Review of Made in America by Edward Stourton – Why the ‘Trump Doctrine’ Isn’t an Aberration | History books

‘A“Almost everyone is more or less in love with the United States of America,” says Edward Sturton in his introduction to Made in America.. Why not? It is a land of dazzle and ideals, of jazz, of Bogart and Bacall, of Harriet Tubman and Hamilton, a nation that was anti-colonial and pro-liberty from its conception, and whose Declaration of Independence declared that “all men are created equal.” Why then does this same country so often produce clown politics, racism at home and abroad, and imperial ambitions, more recently in Greenland and Canada? Why does she regularly show her disdain for the world order she helped create? Why did you elect Donald Trump again?

These contradictions have kept an army of journalists, White House observers and fortune tellers at work for generations. Alastair Cook, perhaps the greatest British exponent of the genre, interpreted the country through the details of everyday life, observing people on the beach, for example, or riding the Tube. Stourton, a BBC veteran who first reported from Washington in the Reagan years, takes almost the opposite approach. He looks at Trump and Trumpism across the course of history, and argues in a series of insightful essays that POTUS 47 is not an American aberration but a continuation, an echo of the dark and often neglected aspects of the country’s past. He concludes that Trump is “as American as apple pie.”

Stourton, who currently presents Radio 4’s Religious and Current Affairs Sunday programme, examines six key aspects of Trump and Trumpism and sifts through the history of the Republic, looking for precursors or parallels. In general, the categories are religion, imperialism, immigration, tariffs, political persecution, and the way the president exercises power. It is appropriate, given Stourton’s experience, that he begin by exploring the American faith.

It is puzzling to those of us who live outside Trumpland that Christian nationalists make up a major component of MAGA believers. How can anyone claim to follow Christian values ​​and still be in league with someone who is corrupt, corrupt, and immoral? In search of an answer, Stourton returns to colonial America, and to John Winthrop, who arrived in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1630, at the head of a group of 700 English Puritan settlers. It was Winthrop who described the new religious colony he intended to establish as a “city on a hill,” an image that has since been borrowed by US presidents from JFK to Reagan to Barack Obama. Winthrop served for many years as governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where he and his co-religionists happily sentenced dissenters to flogging, exile, and even execution. This was justified, in Winthrop’s view, because the state existed to uphold divine laws, and if its earthly methods needed to be brutal, so be it.

The modern parallel is clear. Christian nationalists will support Trump as long as he helps them return divinely established America to the Christian nation it once was: He fulfills his side of the bargain through actions like appointing the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade. Viewed through the lens of early extremism, this alliance makes much more sense than it does in the context of the Constitution, whose guarantees of religious freedom did not arrive until a century and a half later.

This tension – between the enlightened United States and its illiberal character – runs through Stourton’s book. In the 20th century, for example, US presidents liked to define the nation as anti-imperialist, giving the impression that Trump’s current greed for Canada and Greenland is an anomaly. But territorial expansion was a major goal of the United States during most of the nineteenth century. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 set the model. Thomas Jefferson acquired 530 million acres from Napoleon, including lands comprising part or all of today’s fifteen U.S. states. The country doubled in size overnight. Of course, these lands were not France’s to sell: their rightful owners included an estimated half a million Native Americans. But Jefferson’s deal set the tone for the coming “century of expropriation” and ethnic cleansing.

Four decades later, the United States government made another large-scale land seizure, forcing Mexico to cede more than half of its territory, including California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona, New Mexico, and parts of Colorado, Wyoming, and Oklahoma. In all, there were about 20 episodes of American expansion in the 19th century, including two attempts to annex Canada. The United States “resorted to every trick available to achieve its ambitions,” according to Stourton, including real estate deals, bribery, treaties, sharp diplomatic practices, bullying, ethnic cleansing, and invasion. “The result always comes first,” he writes, “and the means are less important.”

There are precedents here for almost all of Trump’s actions. Mass arrests and deportations? Attacks on “fake news” media? In 1798, John Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which allowed him to imprison or exile foreigners without trial, and prohibited “false and malicious” writings against the president and government. Disdain for judges and the law? See Andrew Jackson, POTUS Number Seven, a “monster,” according to Stourton, and a hero in Trump’s eyes. Jackson refused to implement a Supreme Court ruling with which he disagreed, and allegedly told the Chief Justice: “John Marshall has made up his mind; now let him carry it out!” Definitions? President William McKinley raised import duties to about 50%, the “Trump level,” with dire consequences for the Republican Party. Banning Muslim immigrants? Stourton refers us again to Winthrop, whose system imposed punishment on the basis of the identity or sect to which a person belonged, and required outsiders wishing to reside in Massachusetts to obtain permission.

Sometimes, attempts to find historical precedent seem a bit exaggerated. Perhaps the weakest link is the one Stourton draws between Trump’s use of the state to punish his enemies and the McCarthyite witch hunts of the 1950s. There are similarities in the way government processes are abused, but they look very different. Trump, the most powerful man in the country, is driven by a desire for personal revenge: he orders the prosecution of people he believes have insulted or wronged him. As for Joe McCarthy, who never rose above the position of junior senator, he had no history with many of his targets, but he attacked them opportunistically, because he loved the limelight.

Overall, though, Made in America is an eloquent, entertaining, and informative intellectual exercise. Stourton makes a compelling case that Trump is a logical outgrowth of American history, a modern representative of the illiberal, imperial streak in American politics that contrasts sharply with the values ​​more commonly found in the Constitution. He sets out to prove that you can’t understand Donald Trump without understanding America’s past, he tells us. What he ultimately found was that “you can’t understand America without understanding Trump.”

Non-Americans should take solace in Stourton’s conclusion that Trump is an American phenomenon. As Cook once said: “The British particularly shudder at the latest American vulgarity, and then embrace it with enthusiasm two years later.”