When America Stopped Being Great

BBC New York correspondent Nick Bryant reveals how America's decline paved the way for Donald Trump's rise, sowing division and leaving the country vulnerable to its greatest democratic challenge yet, culminating in the annus horribilis of 2020 and the fraught US election. Deftly sifting through almost four decades of American history, from the post-Cold War optimism of the 'Greatest Generation', through the scandal-wracked nineties and into the new millennium, Bryant unpacks the mistakes of past administrations, from Ronald Reagan's 'celebrity presidency' to Barack Obama's failure to resolve race. He explains how the historical clues, unseen by many (including the media) paved the way for an outsider to take power and a country to slide towards disaster. As Bryant writes, 'rather than being an aberration, Trump's victory marked the culmination of so much of what had been going wrong in the United States for decades - economically, racially, politically, culturally, technologically and constitutionally.' A personal elegy for an America lost, unafraid to level criticism at actors on both sides of the political divide, When America Stopped Being Great takes the long view, combining engaging storytelling with recent history to show how the country moved from the optimism of Reagan's 'Morning in America' to the darkness of Trump's 'American Carnage'. It concludes in arguably the most dramatic year in recent memory - 2020 - in an America torn apart by a bitterly polarized election, racial division and the national catastrophe of the coronavirus.