Presidential inaugurations are ordinarily an exercise in national renewal and rejuvenation. Joe Biden’s was more about repair. To demonstrate to the watching world that America was back, the incantation of his new administration, he enlisted some of the country’s most recognisable A-listers. Jennifer Lopez sang the Woody Guthrie classic ‘This Land is Your Land’. Lady Gaga belted out the Star-Spangled Banner into a golden microphone as if the life of the republic depended on it. Both, though, were upstaged by the lodestar of the ceremony, the African-American National Youth Poet Laureate, Amanda Gorman, who recited her spellbinding poem ‘The Hill We Climb’, a call for comity and togetherness.
The backdrop to the ceremony, however, reeked of divisiveness. Though now festooned with red, white and blue bunting, the inaugural platform had been used only two weeks before as a staging post for the Capitol Hill insurrection. The few of us allowed to personally witness Biden’s swearing in peered out over a capital that looked more like a garrison town. Troops manned makeshift checkpoints made up of ugly concrete barriers and khaki Humvees. The wire-mesh wall erected around much of central Washington enclosed an area called the Green Zone, terminology previously deployed in Baghdad.
While Biden’s inauguration would be remembered for three words, ‘Democracy has prevailed’, it was three short phrases that outlined his presidential mission statement: ‘Bringing America together. Uniting our people. And uniting our nation.’ But could anyone heal this dismembered land?
The 78-year-old president’s first 100 days were unexpectedly restless. Placing its faith in science, reason and the federal government’s capacity to ameliorate the coronavirus crisis, his administration accelerated the vaccine roll-out, which helped slow the advance of the original variant of Covid-19. It passed a giant stimulus package, the American Rescue Plan Act, which also brought about the largest expansion of the welfare state in decades. The United States rejoined the Paris climate change accord.
NASA bolstered the narrative that America was again on an upward trajectory by rolling out its Perseverance Rover on Mars. Then it performed something of a victory lap by launching a miniature robotic helicopter, Ingenuity, whose 40-second flight was likened to the Wright Brothers’ first powered flight at Kitty Hawk. Both were futurist reminders of a bygone age of earthly US dominance.
As journalists, we covered Biden like the orthodox president he was; and many of us doubtless found comfort in his conventionality. No longer were our professional lives consumed with reacting to what the president had tweeted. The simple fact that Biden conducted so much of his presidency offline contributed to a lowering of the political temperature, as did Donald Trump’s banishment from Facebook and Twitter.
Just as a better story bias had shaped our early coverage of candidate Trump, so I suspect a better America bias influenced our initial take on President Biden. It was tempting to write stories that cohered with the ‘America is back’ narrative, because many of us wanted the country to rediscover its better self.
Sadly, however, US politics had entered an even more abnormal and alarming phase. Rather than becoming a day of Trumpian repudiation, January 6th became yet another moment of Republican radicalisation. Instead of breaking the fever, it made the body politic even more diseased. Despite his role in engineering a coup attempt, the former president remained as the titular leader of the GOP. Despite his second impeachment, he remained its presumptive presidential nominee for 2024. His comeback speech at the CPAC conference in Orlando in late February 2021 felt the coming together of a fanatical cult. To complete the quasi-religious vibe, a gold idol of the former president was even put on display.
Party leaders like Mitch McConnell and the House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who were initially critical of Trump’s role in inciting the mob, now kissed his ring once more. Republican lawmakers whose own lives had been placed at risk downplayed and even denied the violent intent of insurrectionists. One Republican claimed during a congressional hearing that the rioters looked like they were on a ‘normal tourist visit’. Another complained that, in pursuing prosecutions, the Justice Department was ‘harassing peaceful patriots’. Ashli Babbitt, the insurrectionist shot dead by a police officer – the Air Force veteran was wearing a Trump flag around her shoulders when she died – became a right-wing martyr.
By contrast, conservative dissenters like Congresswoman Liz Cheney, who defended the sanctity of the electoral process, became victims of a purge. In the eyes of Trump’s supporters, Republicans who did not embrace the ‘big lie’ were traitors.
The GOP’s win-at-all-costs mentality had reached the point of utter madness. Yet conservative voters endorsed the fraudulent claim of fraud. Polling suggested that almost 80 per cent of Republicans did not believe that Joe Biden had legitimately won the election. Fox News, with its prime-time propagandist Tucker Carlson in the vanguard, was more demented than ever in spewing misinformation and propagating the big lie.
A conservative movement which for years had increasingly come to be defined by its opposition to the Democratic Party now mobilised against democracy. No longer was the attack merely confined to voter suppression – although that was ramped up, especially in states like Georgia, which had turned from red to blue partly because of high turnout among voters of colour. Now it extended to election subversion. Restrictive voting laws were passed in 17 states, as well as measures making it easier for state legislatures to interfere with election administration in a partisan way. One ploy was to sideline secretaries of state like the Georgia Republican Brad Raffensperger, whose decency, fair-mindedness and refusal to be bullied by Trump preserved the integrity of the vote. Another tactic was to pack Election Boards with Republicans. Moderate secretaries of states, like Raffensperger, who had refused to succumb to threats from the Trump White House, also found themselves targeted at the ballot box by ‘big lie’ Republicans, who vowed to ‘primary’ them out of office. This was all part of a flagrant attempt not just to grant Republican state legislatures the authority to subvert the popular will but to permanently rig the system in their favour.
This was not just some drive-by attack on democracy. Nor was it a guerrilla campaign based on hidden ambushes and hit-and-run tactics – even though far-right groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers looked more and more like the paramilitary wing of the conservative movement. This was more brazen and threatening: a sustained and coordinated onslaught which unfolded in plain sight. Truly, it was Code Red for US democracy.
Throughout all this, Joe Biden continued to give voice to the language of American exceptionalism – a tongue that was sounding increasingly obsolete – and sought to frame the geopolitical rivalry between the USA and China as a climactic struggle between democracy and authoritarianism. ‘This is a battle between the utility of democracies in the twenty-first century and autocracies,’ he stated at his first press conference. But that very battle, of course, also raged at home, and nobody could say with any certainty which side would win.
Six months into the Biden presidency, I learned that this very book had made it into the Oval Office. A sharp-eyed Twitter follower, studying a photo released by the White House, noticed that a copy of When America Stopped Being Great was on the table behind the Resolute desk, among a pile of books that included Hunter Biden’s memoir and a biography of FDR. Doubtless Joe Biden would have rejected its thesis, that we were living in the age of a post-America America. But from the disastrous fall of Kabul, which was so reminiscent of the fall of Saigon, to the sight of Haitian refugees being charged by border agents on horseback at the southern border, which evoked memories of slavery, and from new restrictive abortion law in Texas, which sought to nullify Roe v. Wade, to the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse, the Trump-supporting vigilante who shot dead two men during racial protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin, events during his first year in office reinforced that narrative. His reunification project had failed.
My concern now is that January 6th was a foreshock, a prelude to an even more deadly eruption. I am not suggesting that the country is on the verge of a full-blown conflagration, an American Civil War 2.0, in which compatriots would face off on the modern-day equivalents of Gettysburg or Antietam. But I do fear we could see more white supremacist shows of strength, along the lines of the neo-Nazi torch rally in Charlottesville; an escalation of political violence from militia groups; and sporadic acts of domestic terrorism akin to the 1995 Oklahoma City bomb attack. Elections, the mechanism in civil societies that resolve disputes peacefully, could routinely become violent flashpoints.
I dearly hope I am wrong. I yearn for an upturn in the country’s fortunes. But the warning delivered at the conclusion of the first edition of this book, that we would witness more American carnage, was unfortunately borne out by events. I penned that line long before Trump instructed his personal army to march on the Capitol.
American democracy prevailed that day. But only just. And let us hope it can long endure. Because I have always agreed with the words of Thomas Paine, whose writings in the revolutionary era did so much to bring about the creation of the United States: ‘the cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind.’
Acknowledgements
Perhaps the greatest gift of my journalistic life has been to have a seat in the stalls for many of the most extraordinary moments in modern American history: the Reagan Revolution, the Bush interregnum, the Clinton years, 9/11 and the lead-up to war in Iraq, the victory of Barack Obama and the defeat of Hillary Clinton. As I was writing this book, however, and the coronavirus crowded in on us in New York, I confess to wanting to escape. The Covid-19 crisis became a coda to the book I wish we all could have avoided. It made me yearn even more for the America I fell in love with as a teenager during that carefree Californian summer.
The idea for When America Stopped Being Great came from an essay I wrote for the BBC, which began with that first westward journey. Early one Friday evening, I started putting pen to paper on the Acela Express as it pulled out of Union Station in Washington, and was still writing when the sun rose in New York on Saturday morning. Much to my surprise, this bundle of thoughts and reminiscences became something of a viral sensation, so my thanks to the more than three million people who read that essay and unwittingly helped bring this book into existence.
Our digital team in Washington, led by Tom Geoghegan, Ben Bevington and Jude Sheerin, has always promoted my writing, and always found a home for the longest of long reads. Thanks as well to Finlo Rohrer in London, who came up with the headline for that piece, which I purloined for the title of this book.
My BBC boss in Washington, Paul Danahar, a dear friend since our days covering the 9/11 beat in South Asia, has always been a wise and brave editor. He casts a thoughtful eye over almost every word I write, and defends us to the hilt. The BBC’s former foreign editor Jon Williams posted me to New York in the first place, and then, happily, became our neighbour in Brooklyn. Thanks as well to my friend Andrew Roy, the BBC’s present foreign editor and former Washington bureau chief from the Clinton years, and the BBC’s head of newsgathering Jonathan Munro for letting me see how the Trump years played out.
My New York producers, Nada Tawfik, Chris Gibson, Tony Brown, Lynsea Garrison and Ashley Semler have been a joy. My shooter Andrew ‘Sarge’ Herbert is an Aussie legend. My friend Andrew Blum filmed that first interview with Donald Trump. My thanks, as well, to our producers and camera crews in Washington and beyond. The lovely Tara Neil, Kate Farrell, Sarah Svoboda, John Landy, Ian Druce, Ron Skeans, Pete Murtaugh, Chuck Tayman, James Cooke, Maxine Collins, Maria Byrne, Mat Morrison, Aiden Johnson, Gringo Wotshela, Ed Habershon, Kat Stefanie, Samantha Granville, Harry Low, Brajesh Upadhyay, Lindle Markwell, Aiden Johnson, Sam Beattie, Morgan Gisholt Minard, Bill McKenna, Allen McGreevy, Joni Mazer Field, Jonathan Csapo and Rozalia Hristova. Much of the book was discussed over various dinners in the home of my good friends Katty Kay and Tom Carver. Our office manager John McPherson has long been a BBC treasure.
My correspondent colleagues Jon Sopel, Barbara Plett Usher, James Cook, Anthony Zurcher, Aleem Maqbool, Gary O’Donoghue, Laura Bicker, Chris Buckler, David Willis, Laura Trevelyan and Jane O’Brien have been wonderful fellow travellers. Thanks, as well, to our happy band in the BBC New York bureau: Michelle Fleury, Samira Hussain, John Mervin, Natalie Sherman, Bahman Kalbasi, Zoe Thomas, James Cooke and Tom Brook.
I have also benefited from the work of a squadron of historians and political reporters who have covered or written about the last six presidencies with such distinction, foremost amongst them Lou Cannon, H. W. Brands, Gil Troy, Jon Meacham, John Harris, Joe Klein, Hendrik Hertzberg, Jean Edward Smith, E. J. Dionne, Jonathan Alter and Steve Kornacki.
The biggest treat of writing this book was to reconnect with the professor who examined my doctoral thesis all those years ago, my fellow Bristolian Tony Badger, the former Paul Mellon Professor of American History at Cambridge University and one of the nicest men in British academia. Our transatlantic email exchanges took on the feel of a fun evening in one of those cosy Cambridge pubs where the conversation could have extended way beyond closing time. Tony was generous with his insights, anecdotes and encyclopaedic knowledge. Richard Partington, the senior tutor at Churchill College, who has done so much to encourage kids from similar backgrounds to me to feel that Cambridge is their academic home, was also supportive.
For his thoughts on the manuscript, I am indebted to Allan Little, the BBC’s poet laureate of news. Allan, who has always been supportive of my long-form writing, is the kind of correspondent we all want to emulate. The BBC’s Ben Wright, another of our finest wordsmiths and a friend since the George W. Bush days, popped up in New York at just the right time with his discerning eye and generous encouragement. I owe an enormous debt to Malcolm Balen, the BBC tsar who checks every word we prepare for outside consumption. It is to his great credit that Malcolm wields his blue pencil so lightly and so deftly. I am thankful for his wise counsel and encouraging words.
It was also my good fortune to work with Jamie Birkett at Bloomsbury, who was not just a great advocate for the book but such a talented and helpful editor. In these socially distanced times, we quickly developed a close working relationship, even though it was only after the hardback edition was published that we finally came face-to-face. The Bloomsbury team was exemplary: Jude Drake in publicity, Lizzy Ewer and Rosie Parnham in marketing, Sutchinda Thompson, who designed such a striking cover, Rayshma Arjune, who looked after publicity on this side of the Atlantic, Matthew Taylor who was such a diligent copyeditor and Sarah Jones, who project edited the paperback edition.
For the Australian edition, I am grateful to the indefatigable Nikki Christer at Penguin Random House, who once again brought a book into existence based on what was essentially a one-line pitch. It was a pleasure to work with the editor Patrick Mangan, a fellow Pom, and my tireless publicist Jessica Malpass.
Gordon Wise, my agent in London, deserves a special word of thanks, for believing in this book from the outset and for pushing so strongly for a pre-history of the Trump presidency that took a step back from the frenzied here and now. Pippa Masson, his colleague from Curtis Brown in Sydney, is always a joy to work with.
My dear mum and dad, Janet and Colin Bryant, have always encouraged my American travels, even though it has meant me living most of my adult life beyond British shores.
Words of thanks to my children, Billy and Wren, double as an apology: for the time I spent reading history books on holiday when I should have been splashing around in the pool; for allowing Netflix to do some of my early morning weekend parenting so I could sit at my laptop. Though they are usually in the same room when I write, many are the times when I have been absent. Still, I have watched them blossom into charismatic little New Yorkers, with all the spirit, imagination, open-mindedness and internationalism that entails. Beautiful Honor, the calmest of babies, has been the most joyous of distractions.
The final and most heartfelt words of appreciation go to my wife Fleur, who agreed to leave behind her beloved Australian homeland in 2013 so I could pursue my latest American dream. Not for the first time, completing a book meant burning too much midnight oil. Not for the first time, some of my early deadlines coincided with a due date. No one, though, has encouraged my writing more than Fleur, and done more in a loving and practical way to help make it happen. For years to come we will talk about the months spent in lockdown during New York’s coronavirus outbreak, and reflect on how the experience brought us even closer together as a couple and as a family. Forever we will remember the spring and summer of 2020, mindful of those who lost their lives and thankful for the magic of new life.