When America Stopped Being Great

'Nick Bryant is brilliant. He has a way of showing you what you've been missing from the whole story whilst never leaving you feeling stupid.' - Emily Maitlis 'Bryant is a genuine rarity, a Brit who understands America' - Washington Post In When America Stopped Being Great, veteran reporter and 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 challenge of the modern era. Deftly sifting through almost four decades of American history, from post-Cold War optimism, 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 adequately address income and racial inequality. 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 presidency 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 criticise 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 with some of the most dramatic events in recent memory, in an America torn apart by a bitterly polarised election, racial division, the national catastrophe of the coronavirus and the threat to US democracy evidenced by the storming of Capitol Hill.

Nick Bryant is known for being one of the BBC's most senior foreign correspondents, with postings in Washington DC, South Asia, Australia and, most recently, New York. He is the author of The Bystander: John F. Kennedy and the Struggle for Black Equality, Confessions from Correspondentland and The Rise and Fall of Australia. Nick studied history at Cambridge and has a doctorate in American history from Oxford. The Washington Post has noted: 'Bryant is a genuine rarity. A Brit who understands America.' In 2021, he left the BBC, and now lives in Sydney with his wife and children.

Introduction: Face to Face with 'The Donald' 1 It's Morning Again in America 2 Goodbye to the Greatest Generation 3 Bill and Newt 4 The Three Convulsions 5 No You Can't 6 The Donald Trump Show 7 American Carnage 8 The Descent into January 6th Conclusion: Present at the Destruction Afterword: Code Red for American Democracy Acknowledgements Notes Index