Book Review: If Only They Didn't Speak English: Notes from Trump's America by Jon Sopel
Many in the UK have been wondering for quite a while why America voted for Donald Trump in 2016.
Much has been written about the latent anger among the white working class men, badly affected by globalisation and the transfer of their jobs overseas, and Donald Trump's genius for tapping into that anger and exploiting it.
Jon Sopel, the BBC's North America Editor has released the paperback version of his book, If Only They Didn't Speak English: Notes from Trump's America, to explain how this happened, and offer a more general cultural description of the state of modern America.
Mr Sopel looks at the various key cultural and social norms that define America and sets it against the rest of the West – especially western Europe – and tries to explain what drives American society, and what its flashpoints are.
Beginning and ending with chapters that explain the Trump presidency, such as the anger that got him into power and a new chapter on the first year of chaos in the White House (as well as the surprising resurgence in economic prosperity), there are chapters on religion, race, guns, patriotism, pharmacological abuse and big government. Mr Sopel seeks to describe and explain the strong emotions running through each of these elements of American society and the good or ill they provoke. The frontier mentality induces a certain degree of self-reliance in many Americans that many in Western Europe would simply not recognise, leaving many such tasks to the local council or central government – clearing the pavement of snow, for example.
But the same frontier mentality, combined with the physically isolated existence for many, has induced the deep-seated gun culture that many outside the US simply cannot understand. Despite many thousands of people dying from gun violence each year, and the incidence of mass shootings happening with alarming frequency, Mr Sopel predicts that the US will never give up its guns.
Citing commentators at the time of the Sandy Hook massacre that if the killing of 20 six-year-olds and seven-year-olds in 2012, along with six teachers, was not enough to bring about change in the legislation, then nothing will. The National Rifle Association is too powerful, and has too strong a hold over politicians in Washington, and the US population – where guns in circulation outnumber people to own them – are too wedded to their machinery and its embeddness in the constitution, however distorted its interpretation might have been.
Nonetheless, Mr Sopel has good things to say about the US, such as how charming and polite its people can be, and how thoughtful and intelligent Barack Obama was when he was in office and his dignity out of it. There is also an interesting detail about his infamous red line on Syrian regime's use of chemical weapons, and a weird coincidence about access for weapons inspectors just as the president was about to bomb specific sites.
This is an intelligent well-written book, which is especially useful for anyone trying to make sense of American society as it is today, and it also provides a quick summary of the weirdness and chaos of the first year of the Donald Trump presidency.
Published by BBC Books. Melanie Tringham is deputy features editor of Financial Adviser and FTAdviser.com
