There was a moment, a few pages into Jon Sopel’s engrossing portrait of the United States in the Age of Trump, when I wondered whether I might be the least fitting person on the planet to review it. As its ironic title — a riff on George Bernard Shaw’s remark about “two nations divided by a common language” — suggests, the book is explicitly directed at British readers.
Yet, while I’m a born-and-bred Washingtonian, I found it to be not only immensely readable, but enlightening. And that’s not just because I’ve now actually lived in London for considerably longer than in my native America.
Perhaps because Sopel was a regular visitor to the US before becoming the BBC’s Washington-based North America editor, he manages to move beyond a mere account of the events and issues surrounding Trump’s extraordinary ascent to the presidency. He has captured a sense of what makes ordinary Americans tick, and the ways in which they, and the country, are simply wired differently than Britain and the British.
He also rightly observes the real-life limitations that lie behind what successive British and American governments have extolled as their “special relationship”— though, in an especially moving passage, about meeting an octogenarian US ex-serviceman during a family visit to Normandy, he also explains why, despite everything, a core specialness does remain.
The book is at its best when examining the complex way in which Americans relate to some of the country’s key, and most divisive, political issues: God and country, government and individual liberty and, of course, guns.
The mix of familiarity and distance that he brings to his observations reminded me a little of a pair of books by two extraordinary foreign correspondents – Hedrick Smith of the New York Times and Robert Kaiser of the Washington Post – that I devoured four decades ago before embarking on a three-year correspondent’s posting of my own to the then Soviet Union.
If Sopel’s book does have a weakness, it is one that is unavoidably shared these days with almost everything written about America and Americans.
It is that the presence of Donald Trump — his angry tweets, the mix of instability and venality, and sometimes borderline illiteracy that he has brought to the American presidency — seems to have sucked the oxygen out of attempts at serious reporting or discussion about where precisely he is leading the country.
Sopel offers engaging anecdotes about how Trump campaigned and won and how he has governed. But he leaves the reader hanging as to how this bizarre departure from more than two centuries of American history seems likely to end, and whether the demagoguery and division in which Trump revels will irrecoverably damage institutions and constitutional norms. But the fact is that nobody knows.
Ned Temko is a former editor of the JC
If Only They Didn’t Speak English By Jon Sopel BBC Books, £20 (pb £7.99)
