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‘Almost everyone is a little bit in love with the USA,” declares Edward Stourton in his introduction to Made in America. And why not? It is the land of razzle-dazzle and high ideals, of jazz music, Bogart and Bacall, Harriet Tubman and Hamilton, a nation that was anti-colonialist and pro-liberty from its conception, whose Declaration of Independence states that “all men are created equal”. Why, then, does this same country so often produce clown-show politics, racism at home and abroad, and imperial ambitions, latterly in Greenland and Canada? Why does it regularly show contempt for the world order it helped create? Why did it once again elect Donald Trump?
These contradictions have kept an army of journalists, White House-watchers and soothsayers in business for generations. Alistair Cooke, perhaps the greatest British exponent of the genre, interpreted the country via the minutiae of everyday life, observing people at the beach, say, or riding the subway. Stourton, another BBC veteran, who first reported from Washington in the Reagan years, takes almost the opposite approach. He looks at Trump and Trumpism through the run of history, arguing in a series of insightful essays that the 47th Potus is not an American aberration but a continuation, an echo of dark and often neglected aspects of the country’s past. Trump, he concludes, is “as American as apple pie”.
Stourton, who currently presents Radio 4’s religious and current affairs programme Sunday, takes six key aspects of Trump and Trumpism and sieves the history of the republic, looking for precursors or parallels. Broadly speaking, the categories are religion, imperialism, immigration, tariffs, political persecution and the way in which the president wields power. Appropriately, given Stourton’s expertise, he kicks off with an exploration of American faith.
It is baffling for those of us who live outside Trumpland that Christian nationalists form a major component of the Maga faithful. How can anyone purport to follow Christian values and still align themselves with someone so obviously venal, corrupt and immoral? In search of an answer, Stourton spools back to colonial America, and to John Winthrop, who landed at Salem, Massachusetts, in 1630, at the head of a group of 700 English Puritan settlers. It was Winthrop who famously described the new religious colony he intended to found as “a city upon a hill”, an image since borrowed by US presidents from JFK to Reagan to Barack Obama. Winthrop served for many years as governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where he and his co-religionists happily sentenced dissenters to whipping, banishment and even execution. This was justified, in Winthrop’s view, because the state existed to uphold divine laws, and if its earthly methods needed to be brutal, so be it.
The modern parallel is clear. Christian nationalists will support Trump as long as he helps them return divinely founded America to the Christian state it once was: he’s delivering on his side of the bargain through actions such as appointing the supreme court justices who overturned Roe v Wade. Seen through the lens of early puritanism, the alliance makes far more sense than it does in the context of the constitution, whose guarantees of religious freedom only arrived a century and a half later.
This tension – between an enlightened US and its illiberal alter ego – runs through Stourton’s book. In the 20th century, for instance, US presidents liked to define the nation as anti-imperialist, which gives the impression that Trump’s present-day coveting of Canada and Greenland is the anomaly. But territorial expansion was a key aim of the US for much of the 19th century. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 set the template. Thomas Jefferson acquired 530m acres from Napoleon, including land that makes up part or all of 15 modern-day US states. The country doubled in size overnight. Of course these lands were not France’s to sell: their true owners included an estimated half-million Native Americans. But Jefferson’s deal set the tone for a “century of confiscation” and ethnic cleansing that was to come.
Four decades later, the US government made another massive grab for land, forcing Mexico to cede more than half of its territory, including modern-day California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona and New Mexico, and parts of Colorado, Wyoming and Oklahoma. In all, there were around 20 episodes of American expansion in the 19th century, including two attempts to annex Canada. The US “resorted to absolutely every trick in the book to achieve its ambitions”, according to Stourton, including real-estate deals, bribery, treaties, diplomatic sharp practice, bullying, ethnic cleansing and conquest. “The outcome always came first,” he writes, “the means mattered less.”
There are precedents here for almost all of Trump’s actions. Summary arrests and deportations? Attacks on the “fake news” media? In 1798, John Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which allowed him to imprison or banish foreigners without trial, and banned “false and malicious” writings against the president and the government. Contempt for judges and the law? See Andrew Jackson, Potus number seven, a “monster”, according to Stourton, and a hero to Trump. Jackson refused to implement a supreme court verdict he disagreed with, allegedly saying of the chief justice: “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!” Tariffs? President William McKinley raised import duties to around 50%, a “Trumpian level”, with disastrous consequences for the Republican party. Muslim migrant bans? Stourton refers us again to Winthrop, whose regime inflicted punishment based on the identity or sect to which a person belonged, and required strangers wanting to reside in Massachusetts to get permission.
Occasionally, the attempts to find historical precedent feel a little stretched. The weakest may be the link Stourton draws between Trump’s use of the state to punish his enemies and the McCarthyite witch-hunts of the 1950s. There are similarities in the way government processes are abused, but these feel very different. Trump, the most powerful man in the country, is motivated by a desire for personal retribution: he orders the prosecution of people he thinks have slighted or wronged him. Joe McCarthy, who never rose higher than the status of junior senator, had no history with many of his targets, but attacked them opportunistically, because he loved the spotlight.
On the whole, though, Made in America is a pithy, entertaining and informative intellectual exercise. Stourton makes a persuasive case that Trump is a logical outcome of American history, a modern representative of the illiberal, imperialist streak in US politics that stands in sharp contrast to the more familiar values of the constitution. He set out to prove that you cannot understand Donald Trump without understanding America’s past, he tells us. What he found in the end was that “you cannot understand America without understanding Trump”.
Non-Americans should hardly take solace from Stourton’s conclusion that Trump is an American phenomenon. As Cooke is once supposed to have remarked, “The British especially shudder at the latest American vulgarity, and then they embrace it with enthusiasm two years later.”
