When America Stopped Being Great

Nick Bryant is brilliant. He has a way of showing you what youve 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 Americas decline paved the way for Donald Trumps 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 Reagans celebrity presidency to Barack Obamas 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, Trumps 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 Reagans Morning in America to the darkness of Trumps 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.