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BBC Books, an imprint of Ebury Publishing
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Copyright © Jon Sopel 2017
Cover design by Two Associates

Jon Sopel has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published by BBC Books in 2017

www.penguin.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9781785942266 (hardback)
ISBN 9781785942280 (trade paperback)

Introduction

We’re going to play a game. I’m going to say a name and I want you to write down what comes to mind. OK. Let’s start: New York. I reckon you’re going to put skyscrapers, shopping, the Empire State Building, steam rising out of vents, cycling in Central Park, yellow taxis. Broadway. Bustle. Trump Tower – yup, I guess we can’t ignore that any more. The soaring clarinet at the opening of Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’, Sinatra belting out ‘New York, New York’ or Jay Z’s ‘concrete jungle where dreams are made of …’ in ‘Empire State of Mind’. Or that scene when Harry met Sally in a diner, and any number of Woody Allen films – in fact his whole oeuvre. Midnight Cowboy, King Kong, Fame – and on and on and on.

And if I were to say LA, I bet you’d write tall palm trees, Sunset Boulevard, soft-top cars, ripped men on Muscle Beach, silicone-enhanced film stars in Beverly Hills, rollerbladers in Santa Monica, the Hollywood sign. And Miami? Steamy hot, Art Deco buildings, old Cuban men playing dominos, water, powerboats, wide beaches. Or the Grand Canyon? Las Vegas? San Francisco? Yellowstone? Chicago? Nashville?

Through music, literature, film and TV, and even through the food we eat and the clothes that we wear, we all have a highly developed sense of what America is; through our own visits we feel we know the country; and through our shared, tangled history we claim a special relationship.

But America in the election year of 2016 – and its extraordinary aftermath – felt about as foreign a country as you could imagine. It was fearful, angry and impatient for change. Journeying across the continent to cover the most turbulent race in recent history lifted a lid on seething resentments and profound anxieties. And most of that rage would find its embodiment in one unlikely person, who was brash, unpredictable – and, in the end, unstoppable.

And in my 30-plus years of being a journalist, I had never covered an election like it, nor witnessed anything like its bitter aftermath. The new president, having scaled the mountain-top, was not enjoying the view – he still had enemies to slay: Republicans who questioned him, the intelligence services, Democrats whom he had put to the sword. Even America’s favourite actress, Meryl Streep, got a kicking for daring to question whether the new president was being divisive. He raged at suggestions that his inauguration had fewer people attending than Barack Obama’s. He claimed that five million Americans had voted illegally for Hillary Clinton. And he went after the media with a rare ferocity and contempt.

I would even sample a little taste of it myself. There had never been anything like President Trump’s first proper news conference in the East Room of the White House (and if the walls could speak, I suspect they’d have nodded sagely and said, ‘You’re right, we never have seen anything like it’). He lashed out at the media for half an hour, as being the most dishonest, loathsome perpetrators of fake news. He swatted away an earnest young orthodox Jew who dared to ask him about anti-Semitism. An African American reporter asked whether the president had plans to meet the Congressional Black Caucus. With a casual racism that shocked nearly all the journalists in the room he asked whether she would fix up a meeting – in other words, perhaps, all you black people know each other, you could sort it out for me. She demurred.

I was the only foreign journalist to get called. And I wanted to ask him about the problems he was having over his attempts to ban travellers from seven mainly Muslim countries. It should have been straightforward. It was not. Having spoken just one word, my English accent alerted him.

‘Which news organisation are you from?’

‘BBC News,’ I replied.

‘Here’s another beauty,’ says the president.

‘That’s a good line. We are free, impartial and fair.’

‘Yeah. Sure.’

‘Mr President …’

‘Just like CNN, right?’ he asked sarcastically.

‘On the travel ban – we could banter back and forth …’

I eventually got to ask my question, and he replied. When I tried to ask a follow-up I was told to sit down, and then, a little menacingly, he added, ‘I know who you are …’

I have never seen politics done like this anywhere. And don’t take that as in any way disapproving. It’s not. This news conference was enormously entertaining. The whole 75 minutes went by in a flash. You had no idea what was going to happen next. And that’s the way it has been for the past 18 months, and that’s the way it is going to be for the foreseeable future. It was – and is – as foreign as foreign can be.

And can you imagine, back in March 2014 when I went through the selection board for the job as North America Editor, if I had said I think a reality TV star, property developer and golf-course owner called Trump with no political experience, who’d been married three times, was going to become America’s 45^th president, how they would have laughed. Equally, though, if I had said the Democratic Party was going to flirt heavily with choosing a socialist revolutionary as its candidate, the head of BBC News and the rest of the panel would have thought it was time to give Sopel a nice desk with no sharp edges and lots of foam furnishings around him where he could do no harm to himself – or the corporation.

I guess over the past 20 years I have travelled to the US an average of three or four times a year: sometimes for work, sometimes to see friends, sometimes to holiday. I had the best mid-life crisis one could ever hope for with five mates as we hired Harley-Davidsons and rode across Arizona, Nevada and California. I thought I knew this fabulous and complicated country. I didn’t, and there were times in 2016 when I felt I knew it less well with each passing month.

America is surprising, varied and dynamic. American friends ask me what has been the most unexpected thing about living here. Easy: politeness and civility (admittedly Donald Trump is challenging that). Yes, the stats may say you’re much more likely to die at the hands of some mad gunman than you would be in the UK (though it’s still an infinitesimally small chance) – but the odds are much higher that you are going to be blown away by civility, decency and courtesy.

The work ethic of young people is off the charts. American kids in college are unbelievably focused – they don’t do gap years; their summers are spent working hard to secure internships to add lustre to their CVs. And when they start work, wow, do they put in the hours – probably they work round the clock so they don’t have to think about their hideous college loans that they are paying back at scandalous, usurious interest rates.

And there are things about the mundanities of life that you might expect. Yes, the portions of food are often way too big, sweet things are sweeter, salty things are saltier, and Americans drive enormous cars and have no idea how to parallel park. Television overall is much better in the UK (what else do you expect me to say?!), but some of the drama and some of the comedy is way better than what you’d get in Britain. Americans are obsessed by the weather – and rightly so. America gets a lot of weather, much of it extremely violent and dramatic. But these are the superficial differences that separate us; there are much deeper fissures too – and it’s those fault lines that the coming chapters will seek to explore.

So let’s go back to the game we started with, only this time play it the other way round. Get the average American to write down what comes into their mind when you say London – they will say fog. I can’t tell you how often Americans have asked me, is it always foggy, damp and rainy in London? Personally I blame Ella Fitzgerald for singing so beautifully about ‘a foggy day in London town’. They will know the Houses of Parliament (and how all those MPs will do nothing but shout at each other). They will know Buckingham Palace. They know about the royal family – that is the one bit of British news that will always break through (at parties I can feel the wave of disappointment come over people I meet who ask me if I know the Queen well, and I have to reply ‘not terribly …’). They know Adele, David Beckham, Gordon Ramsay – even Jeremy Clarkson. And they love our sixties and seventies rock music. The Who, Jethro Tull, The Rolling Stones still do good business in the US.

But ask people about Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow or Newcastle, about the Lake District or the Brecon Beacons, and I suspect not a lot will be written down.

The special relationship is something that concerns us far more than it does them. They like us. They like our quirks. They hate our weather. They love our accent. But for an awful lot of Americans Britain is a small island that they would really struggle to identify on a map of the globe. They know much less about us than we know about them – or think we do.

But America is at a moment where all the things we thought we knew for certain about this superpower, that have been there since the Second World War – are up in the air. This nation is at a turning point. Having lived here for the past few years and travelled from coast to coast – or ‘from sea to shining sea’ as the song ‘America the Beautiful’ would have it – there is a restlessness that is palpable. I’ve gone from the chill of the Great Lakes in the depths of winter to the steamy Deep South, reported from the most iconic cities to the most Hicksville towns where the tumbleweed blows through (in Midland, Texas, the wind was so strong that the tumbleweed overtook the car we were driving in). There is a common thread. A huge number of Americans feel their ‘dream’ is being torn away from them. Of the status quo, a piercing cry of ‘enough’ has gone up. Of the future, the demand is for ‘change’. But what that will look like is anyone’s guess; at the moment there are only vague shapes and ill-defined contours. The past 18 months have made predicting the future a complete fool’s errand.

This complex, God-fearing, gun-loving, patriotic, government-hating gargantuan of a country wants to pull up the drawbridge and look after itself. And as to what the rest of the world thinks? Think Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind – ‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.’

You see, if only they didn’t speak English in America, then we’d treat it as a foreign country – and possibly understand it a lot better.

Foreword

Some books are the result of a blinding flash of inspiration; others have the gestation period of an elephant. This book – and how in tune with the 2016 madness and Donald Trump zeitgeist is this? – is the product of a tweet.

I had been on BBC Radio 2 with Simon Mayo, talking about some aspect of the presidential election campaign, when I received a tweet from a man purporting to be a literary agent. He said he’d like to talk to me as it seemed I could tell a story. Unusually, for Twitter, he turned out to be who he said he was. So I spoke to this charming and clever man, Rory Scarfe, and he suggested I scribble a few hundred words of what I would like to write about. This I thought would be enough to secure a big, fat literary contract. But no, he now wanted 15,000 words to show to publishers. And I thought, well that is simply not going to happen. Too busy with a presidential election to cover.

And this is where my wife, Linda, intervened. We were about to go to Barbados with our kids, who live and work in London, and assorted friends. I am not the best person at lying around on a sun lounger and, it is said, I can be annoying to others who are happy to do nothing but read books, listen to their music and soak up the sun. So I was told in no uncertain terms that instead of irritating everyone I should start work on the book. And each morning in this little piece of paradise, in the aptly named villa ‘Eden’ at Sugar Hill, I would sit in the gazebo and write. I also spent a good deal of last summer in the Hampshire garden of my oldest friend, Pete Morgan, trying to make progress. Linda has also been a source of brilliant ideas about how the book could be improved; what should be included and what left out.

That was the start. For getting it finished, and getting a whole bunch of half-formed ideas into a vaguely cogent shape, I need to thank a number of people. Most of all my editor, Yvonne Jacob at BBC Books, who has been a source of endless enthusiasm and encouragement, my brilliant colleague and friend from New York, Nick Bryant, who read the manuscript and offered really perceptive observations. BBC bosses get a bad rap, but I want to thank them for being so supportive in this endeavour – particularly Paul Danahar, the bureau chief in Washington, who would, on the rare quiet days, let me slip away to write. He was the person who, when we were discussing some extraordinary aspect of the campaign and the problem of explaining the craziness – and foreignness – of it to our British audience, said, ‘If only they didn’t speak English.’ I thought to myself now that would one day make a great book title. Malcolm Balen in London tried to keep me ‘free, fair and impartial’ with what I have written. And then there’s the team. My cameramen, John Landy and Ian Druce, and producers Lynsea Garrison, Sarah Svoboda and Rozalia Hristova, who’ve been the ‘band of brothers’ (and sisters), and shared so many of the experiences that have formed the backbone of these succeeding chapters, deserve a huge thank you too. Without Jonathan Csapo to sort, fix and manage in the bureau I am not sure I would be able to function.

And of course this book is only possible because of all the people in all the places we’ve met and interviewed along the way.

Without this becoming like an Oscars speech, where the music wells up to drown out the person spending far too much time gushing at the microphone, I want to say one other thank you. The family across the street from us in Washington are the Powells – I mention them in the book. When we arrived they could not have been more welcoming to us. And they were a constant source of insight and stories – invariably over a negroni or two. As I was finishing the book, Elizabeth, at the age of 39, was diagnosed with – and died two months later from – a rare and aggressive form of lung cancer. As a family they are all that I love about America – positive, optimistic, kind, decent. So this is to Jeff and his two beautiful children, Eleanor and Charlie; and in memory of an exceptional woman.

Jon Sopel, July 2017

Washington DC

About the Author

Jon Sopel has been the BBC’s North America Editor since 2014. As a BBC presenter of 16 years, Jon has worked variously as the corporation’s Paris Correspondent, Chief Political Correspondent, hosted both The Politics Show and Newsnight and is a regular on HARDtalk, as well as a number of Radio 4 programmes. As North America Editor, Jon has covered the 2016 election and the Trump presidency at first hand, reporting for the BBC across TV, radio, and online. He has travelled extensively across the US and recently rode a Harley Davidson down the West Coast (that wasn’t for work though). He lives in Washington and London.

About the Book

As the BBC’s North America Editor, Jon Sopel has had a pretty busy time of it lately. In the 18 months it’s taken for a reality star to go from laughingstock to leader of the free world, Jon has travelled the length and breadth of the United States, experiencing it from a perspective that most of us could only dream of: he has flown aboard Air Force One, interviewed President Obama and has even been described as ‘a beauty’ by none other than Donald Trump.

Through music, film, literature, TV and even through the food we eat and the clothes that we wear, we all have a highly developed sense of what America is and through our shared, tangled history we claim a special relationship. But America today feels about as alien a country as you could imagine. It is fearful, angry and impatient for change. Reflecting on his journey across the continent to cover the most turbulent race in recent history, Jon Sopel lifts a lid on the seething resentments, profound anxieties and sheer rage that found its embodiment in a brash, unpredictable and seemingly unstoppable figure.

In this fascinating, insightful portrait of American life and politics, Jon Sopel sets out to answer our questions about a country that once stood for the grandest of dreams but which is now mired in a storm of political extremism, racial division and increasingly perverse beliefs.

CHAPTER 1

Anger

As Americans gathered to see out 2016 after one of the most momentous – and unexpected – years in the nation’s history, ready to link arms, sing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and drink a cup of kindness to 2017, Donald Trump had time for one last tweet. It read: ‘Happy New Year to all, including my many enemies and those who have fought me and lost so badly they just don’t know what to do. Love.’

Magnanimity was a commodity in short supply as Americans went about electing their 45^th president.

It seemed a fitting end to a tumultuous and defining year in which one section of American society would look at the other as if they were from different tribes. The divisions were between black and white, young and old, rich and poor, urban and rural, educated and uneducated. In short, those who were doing well and that vast swathe of America who felt left behind. And it was this latter group whose fury and rage Donald Trump tapped into.

They were angry. Angry about wages. Angry about job insecurity. Angry about their savings. Angry about college fees. Angry about their loans. Angry about their healthcare. Angry there were plots to take away their guns. Angry about their kids’ futures. Angry about illegal immigrants. Angry about the value of their homes. Angry with politics. Angry with politicians. Angry with Obama. Angry with Congress. Angry with Wall Street. Angry about America’s place in the world. Angry about the rest of the world. Angry about the treatment of military veterans. Angry the country was going to hell in a handcart. Angry about just about everything and anything.

At times it seemed that it wasn’t so much about blue collar or white collar – Americans were just hot under the collar. When you asked anyone what they thought about the state of the country, it seemed that every reply commenced with ‘Don’t get me started …’

And in perfect harmony with the national mood, America went through the nastiest, most mean-spirited, poison-drenched, hate-filled, vituperative election, with a result as remarkable as any in the country’s 240-year history. An election that pitched a pompous, braggadocious, thin-skinned, sexually boasting property billionaire and reality TV host, who was big on gut instinct but knew precious little about the detail of any policy, against a political insider of 30-plus years who knew Washington inside out, had the detail of everything at her fingertips, never more comfortable than when surrounded by nerdy policy wonks – but had a singular lack of capacity to connect with the public, or communicate clearly why she wanted to be president, other than that it was her entitlement and her turn. The boor versus the bore.

They were two candidates extraordinary in one other respect too. They were uniquely unpopular. Their disapproval ratings broke all records. In this country of 320 million talented, creative and brilliant people with rich reservoirs of experience to draw upon and varied backgrounds, America ended up with a choice of Trump versus Clinton; a decision not of ‘who do I like the most’, but ‘who do I loathe the least’.

Donald J. Trump played by the Queensberry Rules in reverse. There was no belt below which he would not punch, no line he wouldn’t cross. Gouging and holding were to be encouraged; the rabbit punch was the norm. And if the referee called him out, he’d whack the ref with an elbow in the ribs for being biased against him.

The former governor of New York, Mario Cuomo, once remarked that in politics you campaign in poetry and you govern in prose. Donald Trump campaigned with a flamethrower in one hand and a flick knife in the other. Big groups like the media, Wall Street, Washington, the establishment would get the flamethrower treatment. Political opponents who stood in his way (Republican and Democrat) would get the switch-blade. His other favoured method was the drive-by killing by Twitter. He was the master of assassination in 140 characters. The scenes of carnage by the end looked like something out of Reservoir Dogs.

Covering the 2016 election was a very different experience to anything I had ever done. Not just for its unabashed nastiness, but for some of the subject matter too. I was in new territory. Call me sheltered, but in the course of covering politics I had never hitherto discussed penis size or a woman’s vagina – but these were subjects that now had their moment in the sun. And they were interspersed with showers, sometimes ‘golden showers’. There were earnest discussions with TV bulletin editors about what words could be used pre and post watershed. Could we say ‘I moved on her like a bitch?’, as Donald Trump proclaimed in that tape? ‘Can we use the word “pussy”?’ I had to ask one weekend editor. This was new territory for me.

Indeed the two most dramatic moments of the final weeks of the election came with the release of that Access Hollywood sex tape from 2005 in which Donald Trump seems to boast about being able to do whatever he likes to a woman because of his fame, and the FBI announcing 11 days from polling day that it was reopening its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. The latter was because, in the course of another inquiry, it had come across Clinton correspondence on the computer of someone being investigated for ‘sexting’, and sending pictures of his penis to unsuspecting recipients. His name was Anthony Weiner. And the former congressman was married to Mrs Clinton’s closest aide, Huma Abedin. The suggestion was clear – there was more on this computer to interest the FBI than just Weiner’s much selfied ‘manhood’. And then there was the sex tape, on which Trump is heard boasting about grabbing a woman’s genitals to someone called Bush. Where does a satirist go with that? Election 2016: all wiener and bush. You really couldn’t make this stuff up. But it was all part of the lurid Technicolor circus that was election 2016.

And the candidates for the most illustrious crown in democratic politics went about winning by tearing chunks out of each other. The mostly insightful Republican pollster, Frank Luntz, had said to me at the Republican Convention in Cleveland in the summer of 2016, if this is an election about Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump wins, and if it’s about Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton gets it.

Though Luntz may have been right about that, he is going to struggle to recover from his election-night tweet, which read: ‘In case I wasn’t clear enough from my previous tweets, Hillary Clinton will be the next President of the United States.’ As predictions go it had strong echoes of poor Michael Fish, the BBC weatherman who, back in 1987, told viewers there was no hurricane coming. Only for Britain to wake up the next morning and find every tree knocked down across the land. America woke on the morning of 9 November to find that the political establishment had been completely uprooted by Whirlwind Donald.