Yasmeen Abutaleb is a White House reporter for The Washington Post who is covering the 2024 election campaign. She is also the mom of a one year old and is seven months pregnant with her second child.
Career Journey
Liz Tenety: Yasmeen, did you always want to be a journalist?
Yasmeen Abutaleb: I didn’t know this career was an option until college. My parents are Egyptian immigrants, and like many immigrant families, careers like doctor, engineer, or lawyer were encouraged. My mom’s dad was a journalist for Voice of America, but it wasn’t until I joined my college newspaper as a microbiology major that I discovered journalism for myself.
Liz Tenety: How did your transition from science reporting to politics at The Washington Post unfold?
Yasmeen: I started at the Post six months before COVID hit, focusing on health. Covering the pandemic became a major political story with Trump’s handling of it, which gave me a taste for politics. Then I later co-wrote a book with Damian Paletta about the Trump administration’s COVID response (Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic That Changed History), and that experience solidified my interest in political reporting.
Liz Tenety: What’s something people don’t realize about covering politics?
Yasmeen: Much of the job is waiting. On the campaign trail, we arrive hours before events, pre-write stories, and sit around until the action starts. Sometimes, the job is very exciting, but people don’t understand how much of it is a grind. My sister jokes that I spend half my job traveling or waiting for the actual thing to happen.
Balancing Motherhood and a Demanding Career
Liz Tenety: Let’s talk about motherhood in the midst of this exciting, though sometimes boring, political reporter life. You’re on the campaign trail now. How do you manage reporting with motherhood?
Yasmeen: I joined the White House team in June 2022, found out I was pregnant two months later, and most of my time on the beat has been while pregnant. Time management is everything—meeting deadlines while being present for my son is a constant juggling act. My editors understand my need to be home for bedtime, and I fit calls or edits around my son’s schedule. When things get hectic, my husband steps in to help.
I think like any mom, the most important thing you learn is time management. So I feel like I’ve become much better at not wasting time during the day now because not only do I have deadlines, but I need to be home by a certain time a lot of days. And then also just thinking a lot more about time management because I do have to travel a good bit about how to maximize the time with my son when I’m home and to sort of mitigate the time that I’m away so it doesn’t feel like I’m away so much.
Liz Tenety: How do you manage the unpredictability of being a journalist covering a very demanding beat? I feel like a lot of working moms can relate to the challenge of really unexpected things coming up at home or at work and how it’s a struggle to manage it all.
Yasmeen: I think one of the things that I was luckiest with is I did not have to reinvent the wheel at The Washington Post. I had other moms who had been on the campaign trail with small kids or while they were pregnant or were managing a demanding job like the White House while having little kids.
And one of my colleagues, Ashley Parker, gave me one of the best pieces of advice that I ever got in terms of how to manage all this. And I’ve adhered to that.
Her advice is that there are certain things that she couldn’t do. She had her first daughter during the Trump administration while she was covering the White House. So that was even more manic. And, she said there were certain assignments she couldn’t take or she couldn’t do because of bedtime or she didn’t have childcare. And so she’d get asked to do a story or something and she’d say, “I can’t do that, but I can do this instead.” And it would be like, “I can be the lead writer for a weekend story if I can write it Friday after my kid goes to bed.” Or “I can do the debate coverage once I put my kid to bed.”
And so that’s been really helpful for me because you’re trying to say like, this is my boundary, this is my restriction right now, but I am going to do this for you instead. And I find that tends to go over well because then, everyone feels like you’re still carrying your weight and you’re trying to make it work. So saying, “I can’t do this, but I can do that,” goes a long way in balancing workload with family.
Memorable Reporting Moments
Liz Tenety: Have you had any standout moments on the campaign trail?
Yasmeen: I brought my husband and son on a recent last minute reporting trip. It was chaotic, but worth it—we managed interviews, and my son even stayed quiet for a podcast recording’s room tone. And I think that was like my proudest moment of “we’re finding a way.” Of course he was losing it by the end of the day, but still, we’re doing it. He stayed quiet. That moment is just seared in my mind.
Liz Tenety: How does your background as the daughter of immigrants and as a working mom shape your approach to reporting?
Yasmeen: I do have to remind myself what a privilege the job is. You know, we’re watching these candidates up close. This has been an absolutely insane election. I mean, the last couple all have been, but this one has been [another level]: You had the incumbent drop out four months before the election, replaced by his vice president, who is potentially the first female president, first woman of color to become president. There’s so much history in this campaign.
And I do get frustrated when I get assigned another weekend story or I’m working late or feel like I can’t catch a break basically. But I know in the end I’ll be really, really glad that I covered this and got to watch everything up close and get to know these candidates so well in the campaign.
Politics and motherhood in the 2024 election
Liz Tenety: How do you see motherhood and politics intersecting in this campaign?
Yasmeen: Women’s healthcare is now a top campaign issue, which is remarkable. It’s become a key focus for Kamala Harris, while Trump struggles to address it given his conservative base. I’ve even heard undecided male voters raise abortion rights as a deciding factor, which feels like a shift.
Liz Tenety: What about childcare?
Yasmeen: The vice president has made the childcare tax credit, this $6,000 credit that she would give to people who just had a child, a central part of her campaign pitch. It’s part of her stump speech. It’s part of her economic proposals. So I think that’s indicative of the fact that childcare is clearly resonating as a top issue for people.
We’ve also seen some really strange answers to the question. During the first presidential debate between Trump and Biden, they were both asked about childcare and neither of them actually answered the question about what they would do about it, they’ve both totally veered off into different answers. Then JD Vance was asked about it in an interview a few weeks ago and he said something like, well, “maybe like grandma has to step up more, aunts and uncles have to step in more.”
So, I mean, I think the answer to that question is indicative of how serious, maybe how personally the candidates understand that issue.
And I’ll be honest, I didn’t understand how challenging childcare was—or how much your day blows up if you don’t have childcare when you think you’re gonna have it—before I became a mom.I didn’t realize how tough childcare is until I became a mom myself.
Yasmeen’s support system during the campaign
Liz Tenety: So how do you maintain balance in the midst of it all?
Yasmeen: My support system is everything—my husband, parents, and childcare help keep things running. Taking people up on offers of help and squeezing in sleep whenever possible also makes a difference during these intense weeks.
