Abstract
Jon Sopel explains his quirky title: “You see, if only they didn't speak English in America, then we'd treat it as a foreign country – and possibly understand it a lot better.”
Is this so? “They” speak English in Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Would we understand them better if they only spoke in their native tongues? Judging by this breezy history of “Trump's America”, Sopel – the BBC's North America editor – understands them well enough. He divides his 400-page tome (with index) into 10 easy-to-digest chapters with self-explanatory headings: Anger, Race, Patriotism, Government, God, Guns, Anxiety, Special (the supposed UK/USA Relationship), Truth and Chaos.
The villain of the piece is Donald Trump, whose “America First” proclamation, Sopel points out, was the name of the US isolationist campaign prior to the Second World War led by the right-wing aviator Charles Lindbergh, who said: “The British and Jewish races, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war.”
Lindbergh added about the Jews: “Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large influence and ownership in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.”
Sopel says: “Interesting that Donald Trump would choose to align himself to an historical movement that is widely seen as an appeaser of Nazism, isolationist and firmly anti-semitic.”
Trump denies being anti-semitic, says Sopel, “but those who had never reconciled themselves to a black president (of whom there were still many) who want America to retreat into itself, who are sick of the US having to act as the world's policeman, who want to ban all Muslims from entering, would have been more interested in what Donald Trump said, rather than what he would subsequently deny”.
Trump dismisses all news reports he regards as negative as “fake news”, or lying press. “Lügenpresse – lying press – is a word with a very particular pedigree in Germany,” reports America's Daily Beast website.
“That it echoes the rhetoric of the Nazis is sadly appropriate to the present, when ideologues try to own the ‘truth’ by branding all others as purveyors of lies. It's a pattern we've seen solidly established even (and especially) in the White House, where an administration that came to office by claiming Barack Obama was born in Kenya, three million illegal immigrants voted for Hillary Clinton, and the inauguration of Donald Trump saw the biggest crowd ever, now lectures professional reporters about their ‘responsibility to tell the truth’.”
Trump's a shocker, but is he America's worst-ever and most dangerous president? The great essayist HL Mencken, from the end of the First World War until the Great Depression, is said to have reached an audience unmatched by any other political or cultural figure in American history. He pointed out, 100 years ago, that America's idolised first president, George Washington, was “the richest man in the United States, a promoter of stock companies, a land-grabber, and exploiter of mines and timber”. Moreover, “he was a bitter opponent of foreign entanglements, and denounced their evils in harsh, specific terms”. He drank copiously, swore and “had no belief in the common people, but regarded them as inflammatory dolts”. As for George's private behaviour, “he took no interest in the private morals of his neighbours”. Indeed, “what a chance there would be for any district attorney who thought to follow him on his peregrinations and grab him under the Mann Act” – a 1910 US law forbidding citizens to engage in the interstate transport of “any woman, or girl, for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose”.
All US presidents are more dangerous now than they were in Washington's time because they have the thermo-nuclear means literally to destroy the planet. But all are made in the image of the led, Trump included.
Sopel points out: “Love of country and pride in its values can be variously described as national pride (good) through to nationalism (not so good) until it reaches jingoism/xenophobia (bad). But in the US there is a whole school of intellectual thought that considers the peculiarly US nature of this question. Put crudely it can be summed up in the words of the philosopher and songwriter Tina Turner: ‘Simply the best, better than all the rest’.”
President Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, saying Americans had a duty to see that “government of the people, by the people, for the people” shall not perish from the earth, might be the influence behind the doctrine of “American exceptionalism”, thinks Sopel. Maybe so, but HL Mencken offered an alternative view in 1920, writing of the Gettysburg Address's principal sentiment: “It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in that battle fought against self-determination.” It was the Confederates who fought for the right of the people to govern themselves. And, of course, to keep slaves.
In recommending Sopel's entertaining romp through American history and its current excitements, I can do no better than his friend and colleague Emily Maitlis's cover page tribute: “Jon Sopel nails it…”