Product Overview

• Type: Bryant, Nick
• Author: When America Stopped Being Great: A History of the Present

'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. Read more