person at the White House and have two small kids, and so I am like the classic very traditional home cook who freezes whatever I can when I have time on a weekend and then takes it out in batches. My mom used to make these, I don’t know what I would call them, version of a samosa. But they’re made with Pepperidge Farm Puff Pastry Sheets. Inside you put ground beef that I make with a recipe that I got from an Indian cookbook. So I make those and I freeze them, and I love to [break] the fast with them because you can just take them out of the freezer and pop them in a toaster oven for 20-ish minutes, and they’re ready to go. I’m sure some people eat them with chutney, but we eat them with ketchup.
Mike Unger is a writer and editor who grew up in Montgomery County and lives in Baltimore.
This appears in the May/June 2025 issue of Bethesda Magazine.
