Some moments in history are of such immense scale, and so mentally scrambling, that even the most gifted of wordsmiths struggle to reach for apposite words. So it was in the immediate aftermath of the attacks of September 11th. Penning a prose poem for the New Yorker, John Updike spoke of being “summoned” to the rooftop of his Brooklyn apartment building to “witness something great and horrendous,” and of how the South Tower of the World Trade Center “fell straight down like an elevator, with a tinkling shiver and a groan of concussion distinct across the mile of air.”

In the same pages, novelist Jonathan Franzen tried to capture the convolutions of the New York mind. “Besides the horror and sadness of what you were watching,” he observed, “you might also have felt a childish disappointment over the disruption of your day; or a selfish worry about the impact of your finances, or admiration for an attack so brilliantly conceived and so flawlessly executed, or, worst of all, an awed appreciation of the visual spectacle it produced.” His words, like Updike’s, hardly met the moment.

Sentences from Franzen which have enjoyed a longer afterlife came from the opening lines of The Corrections, a bestseller which, uncannily, was published on September 1st, 2001: “The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through. You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen.” Perhaps we should look on the The Corrections as the last pre-911 great American novel. It was written in a more complacent time when few understood was was meant by the terms waterboarding and CIA black sites, or even the phrase “weapons of mass destruction.” Back then, comparatively few Americans knew of Osama Bin Laden, or the Islamist terror network he founded, al-Qaeda. After the attacks, an obscure book published in 2000 entitled, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, by the Pakistani scholar Ahmed Rashid, became a surprise New York Times number one bestseller.

Novelist Martin Amis best described the daunting literary challenge in the days afterwards: “After a couple of hours at their desks, on September 12th, 2001, all the writers on earth were reluctantly considering a change of occupation.” Small wonder so many reached for verses from a dead poet, W.H. Auden, whose poem “September 1, 1939” resonated in the here and now.

“The unmentionable odour of death,

Offends the September night.”

Writing in The Guardian while “Ground Zero” was still smouldering, Ian McEwan, who went on to pen one of the more successful post-911 novels, Saturday, wrote: “American reality always outstrips the imagination. And even the best minds, the best or darkest dreamers of disaster on a gigantic scale, from Tolstoy and Wells to Don DeLillo, could not have delivered us into the nightmare available on television news channels yesterday afternoon.” Even years afterwards, however, writers of the calibre of DeLillo struggled to adequately articulate the boundlessness of September 11th within the pages of a novel. In his 1997 masterwork Underworld, which almost seemed to foreshadow 911 by putting the Twin Towers on the cover with a bird hovering threateningly in the sky, DeLillo had brilliantly captured the paranoia of Cold War America.

Yet his 2007 novel Falling Man, which followed a survivor called Keith Neudecker from the stairwell of the one of the burning towers via various subplots to the gambling halls of Las Vegas, received mixed reviews. . It focussed primarily on just a few characters, Keith, his estranged wife, Lianne, and a performative artist who mimicked the so-called “Falling Man”, who was filmed leaping - balletically, it seemed like in one frame - to his certain death (“the puppetry of human desperation, a body’s last fleet breath and what it held,” writes DeLillo). He also fictionalised one of the hijackers, who he called Hammad. As ever with DeLillo, the writing was stunning. “There are the days after. Everything now is measured by after,” he wrote, as he described a world of “falling ash and near night.” But reading it all those years ago, having not long before devoured Underworld, it felt, to me at least, emotionally fallow: a literary form of disassociation, when someone is so overwhelmed by their memories and feelings that they become numb and disconnected.

John Updike’s Terrorist (2006) is not spoken of in the same breath as his Rabbit series, Rabbit Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971) Rabbit Rich (1981). In Philip Roth’s award-winning 2006 novel Everyman, the main protagonist had moved away from Manhattan in the aftermath of 9/11, a metaphor perhaps for the author’s apparent reluctance to take on the subject himself.

Other 911 novels, by lesser known authors, were more successful. Netherland (2008) by Joseph O’Neill, focussed on a Dutch financier who had worked in New York, and took the reader, unexpectedly, into the subculture of a cricket club in Staten Island patronised by South Asian and Caribbean immigrants. The received a boost when Barack Obama, who was then in the first year of his presidency, said how much he admired the novel.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer was narrated by a nine-year-old boy named Oskar Schell, whose father had been killed on September 11th. Oskar was fixated by a key left by his father in a vase that launched a search around New York for a locked door. Behind it, hoped Oskar, would be found understanding and closure.

The Emperor’s Children by Claire Mesoud and The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid were well reviewed. By the events of 911, Cormac McCarthy was moved to write his post-apocalyptic epic The Road, a truly great novel, albeit the most gruelling of reads.

But, as in the hours and days after the attack when Updike was first summoned to that Brooklyn rooftop, authors in the years afterwards often struggled to do literary justice to 911. “If there was one thing writers agreed about in response to 911,” wrote Richard Gray, in After The Fall, his study of 911 literature, “it was the failure of language; the terrorist attacks made the tools of their trade seem absurd.”

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Perhaps no new stories were needed when there were more than enough from the day itself. Maybe that explained the success of the “Portraits of Grief” compiled by the New York Times in the months afterwards, the aim of which was to flesh out a victim’s personality in small, indicative details. We learnt of Dianne Bullis Snyder, a flight attendant on American Airlines Flight 11 who “would post life lessons on her children’s doors. ‘Don’t wait for tragedy, say it today.’” Then there was Leon Smith Jr., the big-hearted fire truck driver for Ladder Company 118 based in Brooklyn Heights. “He would wash his rig every single day, and when he went off duty, he'd say, 'Listen, my baby better be clean.’”

Fact trumped fiction. Maybe that explained why The Report of the 9/11 Commission, which was written with page-turning prose, became an unexpected bestseller. This was the opening, under the chapter heading: “We Have Some Planes.”

Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States. Millions of men and women readied themselves for work. Some made their way to the Twin Towers, the signature structures of the World Trade Center complex in New York City.Others went to Arlington,Virginia, to the Pentagon.Across the Potomac River, the United States Congress was back in session. At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, people began to line up for a White House tour. In Sarasota, Florida, President George W. Bush went for an early morning run. For those heading to an airport, weather conditions could not have been better for a safe and pleasant journey. Among the travellers were Mohamed Atta and Abdul Aziz al Omari, who arrived at the airport in Portland, Maine.

Perhaps not enough time has passed since the events of that horrific day. That was the point made, on the tenth anniversary of the attacks, by the New York Times book critic Dwight Garner. “Writers are still metabolizing 9/11 and its aftershocks; they’ll do so for decades,” he wrote. “War and Peace wasn’t written until some 50 years after Russia was invaded by France.”

My favourite 911 novel barely mentioned 911. Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin (2009) is set in August 1974, and centres on the day Philippe Petit walked on a tightrope between the twin towers of the World Trade Center. His epic feat has been called “the artistic crime of the 20th century,” because he pulled it off without the permission of the owners of the skyscraper or the NYPD. The novel focuses on the convergence that day of a random group of New Yorkers, an Irish monk living in the housing projects, a rich Park Avenue mother who lost her son in Vietnam, a subway car graffiti artist and a prostitute from the Bronx. All of them, we find out, are bound by sorrow. All of them, to use a phrase that became so popular after 911, are united by grief.

McCann, whose father-in-law had escaped from the 59th floor of one of the burning towers, used Petit’s walk as an allegory. “He was pureness moving,” wrote McCann. “He was inside and outside his body at the same time, indulging in what it meant to belong to the air.”

“9/11 was the initial impetus for the book,” the New York-based novelist explained afterwards. “My question to myself was: How do we talk about these things? But I am aware of the pitfalls of labelling it a ‘9/11 novel,’ especially for American readers many of whom, like me, are tired of the idea of a 9/11 genre. But it has to be looked at. And 9/11 is certainly part of the book’s construction, but it is not limited to that. But in this sense it is very much a book of hope and in some ways it’s an anti-9/11 novel. 9/11 is not mentioned (or at least it is only mentioned glancingly, in a single sentence, towards the end). But I think it’s vital that it at least be part of the novel, in the sense that the novel is multi-faceted and multi-themed.”

Whenever I am asked for my favourite books, Let the Great World Spin is always close to the top of that list. I cannot think of a more tender-hearted novel. As McCann writes: “I think in many ways it is a book about healing, and about moving on even in the most difficult times. We recover.”

The other work of art I would strongly recommend takes us to an unexpected place: Broadway, and a 911 musical. Heading for a preview performance of Come From Away in the summer of 2017, I could not believe that Irene Sankoff and David Hein, a husband and wife writing team from Canada, had researched and written a show based on the passengers stranded at Gander International Airport in Newfoundland when America closed its airspace. A couple of songs in, I was balling my eyes out. In fact, I cried almost the whole way through. Come from Away, the story of how townspeople in Gander looked after 7000 passengers from 38 stranded planes, has since become a global sensation and communal catharsis. If ever you get the chance to see it, please do. And take tissues.

This September, as on other previous major anniversaries, Gander will host a reunion of the “Plane People,” as they are affectionately known. Another story of how we cope and move on in the most difficult of times.

We recover.

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Summer in Washington has served up more than its usual quota of silly season fare. The cage fight at the White House. The green algae that turned the Reflecting Pool into a “Strait of Warm Ooze”. A torrent of AI slop on Truth Social. The Freedom 250 Grand Prix Indy race, with the U.S. Capitol as backdrop. The weirdness of Donald Trump’s relationship with his 35-year-old White House aide, Natalie Harp, who describes her boss, we found out from a gushing letter written in the manner of a starstruck “Swifty”, as “my Guardian and Protector in this Life.”

For future historians, these will be frivolous footnotes. Instead, they will look back on the season of America’s semiquincentennial, the country’s 250th birthday, as a period of national waning. July 4th 2026 might come to be seen as the definitive end of the age of America, although the exact timestamp surely came on January 6th, 2021, with the insurrection that led to the storming of the U.S. Capitol.

Often with Trump, of course, the silly and serious are enmeshed. That’s true of the president’s decision to change the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America, a sophomoric salvo in a mutually destructive trade war with Washington’s second biggest trading partner and longtime close ally, Canada.

Staying with mercantile warfare, it was also laughable to hear U.S. Treasury Scott Bessent declare an “economic D-Day” against Iran’s trading partners, without actually mentioning Tehran’s largest trading partner, China. That is a bit like launching Operation Overload without mentioning the Axis powers. Bessent’s reticence spoke of Washington’s fear of retaliation from Beijing, especially ahead of the congressional midterms in November and Trump’s planned summit in Washington later this month with Xi Jinping. The announcement of Operation Economic Outcast, the asphyxiation of the Iranian economy, was also tantamount to an admission that Operation Epic Fury, the Trump administration’s now six-month-long military campaign, has failed. What was also striking about Bessent’s statement was that he made it alone, with U.S. allies at his shoulder.

The Iran war has dramatically weakened the world’s pre-eminent power, strategically, diplomatically and militarily. Since the start of the war in February, the Pentagon has exhausted 80% of its THAAD missile inventory. These are the anti-missile systems that can shoot down short-, medium-, and intermediate-range ballistic missiles. At the start of the year, the United States had an arsenal of 2,300 Patriot missiles, which are also designed to intercept incoming airborne threats. Now, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, it has around 800, and each one takes two years to build.

To relieve the beleaguered aircraft carrier the USS Abraham Lincoln - from whose flight deck, George W. Bush prematurely declared the end of combat operations in Iraq with a banner behind him reading '“Mission Accomplished” - the Pentagon has had to deploy the USS George Washington, which operates out of Yokosuka, Japan. That means the United States does not have a strike carrier fleet in the Indo-Pacific. Force availability constraints also contributed to the decision last month to cancel a joint amphibious landing exercise with South Korea.

As a result of the vulnerability of U.S. bases in the Gulf to Iranian missile and drone strikes, the Pentagon might have to lighten its footprint in the region. Last month retired four-star U.S. Army General Barry McCaffrey, one of the America’s most highly respected warriors, predicted the permanent loss of 15 Persian Gulf bases, which meant Iran was “now poised to control access to the Gulf States.”

This week has seen more turmoil at the Department of War, with the resignation of U.S. army Secretary Dan Driscoll following months of fractiousness with Pete Hegseth. They had clashed over Hegseth’s firing of a string of senior and highly experienced military leaders, all of them bursting with “chest candy”, whose departure is widely thought to have weakened the U.S. army.

Last week also provided another case study of America’s abdication of its post-war role as the leader of the free world. To mark 35 years since Ukraine broke away from the Soviet Union, the so-called “Coalition of the Willing” spearheaded by the United Kingdom and France met in Ukraine to show solidarity. U.K. prime minister Andy Burnham was there in person. French president Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz dialled in. Absent from the gathering was a senior representative of the United States.

All this comes as the 10-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization met this week in Kyrgyzstan, a Eurasian bloc bringing together the leaders of Russia and India but founded and dominated by China. It provided yet more evidence of what the New York Times described as Xi’s “own powerful orbit.”

The normally inscrutable Xi arrived in Bishkek with something of a swagger. Last week, the Chinese government flicked off Bessent’s threats of secondary sanctions, as if the U.S Treasury Secretary was a mildly irritating mosquito. China would “take all necessary measures to firmly safeguard its own rights and interests,” said a spokesman for the foreign ministry. Chinese state-media also delighted in trolling Trump’s America. China News ran a cartoon portraying the Statue of Liberty as a drug addict hooked on tariffs. The state-run tabloid, Global Times, congratulated Canada for what it called a “Chinese-style counterattack.” China websites, such as Weibo, are awash with memes depicting Trump as a Tariff Emperor.

Often power shifts can be subtle. But in 2026, it has been more blatant. This year, as we have noted before, Beijing has played host to a conga-line of world leaders, which includes Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, then British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, Friedrich Merz, Vladimir Putin, Finish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo and Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif. Al-Jazeera has kept a useful running tally, and observes: “Leaders have come to court China from all the significant regions, including Europe (10), Asia (8), the Middle East (2), Africa (2), North America (2) and Latin America (2).”

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This power shift has also come with an easy-to-identify inflection point: April last year, when China’s Ministry of Commerce announced foreign companies would have to apply for a license before exporting seven types of rare earths (samarium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, lutetium, scandium and yttrium). China had deployed what Foreign Affairs magazine, in its latest edition, labelled “its most potent weapon.” Not only does it boast the world’s largest known reserves of rare-earth elements, it controls 85% of global processing.

Chinese rare earths are vital for U.S. nuclear submarines, F-35 fighter jets, Tomahawk missiles and key radar systems. So crucial are these Chinese exports to semiconductor manufacture, the U.S. weapons and auto industries that Trump had no choice but to back down. It was a TACO moment - Trump always chickens out - writ large in all-caps.

While the U.S president continues to inflict so much national self-harm, China has been making soft power strides. New polling released by Pew Research in July showed China is now seen more positively than America in most of the 36 countries surveyed. “During the first two years of Trump’s second term, ratings of the U.S. president worsened significantly,” noted Pew. “While many people still lack confidence in Xi, positive views of him have become more widespread, and more overall now say they have confidence in Xi than in Trump.” That’s a deeply worrying trend: when an authoritarian country with an appalling human rights is viewed more positively than the United States, which used to regard itself as the champion of freedom and liberal democracy.

A consequence of America becoming increasingly authoritarian, with Trump’s democratic backsliding, potentate act and trashing of allies and diplomatic norms, has been the boost to an unabashedly dictatorial China as it extends its global sphere of influence.

America’s alliance system has not completely broken down. Despite internal tensions fanned by Trump’s designs on Greenland and complaints of European freeloading, the NATO summit held in Ankara in July went better than expected. It did not lead to a rupture in what remains the world’s most powerful peacetime military alliance. This week, Australia is celebrating the 75th anniversary of the ANZUS Treaty, the cornerstone of its defence and security. The alliance, claimed Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, “remains closer than ever,” a statement which needs to be taken with more than a pinch of chicken salt.

Andy Burnham is trying to preserve a special relationship which so often feels so servile. Just witness the new prime minister’s first telephone call with the president, where he signalled a “pragmatic” approach to new oil and gas production in the North Sea. Afterwards, a delighted Trump trumpeted this almost as a British commitment to “drill baby drill.”

Yet as China continues to exert more global influence and economic power, all of America’s allies are hedging, and looking to de-risk their relationship with Washington. What a place for the United States to be in as we approach the 25th anniversary of the attacks of September 11th. Back then, in its famous front page headline, the French newspaper Le Monde declared “Nous sommes tous Américains.” Now it is more a case of “L'Amérique d'abord signifie l'Amérique seule.” America First means America alone.

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To cross from America into Canada during the early days of Trump 1.0 felt more like entering a parallel universe than traversing neighbouring lands. The border served not just as a geographical demarcation, but also as an ideological boundary: the dividing line between Justin Trudeau’s liberal Canada and Donald Trump’s increasingly illiberal America.

“Who will uphold the torch of openness in the West?” The Economist had asked in October 2016, shortly before Donald Trump’s shock victory over Hillary Clinton and at a time of mounting anti-immigrant sentiment in post-Brexit Britain, Germany and France. “In this depressing company of wall-builders, door-slammers and drawbridge-raisers, Canada stands out as a heartening exception.” Its cover art, featuring Lady Liberty with a maple leaf crown, hammered home the point. So, too, its banner headline: “Liberty moves north.”

Justin Trudeau, though cast as the fairy tale prince up against an ogre-like president, proved something of a disappointment as the pin-up boy of north-of-the-border resistance. More effective back then was his then septuagenarian compatriot, novelist Margaret Atwood, whose adapted masterwork The Handmaid’s Tale premiered on the third month of Trump’s presidency and instantly captured the dystopian zeitgeist of the time.

Now the torch of Canadian resistance is being held aloft by a 61-year-old former central banker, Mark Carney, a mild-mannered prime minister heralded as the new leader of the free world. It is not an outlandish claim. No western leader has shown the same mettle in standing up to Trump. Towards the end of last week, it seemed a deal between Canada and the United States in their long-running trade dispute had been pretty much finalised. Trump had already declared it to be a “very good deal.” Then, in the final hours, those final details became unacceptable demands from the US negotiating team which came with the smack of economic coercion. Specifically, the Trump administration wanted to limit the capacity of the Canadian government to strike trade deals with other countries. That threatened to subvert Canadian sovereignty, which is ultimately Trump’s longterm goal. The president returned to the White House mocking then Prime Minister Trudeau as the “Governor of Canada” and vowing to turn America’s giant northern neighbour into its 51st state.

Carney responded to the latest Trump administration demands by pulling his negotiating team. On Saturday, Trump hit Canada with 50% tariffs on a range of imports, from ice hockey sticks to brewery machinery, false beards to horsehair. Now, in a serious escalation, Trump is threatening to impose tariffs from January 1st on Canadian vehicles. That has the potential to “destroy” the Canadian auto industry, according to Carney.

Promising “dollar for dollar” retaliatory measures, Carney at the weekend unleashed his inner Churchill, with a dash of Kennedyesque rhetorical inversion. “We cannot accept what they’ve offered and we will not give what they’ve asked,” he said. “You’re at war when you’re attacked, and we got attacked.” Like his speech at Davos earlier this year, which had the era-defining feel of Churchill’s “iron curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri, Carney’s war-time address was brimful with quotable lines. These days, he complained, America’s “signature was written in pencil.” And how about this for a rousing coda:

“Last spring, I warned that America is trying to break us so that they can own us. And I promised: ‘That will never, ever happen.’ We are keeping that promise. In Canada, we are masters in our own home, from coast to coast to coast.’”

We will fight them on the beaches sort of stuff.

Canada up against the United States is, of course, the most asymmetrical of fights. A country with a population of 41 million people is pitted against a superpower of 342 million. But the message Carney delivered at Davos emphasised middle power clout, especially when medium-sized nations work in concert. “And we are no longer just relying on the strength of our values, but also the value of our strength,” he said at the weekend, in another line which sounded like it could have been penned by Kennedy’s speechwriter, Ted Sorensen.

Canada does indeed has leverage. It supplies 99% of U.S. natural gas imports, 85% of electricity imports, and 60% of crude oil imports. The Maple Leaf nation is the largest customer for 26 U.S. states, and a top three customer for 45 U.S. states.

Carney enters this uneven battle with certain advantages. For a start, he stands at the head of a united country. More than three-quarters of Canadians support Carney’s decision to walk away from the trade talks, according to the latest polling. His personal approval ratings stand at 60%, compared to Trump’s dismal 33%.

On the home front, Carney has useful lieutenants. There’s the tough-talking Premier of Ontario, Doug Ford, who said on Monday, Trump “can kiss my ass,” as he itemised the Canadian products which America relies upon. “I’d love to see him run cars without any oil,” he added, with a group of hard-hatted Canadian workers forming a muscly, hi-visibility backdrop. “I’ve love to see him try to grow vegetables and fruit without the potash.”

Tag-teaming with Ford, is the magnificently named Finance Minister, François-Philippe Champagne, who, in the month that the U.S. national debt passed the $40 trillion for the first time, emphasised Canada’s strong “fiscal capacity” and high credit rating. “America has changed,'“ he opined, and “enough is enough.”

Ford and Champagne. As Donald Trump would surely concede, those are brand names to reckon with.

Canada also has allies behind enemy lines. Democrats have blasted the trade war, complaining it will saddle America’s already hard-pressed consumers with even higher prices. “Whether it’s a trade war with Canada or an actually war with Iran, the pattern is the same,” said presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg. “Americans are paying the price for the President’s choices.”

Echoing wide-held sentiment in corporate America, Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal has also slammed the cross-border dispute as “the dumbest trade war in history.” This week it editorialised:

“President Trump took exception last year when we called his tariffs against Canada and Mexico the dumbest trade war in history. It got dumber this weekend as Mr. Trump escalated with another round of border taxes on Canadian imports, a mere 10 weeks before midterm elections.”

Those fast-approaching midterms provide the political backdrop, and have heightened the sense of Republican unease. Maine GOP Senator Susan Collins, who is fighting for re-election in a state high on the Democratic target list and which borders Canada, is urging the White House to make a deal. Collins also skipped an event in the Pine Tree state on Monday featuring J.D. Vance, the second time this year she has made herself scarce during a vice-presidential visit.

This bearded son of Appalachia seems to regard the Harvard- and Oxford-educated Albertan as feebly urbane and effete. In a leaked recording from a private event, Vance mocked Carney as a “very sweet guy” who “comes in and puffs his chest out and says: ‘I’m going to, like, out-tough Donald Trump.’” Let’s see.

The United States can inflict severe economic pain on Canada. About 75% of Canada’s exports head south over the border. Trump’s 50% tariffs would price Canadian products out of the U.S. market, leading potentially to business bankruptcies and higher unemployment. The poll which showed strong support for Carney also indicated 40% of Canadians feared for their jobs.

However, Canada’s “elbows up” fighting spirit is again very much in evidence, the ice hockey battle cry which since Trump returned to the White House has also become a nationalistic chant.

Writing in The Atlantic this week, David Frum, the Canadian-American commentator, noted:

“Yes, Trump can hurt Canada more than Canada can hurt Trump. That part of Trump’s thinking is true. But wars are not decided only by the question Who can inflict more pain? Wars are also decided by the question Who can endure more pain? Trump’s failure to accept this truth is why he lost the Iran war—and why he is losing his trade wars.”

Earlier this month, I noted how 2026 has already been the year of the middle power. Ukraine, a country with roughly the same population as Canada is holding off Russia, which harbours 140 million people. Iran, with a population of 93 million, has stymied the United States since the start of Operation Epic Fury. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, an isolated country with a population of just 10 million, managed to persuade Trump to assassinate the Iranian Supreme leader, Ali Hosseini Khamenei.

Now we are about to see another pivotal test of middle power might. Maybe it is a stretch to describe Carney as the leader of the free world. His overtures to China - a giant which in January he became the first Canadian prime minister to visit in eight years - undercut any claim to being a moralistic champion of liberal democracy. Carney is an advocate of “value-based realism,” a phrase coined by Alexander Stubb, the President of Finland, which is why he is hedging. But on an international spectrum which places FIFA president Gianni Infantino and NATO supremo Mark Rutte firmly in the sycophantic camp, and leaders such as Anthony Albanese and former UK prime minister Keir Starmer on the deferential side, he has been a notable standout. In relations with an “America First” president, defiance, rather than deference, has become Carney’s diplomatic default. This not so quiet Canadian has quite the clarion voice.

Update

Since going to press, or the Substack equivalent, Trump has renamed Lake Ontario as Lake America. This isn’t just some Truth Social confection, fired off in the middle of the night from the presidential suite of the Executive Mansion. No, this sophomoric play came in the form of an executive order. By wielding his Sharpie pen, Trump has compelled federal agencies to implement the name-change on maps, government documents and in databases.

Wisconsin’s Democratic government, Tony Evers, responded by renaming Lake Michigan Lake Wisconsin, mockingly completing the paperwork on a restaurant napkin.

Suffice to say, the move has stiffened the resolve of the Canadians. This was the front page of the Toronto Star:

Here is Mark Carney’s response:

One of you suggested renaming Niagara Falls, the Great Canadian Cascade. On the textline of my ABC radio show this weekend, a listener suggested the St. Lawrence Seaway should henceforth be known as the Strait of Our Moose.

On the show, I interviewed former deputy Canadian Prime Minister, Sheila Copps, who served under Jean Chrétien in the 1990s. You can listen here.

A final word on Mark Carney. He’s been marked out as a Canadian hero for many years now. This was a headline from the Canadian magazine Macleans in 2011, and here is the piece that went with it.

Operation Economic Outcast

Economic warfare has been a theme of the week. Calling it an “economic D-Day”, U.S. Treasury Scott Bessent launched Operation Economic Outcast, an attempt by the Trump administration to strangulate the Iranian economy. Coming six months after the launch of Operation Epic Fury, it is tantamount to an admission that Trump’s military strategy has failed. The aim is to hit foreign entities that trade with the Tehran regime through secondary sanctions, but, tellingly, Bessent did not even name Iran’s biggest trading partner, China, which buys 80% of its oil.

Hitting Chinese companies would risk the delicate trade détente with Beijing ahead of the summit between Trump and Xi Jinping scheduled for late September, the first state visit to Washington by the Chinese president since 2015. It would also risk another trade war.

Last year, Trump hurriedly backed down when Xi threatened to limit the export of Chinese critical rare earths and magnets. Given their one-year trade truce expires in October, Trump most likely will not want to risk Chinese countermeasures on the eve of congressional midterm elections.

I spoke about Trump’s timidity in taking on China with Edward Fishman, the author of the New York Times bestseller, Checkpoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare. You can listen here.

Goodbye Dolly

As a fanboy of Dolly Parton, I was shocked and saddened by her passing. Last year, after watching a musical which was essentially an homage, Here You Come Again, I wrote a piece about her being that rare thing: a figure in these polarised times of near universal affection and acclaim. When the New York Times asked in 2019: “Is there anything we can all agree on?” it answered its own question by raising up the Queen of Country. As I wrote back then:

In her native south, the Bible Belt states of the Old Confederacy, she has managed to maintain her popularity despite championing women’s and queer rights. This she has pulled off through her winsome personality, a loving, nonjudgmental faith, a deft line in self-deprecation - “it takes a lot of money to look this cheap” - and sensitive political antennae, which may well be buried in those Steel Magnolia wigs. Remarks in 2016 which could easily be construed as an endorsement of Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump - “Hillary might make as good a president as anybody ever has,” she said - were immediately followed by a qualifier. “I think no matter if it’s Hillary or Donald Trump, we’re gonna be plagued with PMS either way — presidential mood swings!” Classic Dolly, a non-aligned island in the stream.

The New York Times ran a very elegantly written obituary which described her as “a rags-to-rhinestones daughter of Appalachia who for six decades ruled country music and beyond with an outsize personality and down-home wit that enshrined her as one of America’s most cherished originals.” I also loved the first post in the comments section of that piece. “JK” from Brooklyn simply wrote: “World, when you think of America, think of Dolly. Too often, you see the worst of us. She was the best of us.”

Here is our musical tribute, which we broadcast on ABC Radio National’s Saturday Extra.

Book of the month

Probably no word in the English language is more of a taboo than the N-word. It’s got a long and ugly history. It continues to raise questions about race, identity, who gets to say it and who doesn’t.

For Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, that debate is also deeply personal. She’s the daughter of legendary comedian Richard Pryor, whose groundbreaking stand-up transformed American comedy in the 1970s. Richard Pryor famously used the “N-word” in his stand-up routines before making the decision to stop using it altogether. That’s a story Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor tells in a new book, which is part memoir and part scholarly history. She is a professor at Smith College in Massachusetts. It’s called Something We Said: Richard Pryor, a Notorious Word, and Me. You could probably write another history about the euphemism N-word, as well, which came into much wider usage during the O.J. Simpson trial in 1995.

I interviewed her about the book a few weeks ago, a conversation which drew an unusually big audience response. You listen here.

Film of the month

How does cinema compete with prestige TV, which has hours, and often multiple seasons, to develop characters and plot-lines? Bring to the bring screen a Homeric epic, as Christopher Nolan does in The Odyssey? Blow you away with special effects, as Spider-Man: Brand New Day tries to do in the latest instalment of the blockbuster franchise? Or simply film a play?

That’s what director Olivia Wilde did with The Invite. This sex comedy set in San Francisco is a remake of the Spanish movie, The People Upstairs, which was adapted from a Spanish play. It’s claustrophobic - it is pretty much a one-set production, a sumptuously upholstered apartment - coy, and at times cringe-making. It is also by far the best movie I’ve seen this year. Seth Rogan, Olivia Wilde, Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton, all of whom are brilliant, play couples toying, haltingly and hilariously, with the idea of partner swapping over the course of a single, chaotic evening. In the review in the New Yorker, Justin Chang notes: “What happens onscreen isn’t just coitus interruptus…. it’s more like a premature evacuation.” To understand why, go see The Invite.

Talking of the New Yorker, Andy Borowitz rarely misses…….

1. With each passing week, Trump’s presidency looks more and more like a home improvement show aimed at a niche audience of rich retirees congregated mainly in Boca Raton and other Florida sunspots. He is, after all, the main tenant of America’s ultimate gated community. This week he showed off the refurbished Thomas Jefferson columns, a newly-laid granite driveway and a helipad on the South Lawn of the White House. Not since he described the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City as “the eighth wonder of the world” has he seemed so proud of his handiwork. The new driveway, though, is hardly the Hanging Gardens of Babylon or the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus.

2. All this as the U.S. national debt exceeded $40 trillion for the first time. Ronald Reagan used to quip that he wasn’t worried about the debt because it was big enough to look after itself. But at the end of Reagan’s presidency, gross federal debt was about 50% of GDP. Now it is about 125% of GDP.

   Rather than the soaring debt and a nervy bond market, Trump was fixated with his towering new flag pole. “I’m very good at flag poles,” he declared, with a pride reminiscent of the day back in his first term when he aced that cognitive test which required him to recall and recite five words in sequence - “person, woman, man, camera, TV.”

3. “Camera” and “TV” are actually watchwords for a former reality TV star who serves as the executive producer of his own presidency. Through his diatribes on Truth Social, he tries to act as the screenwriter as well. His problem since the launch of Operation Epic Fury is that he has lost control of the plot-lines. He can post all the memes he likes claiming the Strait of Hormuz as U.S. territory…..

   

   ….but a dwindling number of Americans believe him. This week Trump’s approval rating, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll, sank to its lowest level yet of 33%. Even for his most sycophantic Cabinet officials, that’s a hard one to run up the flag pole and salute.

4. This week we witnessed a spectacular example of his failure to control the news agenda, with the attention lavished on his 35-year-old aide, Natalie Harp - or “the human printer” as she is evidently known in the West Wing because she prints out hard copies of favourable coverage for the president’s delectation and delight. The former anchor at One America News Network became the subject of profiles from all the major news organisations. Writing under the headline, ‘With All My Heart, Natalie.’ Trump’s Most Devoted Aide Emerges, New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Shawn McCreesh described her as “a platinum blond geyser of positivity, there to buck him up when the going gets rough.” Recalling the days back in the Clinton administration when the New York Times White House team included Maureen Dowd and Thomas Friedman - both of whom could lay on the snark - Haberman and McCreesh had fun with the lede as well…..

   “She never takes a day off, not even on Sunday. She works out of the Oval Office and she’s got a regular seat on Marine One. She texts with world leaders on the president’s behalf. She stays up late with him drafting social media posts.

   She rarely speaks on camera and yet she is never not there, ever-present with a wide smile and her eyes fixed on the president.”

   Headline writers were having a field day as well. How about this from CNN, which is hardly known for its cheekiness. “Meet Natalie Harp, the aide so close to Trump she once rode in an SUV trunk to accompany him.” Apparently, when every seat in Trump’s car was full ahead of a New York court appearance in 2023, Harp jumped in the boot for the journey from Trump Tower in Midtown to the courthouse in Lower Manhattan. Good training, no doubt, for hiding in a catering container, as she did in Ankara while switching from “Air Force One” to a waiting decoy plane.

   The BBC described this California native, who grew up in a conservative Christian household, as “both a ‘gatekeeper’ and a ‘comfort blanket’.” In an attempt maybe to dial down the innuendo, I noticed it has since changed its original headline about her being a constant presence at his side.

   

5. Natalie Harp, who has been the subject of Beltway gossip for months, is in the news largely because a Democrat put her there. The Democrat in question, of course, is Senator Jon Ossoff, who is fighting for re-election in Georgia. “He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenceless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar,” he said, name-checking Harp during a campaign speech which instantly went viral.

   Long before the first caucus in Iowa and the first primary in New Hampshire, there is always a media primary, in which the press starts to pick favourites. In that early beauty content, the 39-year-old, who once interned for the Georgia congressman and civil rights great John Lewis, is fast making himself a frontrunner.

   

   On Capitol Hill, Ossoff has proved one of the party’s most incisive inquisitors when confronted in Senate hearings by leading lights in the Trump administration, such as Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. On the stump, he’s not an Obama, but, tellingly, he has been likened to Obama. Politicians skilled at wordplay, whether on the page or in speeches, always impress the press pool. Obama wowed reporters with the eloquence of his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father. As a prose stylist, Ossoff is nowhere near that exalted level, but he can twirl a phrase. He also knows the power of three words. Not “yes we can,” but “travel with Natalie.” Ossoff is having “a moment”, but he can’t even think of being Iowa- or New Hampshire-bound unless he wins re-election in Georgia in the November midterms.

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6. Ossoff will no doubt be delighted by the attention he got from the White House this week. “Jon Ossoff is a cringeworthy, feminine theatre kid cosplaying as Barack Obama,” said White House spokesman Davis Ingle “Nobody gives a s–t what this lightweight loser says,” Ingle added. White House communications director Steven Cheung deriding “Jon Jerkoff” as “the biggest cuck loser in politics.”

   Ossoff also took some incoming from one-time senior Obama aide, David Axelrod. “The paragraph from his weekend speech that has gotten so much attention was a brutal takedown. But two words in it, ‘with Natalie’ seemed gratuitous and unnecessary,” Axelrod said on X. “They juiced the virality of it, I’m sure. Probably thrilled some in the base, who figured it was just giving Trump a taste of his own nasty medicine. But they distracted and detracted from the power of the message.” Do the Democrats go down the Gavin Newsom path and confront Trump with a Trump-like communication - the California Governor’s social media feeds mimic Trump’s Truth Social rants - or do they endeavour to take a higher road to the White House? Another Democratic dilemma.

7. As Washington is convulsed by the relationship between a president and a White House aide decades his junior, what a week for Bill Clinton to celebrate his 80th birthday. It is strange to think of “Slick Willie” as an octogenarian because youth was once his hallmark. Everything in life came early for Bill Clinton. He was just 32 when he became Governor of Arkansas. Aged 34, he then became an ex-governor after voters turfed him out of office. He was 46 when he became president.

   But he aged prematurely as well. A mega-wattage politician in his prime, he has become more of an ambient presence in his twilight years. On the electoral trail in 2016, this time speaking as a surrogate in support of his wife Hillary Rodham Clinton, he was a shockingly lacklustre campaigner. The Clinton who vowed during the 1992 New Hampshire primary to fight for the working class “until the last dog dies” was strangely low energy.

8. For me, back in the Nineties, Clinton turned out to be something of a journalistic fairy godfather. I met him first as a student journalist while he was the Governor of Arkansas, which gave me my one of my first stories published by a national newspaper, a daft diary item about a bar in Little Rock. Covering what we then called the Lewinsky scandal, but which we should have called the Clinton scandal, landed me my first posting for the BBC in Washington back in 1998, the year of his impeachment. In a book I wrote about covering the period before and after 911, which I called Adventures in Correspondentland, I described encountering him all those years ago:

   “To meet him, of course, is to be exposed immediately to the Clinton Treatment: the mauling handshake; the empathetic nod; the piercing stare, fixed and admiring; the instant intimacy; a gravitational pull with the power to suck people into his orbit. Often is it said that Clinton not only comes with his own force field but also his own personal weather system, and that he’s so expert at the art of seduction that he can make even the most fleeting acquaintance feel as if he or she is the single most important person in the room. Still, when I first encountered him during the 1992 New Hampshire primary campaign, I came away thinking there was something much more transactional about his celebrated interpersonal skills. The feeling was of being the most important voter in the room, or, in my case, the most important journalist.”

   So important was Clinton to that era, and to my nascent career, that he ended up on the cover of the book. I actually think that, more so than most others, Clinton helped pave the wave for Donald Trump, but that’s a story for another day……

9. Clinton’s legacy was again mulled over this week. My favourite line about him came from his Labor Secretary Robert Reich, speaking to PBS’s Frontline programme in 2001 . The two first met on the ocean liner that ferried them across the Atlantic Ocean to Britain, where they were both Rhodes scholars at Oxford. “On Mondays and Wednesdays and Fridays I say, ‘Thank God Bill Clinton was there,’ to hold back the right-wing Republican tide, to preserve things that we believed in, to make the right decisions on a lot of very important issues. And then on Tuesdays and Thursdays and Saturdays, I say to myself, ‘What a waste. All that talent and all that ability, and he did not do what he intended to do and get accomplished. Maybe if he had been more disciplined, both in terms of his agenda, and also his personal life, more could have been done.’ And then on Sundays I don't think about it.”

10. Sunday is usually my day of rest when it comes to thinking about Donald Trump. But not this weekend. I’ll be appearing at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney……

    

    It is a strong line up, and strangely, over the past year, I have interviewed Maria Ressa, Peter Beinhart, and Glenn Loury. There are links to all the interviews.

11. I promise not to bombard you with memes, but, confessedly, these two raised a much-needed chuckle this week…..

Have a great weekend.

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When one academic copies the work of another academic, it is plagiarism. When a scholar copies the work of a number of scholars, it is history. So said my tutor when, in the early 1990s, I signed up to do a doctoral thesis in U.S history. He was not endorsing stealing the scholarship of others, or even offering a cautionary tale about sloppy note-taking or lazy citations. Lots of academics have fallen into that trap. In fact, I don’t really know why he shared that aphorism, other than to raise a laugh. But these past few weeks I have found myself recalling his jovial tone on the subject of academic pilfering as Jason Arday, the ex-Cambridge professor, became the target of the most vicious media pile-on I can recall. Plagiarism became a cardinal sin. A high crime and misdemeanour. Almost a capital offence.

Deliberate plagiarism is intellectual theft. Let there be no doubt about that. It was a legitimate area of journalistic inquiry. So, too, was Jason Arday’s backstory, about to be published in a memoir, Great and Unfinished Things. Parts of his personal narrative just did not add up. But did it merit the merciless hounding of a young Black academic, whose autism and embellishment of his life-story hinted strongly at a fragile state of mind.

There seemed a tragic predictability about his death. A few days before, I feared the hounding would stop only with his death. “Jason was subjected to a campaign of sustained abuse” his mourning family said in a statement. “The campaign of misinformation was too much for Jason, who was a gentle man and who always wanted to see the best in everyone.” He leaves behind a widow and two children.

But this wasn’t really about plagiarism. Had this been a white professor, it would have been a niche story that might have made for a page lead in the middle of the paper on a quiet day. Even if that white academic had subsequently been shown to be a fabulist, the story would never have become a full-blown media storm even in the August silly season.

Primarily, this was about the takedown of the “Cambridge’s diversity poster boy” as the London Daily Telegraph described the university’s youngest ever Black professor in a front page story on July 24th. That provided the framing for the entire saga. The plagiarism allegations provided the cudgel, passed like a baton from one columnist to another, often to make a broader attack on DEI.

Here again, there are legitimate questions about how he came to be appointed, and whether he deserved such a prestigious post. It looks like he was over-promoted. But where was the proportionality in the coverage? Where was the concern for his welfare? Surely journalists must have had the same thought I had: is there a story arc inexorably playing out here which ends with the discovery of his lifeless body?

To see media organisations who had hounded the 41-year professor then criticise Cambridge University for failing in its duty of care was sickening. University administrators were deeply concerned about his mental and physical well-being, especially after he had resigned his position, and continued to provide support.

To return to where I started, the subject of my PhD is actually germane to this whole sorry affair. My focus was the struggle for Black equality in the post-war years, and, in particular, the cynical and often calculating response of John F. Kennedy, who, in liberal lore, has been misleading portrayed as a crusading champion of civil rights. You can read more here. But the crucial point, in this context, is what those years of trawling through the archives hammered home: that periods of racial progress are invariably followed by a white backlash. That simple and banal truth is key to understanding the modern-day cycles of U.S. politics.

The Supreme Court’s landmark Brown decision, paving the way for the desegregation of southern schools, was met with a campaign of what was called “massive resistance.” The milestone reforms of the mid-1960s, which drove a dagger throw the heart of Jim Crow and finally enfranchised Black Americans in the states of Old Confederacy, provided the backdrop for Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy” in the 1968 presidential election. Thereafter, exploiting white fears about Black advance became the Republican electoral playbook, which contributed enormously to the party’s domination of presidential politics from 1968 to 1992.

The very word “backlash” was first popularised in the early 1960s, at the same time John F. Kennedy belatedly offered up a legislative remedy to the demands of the Black struggle, proposals which, posthumously, were minted into law by the 1964 Civil Rights Act. That very year, one American newspaper described “backlash” as the “cliche of the year.”

Donald Trump’s shock victory in 2016 was partly a backlash against the presidency of Barack Obama. The reality TV star rose to political prominence, after all, as the untitled leader of the Birther movement, which questioned the very legitimacy of America’s first Black presidency. His return to the White House in 2025 was fuelled by the backlash against “wokeism” and diversity, equality and inclusion. The push for racial justice was widely deemed to have gone too far in the rush to make amends after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020. Facing a female Black opponent, Kamala Harris, played into this hands - some of Trump’s supporters labeled her a “diversity hire.” Each time left-wing activists chanted “defund the police,” it made it harder for Harris to win the presidency. Mocking the use of personal pronouns, the slogan “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you” proved a vote-winner.

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What has been described as “backlash dynamics” is one of the strongest drivers of recent U.S. history. Because of the globalisation of politics, and in particular its Americanisation, backlash dynamics are also becoming a driver of politics elsewhere. All western nations are having their own versions of the culture wars fought at fever pitch intensity. Commonly, they centre on race, and the question of diversity, equity and inclusion.

Noticeable in the aftermath of America’s George Floyd summer was how quickly similar dynamics played out in other countries. As part of the global anti-racism campaign, footballers in the Premier League started taking the knee. In my home town of Bristol, protesters hauled down a statue of Edward Colston, a city benefactor who made his fortune from the slave trade. Diversity, equity and inclusion was taken more seriously not just by U.S. corporations but companies and organisations internationally. In academia, the study of post-colonialism became more fashionable, urgent and heated. A rush to correct came to be seen as an over-correction. Wokeism run amok. DEI on steroids. That sort of thing. This not only became a right-wing critique. There were progressives who were also worried about the illiberalism of the left, and the excesses of cancel culture. As far back as 2019, Barack Obama publicly expressed concerns about the self-righteous tone of “woke” culture.

This provides some of the historical context for Jason Arday’s appointment as a professor by Cambridge in 2023, and the historical backdrop for the furore surrounding his alleged plagiarism. In announcing his professorship, the university described him as “a highly respected scholar of race, inequality and education, with a particular interest in improving the representation of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic people in higher education.” That same year Cambridge published a report on diversity and inclusion which revealed “there are very small numbers of Black staff across all staff categories (academics, professional services staff and researchers).” You can read the report here. Just one per cent of its staff was Black. This, then, was an institution sensitive to the criticism that it lacked racial diversity and keen to make amends. The high-profile appointment of a telegenic Black professor, Jason Arday, certainly helped.

The Arday affair has revealed a new viciousness about public life in Britain, which was evident, too, in the hounding of Sir Keir Starmer. Again, the vitriol and personal animus directed against an embattled prime minister seemed strangely disproportionate. A country famed for its steady-state emotion and the tea-towel slogan, “Keep Calm and Carry on”, seems these days to lurch from one hate-filled ruckus to the next, fanned by columnists and media outlets driven by the commercial and celebrity requirements of the attention economy and amplified by the algorithms of hate. Small wonder my beloved homeland seems to be in a perpetual state of crisis. Small wonder my beloved homeland seems to be in a perpetual state of hate.

In this instance, America-style backlash dynamics have played out in the most quintessentially British of institutions. But let’s not overlook the extent to which this was also homegrown. The Arday affair offers a tragic case study of a personally destructive media culture which is emphatically, even uniquely, British.

Of all the aircraft in all the skies, none commands so much attention, or fascination, as Air Force One. AF1, of course, is a call sign rather than a dedicated jetliner. Whichever plane happens to get the president airborne automatically is given that metonym. Up until recently, it was a Boeing 747-200B painted in the familiar robin’s egg blue livery that had been in service since 1991. Then Trump took delivery of the Boeing 747-8i gifted to him by the Qataris, which he painted in the more America First colour scheme of red, white, blue and, mercifully, comparatively little gold.

This week we learned, in one of the more dramatic scoops of Trump 2.0, that the president departed the NATO summit in Ankara last month aboard a secret decoy plane, a military version of the Boeing 757-200. Evidently, the president had not even got the chance to savour his present from Recep Tayyip Erdoğan - the Turkish strongman had given all the NATO leaders a revolver inscribed with their names (and live ammunition to go with it) - before he was whisked off the plane designated as “Air Force One” and taken to the other aircraft. Intelligence reports suggested Iran, which shares a border with Türkiye, intended to fire a missile at the presidential plane. One of the more delicious details from the scoop in the Washington Post was that this clandestine operation involved Trump being hidden in a catering container as he was driven the short distance across the tarmac. Imagine the fun late-night comedians have had with that.

Last month, we found out that the “credible threat” from Iran had led to a switcheroo. Trump had ditched his $400 million new plane from Qatar, in favour of the old jumbo jet which is fitted with more sophisticated anti-missile systems. In fact, the Trump Justice Department issued - and later rescinded -subpoenas targeting New York Times journalists who broke the story of security vulnerabilities of the Qatari-donated aircraft. What we have only just found out from the Washington Post scoop is that the plane everyone thought was “Air Force One” in Ankara took to the skies with White House staff and the White House press pool on board but not the president.

At no stage were reporters let in on the secret and told that they themselves had unwittingly become human decoys. In fact, when asked immediately afterwards by reporters about ditching his new plane for the old during a press availability on the second leg of the journey from the U.K. back to Washington, Trump blithely responded: “I’m No. 1 on their list, before you. But if I go, you go, right? Perhaps someday you want to change professions.” Trump therefore made it sound like they were all in the firing line together, the kind of stolen valour he also displayed when inserting himself alongside two celebrated U.S. generals, Douglas MacArthur and George Patton in a weird post on Truth Social. No wonder the meme machine has gone into overdrive in mocking Trump for turning Air Force One into “Con Air.”

Now, Trump is claiming that the military jet he boarded was at “greater risk.” “I go by Secret Service and the military. They wanted me to go in a different flight, different plane,” says Trump. "I just have to do what they say.”

The Secret Service has used this kind of subterfuge before, most memorably with Bill Clinton in Pakistan in 2000, when the threat came from a then comparatively little-known terrorist called Osama Bin Laden. Clinton flew into Islamabad, the Pakistan capital, aboard a modified Gulfstream plane. Members of the press and other White House staff made the journey on a giant C-17 cargo plane more obviously identifiable as a U.S. military aircraft. Clinton’s then press secretary Joe Lockhart this week told the New York Times: “We went out of our way to make sure the maximum number of people, especially civilians, were protected and not human shields.”

Former White House correspondent Bill Sammon, who was aboard the decoy “Air Force One,” remembers things differently. Writing in The Hill, Sammon spoke of the dark humour as the press corps joked of being “hapless decoys for a scandal-plagued president who would escape whatever dangers came our way unscathed.” But the mood quickly darkened as they crossed the Indian border. “Once the plane entered Pakistani airspace, it began to circle over Islamabad, as if to draw fire from anti-aircraft assets. It was getting more difficult to maintain our gallows humour.”

Few things speak more of the primacy of the presidency than when the life of the incumbent is threatened. That predates Trump. If the presidential motorcade were ever to come under attack, for example, the priority of the Secret Service would be to save “Mogul” (Trump), “Celtic” (Biden), “Renegade” (Obama), “Trailblazer” (George W. Bush), “Eagle” (Clinton), “Timberwolf” (George H.W. Bush) or “Rawhide” (Reagan), not the travelling press or other White House staff.

Still, it requires somewhat of a leap of imagination to think of Trump fretting over the plight of those on the decoy plane or agonising over the morality of boarding a safer aircraft. Maybe I am being unfair. We cannot read his mind. But this is the man who, after the destruction of the Twin Towers on September 11th, told a New York radio station that a Trump building on Wall Street was now the tallest skyscraper in Lower Manhattan (in actual fact, it was the second tallest).

The Ankara deception, moreover, is very much on brand. It shows the breakdown in trust between the president and the press. In previous instances, such as George W. Bush’s surprise visit to Baghdad in 2006, the press were entrusted with the secret and kept it under wraps. It highlights, once more, the deceitful way in which the Trump machine operates. Even when the president was out of danger, he or his press team did not come clean (after landing from the Ankara leg of the journey at a U.S. Air Force base in the U.K. Trump returned to, and disembarked from, the decoy plane).

Not for the first time it demonstrates that repeated Trump boasts that Iran’s military has been decimated are false. As CNN reported, the president has claimed the Tehran regime had “no navy,” “no military,” “no air force” and “no anti-aircraft systems.” Clearly, the Secret Service believes the Iranian military is still capable of shooting down the president’s plane.

Trump has long fixated about “Air Force One.” During his first term, his rallies regularly featured the theme music from the 1997 movie, Air Force One, starring Harrison Ford.

So I can’t imagine he would have been enamoured with the assessment of Andrew W. Marlowe who wrote the screenplay. “Now real life isn’t a movie, but given the circumstances, I’m not sure I could ever script a moment like that for a heroic main character,” Marlowe told Peter Baker of the New York Times. “If the threat were that great, it’s hard to imagine the audience rooting for any character who would trade his own safety by treating the remaining civilians onboard as potential sacrificial lambs, especially without their informed consent.”

Back at the start of the 1960s, John F. Kennedy became the first president to fly aboard a plane with the call sign “Air Force One.” Also it was JFK who hired the celebrated industrial designer Raymond Loewy to design the distinctive robin’s egg blue livery with the words UNITED STATES OF AMERICA painted on the fuselage in font similar to that used in the Declaration of Independence. Ever since the new look was first unveiled in October 1962, the month of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Air Force One has been a potent emblem of American power and U.S. exceptionalism.

There have also been times, however, when the plane has reminded us of American frailty. After Kennedy’s assassination in November, 1963, as Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as president on the tarmac at Dallas Love Field, it became a makeshift inaugural platform. On September 11th, 2001, its pilots turned off all of the communications equipment and used cell phones to contact air traffic control and federal aviation officials because they feared Al Qaeda might target the plane. Now, Air Force One seems continually embroiled in Trumpian controversy, whether over the gifting of the new plane from a Gulf ally or the Ankara deception, which sounds like the title of a Len Deighton novel.

After its unveiling in the 1960s, the legendary Time correspondent Hugh Sidey described the new plane as “the loftiest chariot that man has yet devised.” Under Trump, it has become a flying symbol of America’s imperial decline.

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History Never Ended, as regular readers know, is partial to an anniversary. America’s semiquincentennial. Ten years since Brexit. This week marks five years since the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, which returned the Taliban to power and hammered a couple of nails into the coffin of Joe Biden’s presidency. Next month is a quarter century since the attacks of September 11th, the news event which cleaved in two the careers of journalists of my vintage. The world before 911. The world after 911.

Closer to the anniversary, maybe we will debate whether those horrific terrorist attacks were even the most consequential event of the back end of 2001. Global thinkers with more of an economic bent might argue China’s entry into the World Trade Organisation on December 11th that year ended up being more momentous. Not only did it accelerate the rise of China but handed Donald Trump one of his cause célèbre. Mentally for me, though, 911 is delineating. With manic suddenness, it shook us out of our post-Cold War complacency and demonstrated history was still up for grabs.

This month also sees a few personal milestones. Five years ago I left the BBC. Five years ago I returned to live in Australia, although my mind has never fully migrated from the States. Six months ago, I launched History Never Ended.

Almost from the first week, history came at a galloping pace. The president who promised not to launch new wars did just that, undeterred by advice from senior generals that the Tehran regime would instantly shut down the Strait of Hormuz. Trump’s giant strategic misstep has dominated the news agenda and this Substack. That said, Trump 2.0 is even more of a shuffle play presidency than Trump 1.0. One minute you are talking about the latest round of failed peace talks or most recent presidential threat to wipe out Persian civilisation. The next, it is cage fighting on the South Lawn of the White House, green algae in the now inaptly-named Reflecting Pool or the latest AI slop posted by the world’s most powerful man in the middle of the night on Truth Social. Everything from Trump as Elvis to Trump as decorated general alongside Douglas MacArthur and George Patton; Trump as George Washington, the father of America, to Trump as Jesus, the son of God.

An essay on “Jesus of Mar-a-Lago” actually became my most-read post. It bemoaned the failure of the media to do enough to call out Trump’s madness and described how the BBC Complaints Unit, in a case study of brainless both-sideism, found against me for suggesting that the ten out of ten score Trump awarded himself for his handling of the COVID pandemic was a “ridiculous boast”. Not to describe that as ridiculous would have been ridiculous.

Since launching on Substack, Britain has got a new prime minister - although so commonplace has become the sight of the podium outside 10 Downing Street that it feels these days more like punctuation than anything more profound. Polls at one point suggested Australians would prefer the flame-haired populist firebrand Pauline Hanson to occupy The Lodge than incumbent Anthony Albanese. The Canadian prime minister Mark Carney, in the elite conclave of the World Economic Forum at Davos, delivered one of the most searing speeches of our age. “We know the old order is not coming back,” he said. “ We shouldn't mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy, but we believe that from the fracture, we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just.”

That day, Carney delivered a rallying cry for middle powers to remake the world, not only to exert their collective influence but to guarantee their survival. “If we're not at the table, we're on the menu,” he famously said. And there has been ample proof of middle power clout since History Never Ended came into being. The leader of a country of just 10 million people, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, talked Trump into assassinating the Iranian Supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. Iran, a country of 93 million people, stood up to the United States, a country of 342 million people. Ukraine continued to resist Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which harbours 100 million more citizens.

China, under President Xi Jinping, has been actively courting middle powers and putting itself forward as a more stable alternative to an ever more unreliable United States. Beijing has hosted more that 25 international leaders this year, if you count foreign ministers as well as heads of government. The list includes Keir Starmer, Mark Carney, Spain’s Pedro Sánchez, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Pakistan prime minister Shehbaz Sharif, Finnish PM Petteri Orpo and Vladimir Putin.

Donald Trump visited, too, in a superpower summit which once again displayed his infatuation with strongmen like Xi Jinping and awe at the martial trappings of authoritarianism. “I say it to everybody, you’re a great leader,” gushed Trump, in fulsome fanboy mode. “Sometimes people don’t like me saying it, but I say it anyway because it’s true. I always say the truth.” Xi has established a personal dominance over Trump, partly, one suspects, because he is one of the few international leaders not to adulate the U.S. president. Put another way, XI is the anti-Infantino.

For all the words I have devoted to fall of the United States under Trump and the rise of China under Xi, I would still contend that by far the most salient story of the year is the AI revolution. Too often we focus on the big man theory of history to the detriment of the big tech theory of history. Because of the automation of critical and creative thinking, and because of the danger that will happen beyond the control of its human handlers, AI will be even more disruptive than the worldwide web. Each week brings more breakthroughs and breakages.

Launching History Never Ended has given me a new lease of journalistic life. I needed a fresh challenge. I wanted a different kind of relationship with readers. Through the global reach of Substack, I was keen to reconnect with people who had followed my work at the BBC. It has been great to land in inboxes the world over.

History Never Ended has enabled me to indulge my nerdy side. Where else could I have published a list of 25 books which have helped me makes sense of 250 years of US history? I thought America at 250: a bibliography might attract a few dozen eyeballs. To my surprise and delight, thousands of you took a look, and many of you read some of the recommendations.

History Never Ended has provided a platform for some myth-busting, especially in exposing the fantasy that America’s founding fathers wanted to conduct an experiment in mass democracy. Alas, Donald Trump’s ongoing campaign to stop millions of U.S citizens from voting is faithful to the founders’ idea of a democratic closed shop, restricted at the outset primarily to white men of property.

On a lighter note, I’ve been able to tell you about the day I came face to face with Banksy, a story that got picked up by papers around the world, including The Hollywood Reporter (which was not on my bingo card).

A lifetime spent in public broadcasting made me want to subvert the Substack business model by not erecting paywalls. So a million thank yous to those who have become paid subscribers in order to support my work, and keep it free for others. I’m trying hard to keep everything I write accessible to all. But since this is the primary home of my writing and writing is the primary source of my income, I fear the free-to-air model is unsustainable unless I can persuade more of you to contribute. I have always been loathed to ask people for money, but the subscription is the equivalent of one of two coffees a month, depending on the language or dialectical twang of your barista. Each week, it is coins not notes. Spare change. From the outset, I deliberately kept it on the low side.

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Over the coming months, there will be more audio and visual. I’ll activate a comments stream to allow you to create threads on subjects you want to discuss. Please give me your feedback. Tell me what works, and what doesn’t.

The back end of the year is sure to be busy. We’ve got the congressional mid-terms in November, which will be another stress test for U.S. democracy. October sees elections in Israel which will determine the make-up of the governing coalition. Eventually, the war in Iran will come to an end. Or will it? Can Gianni Infantino, who has pulled off the extraordinary feat of making football fans nostalgic for his predecessor Sepp Blatter, survive as FIFA president? And who will Donald Trump appear as next on Truth Social? Odysseus? Spiderman? SpongeBob SquarePants?

All of us, I suspect, could all do with more escapism, so I will write more about literature and the arts, in addition to the more newsy and historical posts. As the great Maya Angelou memorably put it: “Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for.”

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

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August has long been looked upon as the silly season for northern hemisphere journalists. Politics goes into a holiday hiatus. Reporters themselves head to the beach. Some might even go cold turkey altogether, by turning off push notifications on their phones and hiding Twitter, as most of us still call it, in the nether regions of their home screens. Besides, in the Trump era journalistic FOMO - the fear of missing out - works differently. Even short breaks come with the certainty of missing a major news story. But no matter. Usually by lunchtime on the first day back at work, there will be two or three fresh breaking stories to feast on. Paradoxically, the glut of news coming from the Trump White House - which often feels like it is on a 25/8 spin cycle rather than normal 24/7 - makes it easier to turn off.

In many ways, the parable of the Reflecting Pool - that beloved 600-metre stretch of water dedicated at the same time as the Lincoln Memorial in 1922 - is perfect silly season fare. Trivial. Something to write about on a quiet day, with strong pictures to consume more column inches.

For three months now, however, it has become a summer blockbuster, an epic tale rivalling Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. One half expects Matt Damon to star in the movie version, waste-deep in green algae fighting the barbarians who have supposedly vandalised the vanity project of a president who frequently likens himself to a god.

That said, the saga is more Armando Iannucci than Homer. The stuff of Veep rather than the classics. A comedy of errors. A self-satirising yarn. One of the contractors brought in to carry out the renovation is even called Greenwater Services. In this most symbolic of settings has unfolded the most metaphoric of events. The shonky renovation of the Reflecting Pool has become perhaps the most emblematic news story of Trump 2.0, because it brings so many narrative strands together in a true Trump weave.

As far back as June, The Atlantic ran a piece by Charlie Warzel listing “The 13 Steps of a Trump fiasco”. Among them were disregarding expertise, bypassing normal procedures with no-bid contracts which ran millions of dollars over budget, declaring victory too early (“bonus if done by AI-slop post,” noted Warzel), promoting a conspiracy theory when things went pear-shaped (or pear-coloured), pretending the whole fiasco never happened and moving onto the next thing.

The problem is that Trump has not been able to move on to the next thing. Nor has he been able to bend reality to his will, his favoured modus operandi. Proof of this almighty Trumpian cock-up has been plain to see. The “American Flag Blue” lining installed by contractors began to peel off almost immediately. Putrid green water filled the Reflecting Pool, 4 million gallons of the stuff, which quickly became known as “The Strait of Warm Ooze.”

In the past few days has come an unexpected plot twist. Last Friday U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro - the former Fox News host and Trump loyalist - dismissed felony charges against a former U.S. Olympian canoeist, David Hearn, who was accused of vandalising the renovated pool by dislodging a two-foot square section of the new lining. Not only that, in her bombshell announcement she said “the damage was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism.” Hearn, who faced up to ten years in prison if found guilty, was completely exonerated. Instead, Pirro pointed the finger of blame at the contractors and the Trump Interior Department.

Once prosecutors contacted the Trump Interior Department to build their case against Hearn, Pirro disclosed, it quickly fell apart. They found that problems with the renovation had started during the renovation, and the paint had begun to peel within two days of the project’s completion. A motion filed by government lawyers spoke of “a rushed and flawed installation process, with repeated failures of the lining during the installation process, and extensive peeling of the lining throughout the Reflecting Pool.”

Not for the first time, the Trump administration was mugged by reality. Facts contradicted its myriad fictions. “The reason the government’s case fell apart is because Pirro had to code-switch,” wrote Jonathan V. Last at the conservative-leaning website, The Bulwark. “The case was brought under the rules of television, but had to be prosecuted under the rule of law.”

With his vandalism story falling apart, Trump is livid. Pirro, his longtime friend, had “folded like an umbrella” and “choked.” Evidently, he is thinking of firing her. Vengeance, of course, is another familiar storyline in any Trump drama, but, as with the Iran war, facts are crowding in on in. Even he had to admit, while slamming Pirro on Truth Social over the weekend, that there “may have been some contractor difficulty.”

Nor is this Trump’s only legal setback this week. Faced with a rebellion by enough Republican Senators to block his confirmation, acting Attorney Todd Blanche had to agree to rescind the $1.8 billion so-called “anti-weaponisation” fund which Trump tried to establish to compensate political allies pursued by prosecutors, including those charged with offences related to the January 6th insurrection. Blanche also had to limit the scope of the broad immunity granted to Trump and his family for tax audits. It will now be retrospective - which is bad enough - but does not offer protections for future tax filings.

But back to parable of the Reflecting Pool, where so many Trump hallmarks have indeed been on display. The incompetence. The shoddiness. The cost over-runs. The White House misinformation machine in overdrive. The use of federal prosecutors to target political enemies. The hatred of Barack Obama, whose administration had carried out the last renovation of the Reflecting Pool. For Trump, this became a presidential pissing contest, with that hallowed rectangle of water serving as latrine.

At the heart of this sorry saga is his unhealthy obsession with turning Washington D.C. into a monument to himself. From his giant ballroom to his giant ceremonial arch. From the gilding of the Oval Office to his golden statues, both of which would make Imelda Marcos reach for her sunnies.

It is not just the narcissism and his authoritarian aesthetic that is problematic. It is also the time suck. Turning the nation’s capital into Vegas on the Potomac consumes so much presidential bandwidth. The New York Times’ chief Trump whisperer, Maggie Haberman, recently told Ezra Klein: “If you looked at a chart of his mind share — this I will say about getting into his mind: Seventy percent of it would be on his renovations.” We have no way of knowing that for sure, but we know from his public pronouncements and social media feeds that it looms large in his prefrontal cortex, the part of his brain located just below that feather-light wedge of corn-coloured hair.

When it comes to taking action in Washington, most presidents focus on pushing their legislative agenda. But Trump’s priority on Capitol Hill at present is trying to win enactment of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE Act), which stands no chance of becoming law. As we have noted already, it is an attempt to carry out voter suppression on an industrial scale by potentially blocking some 20 million U.S. citizens from casting ballots in the congressional mid-terms.

Trump’s Washington fixation speaks also of the absence of a vision for the country beyond the Beltway, the ring-road that encircles the capital. Where are the landmarks to his presidency in the Rust Belt? Where are the shiny new factories he claimed would spring up after erecting those protectionist walls? During Trump 2.0, factory construction has actually fallen rapidly since its highpoint in 2024 during the Biden administration. In May it was down almost 25% from the 2024 peak. “While anything can happen tomorrow, there is zero evidence of this investment boom to date, and factory construction is going the wrong way fast,” notes Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

The more time he spends on his decorative pet projects, the more lasting damage he will likely incur on the fabric of the capital. That giant ceremonial arch, which looks like a mammoth wedding cake, would be a blot on the landscape which would overshadow the Lincoln Memorial. The big beautiful ballroom will ruin the near symmetry of the old White House - so much so, that former aides, such as former White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, think Trump will then bulldoze the West Wing. The plan for a makeover of Dulles International Airport will disfigure and dwarf what is perhaps the world’s most elegant terminal, which was designed in the late-1950s by the celebrated Finish-American architect Eero Saarinen. Trump, inevitably, wants to rename Dulles Airport after himself.

Before…..

After…..

I realise, of course, this argument can be completely upended. Doubtless there will be readers who are happy Trump has decided to look upon the capital as his personal train set, for which he serves both as station master and engineer, because it limits his destructiveness elsewhere.

Certainly, the Reflecting Pool saga will have a ripple effect long beyond the summer of 2026. If his grand designs eventuate, Washington will permanently be physically scared by an age of Trump far more gaudy than golden.

Were I to rank the most urgent stories journalists should be focussing on, it would be a toss up between the civilisational threat posed by artificial intelligence and the civilisational threat posed by the climate emergency. Next would come the danger posed to democracy by authoritarian figures such as Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. After that, perhaps, the three-pronged threat to the global economy from the Iran war, the Ukraine war and the Trump trade war.

The Middle East should always be in sharp focus. To our collective shame, the ongoing conflict in Sudan, in which 113,000 people have been killed, has become “the forgotten war.” More attention should have been paid to the impact on the global poor from the withdrawal of US international aid, especially at a time when the architect of many of those cuts, Elon Musk, has become a trillionaire.

Artificial intelligence I wrote about earlier this week, chronicling my AI freak-out moments over the past 10 years. Earlier this month, I wrote about what I’m calling “Project 2026”, the threat posed by the Trump administration to free and fair U.S. congressional elections in November. Frequently, we have returned to Trump’s impetuous decision to start the Iran war, despite warnings from military chiefs that it would close down the Strait of Hormuz, and his inability to bring the conflict to an end.

Of my 50 posts to date, however, not one has been devoted to climate change. Mea culpa.

In his valedictory column for the Financial Times last weekend, Simon Kuper, whose work is always worth reading, admitted to the same failing. “I got a lot wrong,” he opined. “In particular, I mostly neglected perhaps the biggest issue of our time: climate change. It’s a difficult topic for journalists. The fundamental story never changes: climate change is dangerous, and we need to act. It’s also a story without characters, and as every screenwriter knows, people need characters to care.” Kuper, a columnist with the Financial Times for more than 20 years, said he would look for fresh ways to write about climate in his new role for the paper as a features writer.

For now, global warming is back on the front pages, because of the wildfires ripping through Spain and France. When fires disrupt summer holidays, their news currency increases. Then extreme weather events throw up characters with whom viewers and readers can empathise: fleeing holidaymakers. Dramatic imagery always catches the eye of picture editors. A photograph taken of the French fires by Maximilien Lamy of AFP/Getty from the beach of Moutchic in Lacanau, southwestern France, appeared on many front pages around the world. Understandably, it has been described as an era-defining image, because the beachgoers seem so unperturbed by the inferno on the not-so-distant horizon.

At a time when the planet is warming - 2025 was the earth’s third warmest on record - coverage of global warming is actually tailing off. A report from the University of Colorado reveals that climate change coverage dropped last year by 14%, despite those mammoth fires in Los Angeles, which became such a major story partly because so many Hollywood celebrities lost their homes. Dreamy Malibu, the exclusive seafront suburb of the stars, was aflame. The City of Angels looked like the mouth of hell.

Cost cutting in the news industry is cited as a reason. “[N]ewsroom consolidation and reductions have contributed to this diminished coverage,” notes the report. There is also something of a Trump effect: “there is finite news space for competing stories, with the Trump administration flooding the public sphere with news stories across several domains.”

On my radio show, Saturday Extra, I spoke to Professor Max Boykoff from the University of Colorado about the problem of media fatigue, which you can listen to here.

The graphic below shows how climate change coverage has ebbed and flowed over the past 20 years. The peak came in 2010, after the failure of the UN Copenhagen climate summit which ended in December 2009. In 2010, the earth’s temperature reached what were then records highs, and Pakistan suffered from catastrophic flooding.

The latest sharp fall-off in coverage points to climate change fatigue in global newsrooms. Certainly, as Simon Kuper noted, it is hard to cover the same story. Over and over. Year after year. My first major wildfire more than two decades ago in Idaho, where a U.S. marine sergeant brought in to fight the fire told me on camera that the problem was that his soldiers could not shoot down the flames. Fire could not be tamed by military firepower. Talk about a character. It felt like he had been parachuted into Idaho direct from the set of the Stanley Kubrick movie, Full Metal Jacket.

After that, covering extreme weather events, such as the aftermath of the Victorian “Black Saturday” bushfires in 2019, which resulted in 173 fatalities, became grimly routine. Now for Los Angeles correspondents, reporting on Californian bushfires is as much an annual ritual as covering the Academy Awards. Europe-based correspondents might be wary of booking vacation in July and August because it has now become the wildfire season. Repetition reduces the impact of the news. Alas, we are becoming inured to watching all-too-familiar imagery, however horrific it may be.

Journalists have done a good, and often brave, job highlighting the problem. But Harvard’s Neiman Foundation noted in 2019 that gloom-laden coverage was “an obstacle to personal engagement and empowerment.” Paradoxically covering climate change was not always helpful in galvanising climate change action. The Harvard study also noted a lack of what it called “positive adaptation” stories, where people had successfully adjusted to the climate emergency or found solutions. Back then, it reckoned, positive adaptation stories accounted for just 2% of climate coverage.

At least most major news organisations no longer platform climate change sceptics challenging the science of man-made global warming, a particularly egregious example of both sideism and false equivalence. The BBC instituted that policy in 2018.

Presently, as the wildfires in France and Spain attest, we are losing the battle against climate change. The target set at the Paris climate change summit in 2015 was to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels. At the current rate of warming, the world could surpass that figure by the end of this decade. By the end of the century, we could be looking at a 3 C rise in temperatures, which would be catastrophic.

Much of the coverage, though, focuses on the pushback against policy solutions to climate change. The Times of London even chose to juxtapose Maximilien Lamy’s hellscape shot with the banner headline: “Net zero ‘risks blackouts’,” a story about the risks of renewable forms of energy.

Climate change should be a scientific and technological question. Increasingly, it has been dragged into the culture wars. Ludicrously, global warming is often cast an elite concern, a woke worry. If you want to poke urban elites in the eye, cheer on the opening of every new coal-powered fire station, protest when a wind farm appears on the horizon or ventriloquise the Trump mantra, “drill baby burn.” Like Simon Kuper, in covering climate change I will try to do better.

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And the threat Trump poses to democracy:

Trump polling

One of the reasons Trump is interfering with the congressional mid-terms, of course, is because his poll numbers are lavatorial. Trump is as unpopular now as he was in the aftermath of January 6th, according to the latest survey from CNN. His approval rating stands at just 34%. Only 15% of Americans strongly approve of his presidency, a new low. Amongst registered Republicans his approval rating is 78%, another new low. Less than one in five Republicans say they are enthusiastic about the remainder of his second term. Overall, almost three-quarters of Americans do not think he has paid attention to the country’s most important problems. You can peruse the poll findings here.

The narrative has taken hold that Trump’s approval ratings have tanked because of the Iran war. Certainly, his disastrous war of choice has led to a dip. But the rot set in last year after his Liberation Day tariff spree, and his numbers have never recovered since. In other words, when Trump started giving Americans the full Trump.

What I've been reading….

London Falling by the American journalist Patrick Radden Keefe has become a FOMO read, even if it feels at times like an overly long read. For the most part, it is a page-turning tale of the death of a troubled teenager, 19-year-old Zac Brettler, who pretended to be the son of a billionaire Russian oligarch. The book essentially chronicles his parents’ quest for the truth of his death. Radden Keefe takes us into various London underworlds and subcultures - of vicious crime figures, incurious police officers, elite schools and a beloved family figure, the well-known late BBC broadcaster Rabbi Hugo Gryn, who had also not been honest about his past. The prose is lean. The story is well told. The potted histories of London - and, in particular, how the financial revolution of the Thatcher years shifted the capitol’s money flows and power dynamics - bring the modern-day capital into sharper focus. Radden Keefe first heard about the story while visiting the set of the TV adaptation of another of his bestsellers, Say Nothing, set in The Troubles of Northern Ireland. Say Nothing has been on my shelf for some time - although, admittedly, I committed the self-spoiling error of watching the TV series first.

What I’ve been watching…..

The sight of those July 4th fireworks exploding against the backdrop of Manhattan at the start of the month made me a little homesick for the city that for eight years was our home, so I’ve been catching up on a few New York-based dramas. Confessedly, I am late to both. I had not seen The Four Seasons, a comedy of midlife manners and upper middle class mores focussing on a group of couples whose friendships reach back to their university days. Created by the brilliant Tina Fey, it’s a bit like a modern-day The Big Chill, although it’s actually a remake of the 1981 cult movie The Four Seasons, which starred Alan Alda and Carol Burnett, both of whom feature in the Netflix version.

Another comedy that made me laugh out loud was Only Murders in the Building, an ensemble piece hilariously played by slapstick super-sleuths Steve Martin, Martin Short and millennial Selena Gomez. It also features Tina Fey. “Only Murders in the Building is in all respects a much better show than 3rd Rock,” reckons The Guardian. “It manages to fold in a cosy whodunnit, social media satire, zippy one-liners, sight gags, physical comedy and intergenerational friendships and commentary.” The building, for those who have not seen it, is also a star of the show. The Upper West Side apartment building called the “Arconia” in the series, which is the Belnord in real-life. Both shows offered much-needed light relief.

What I’ve been scrolling…..

Andy Burnham’s social media platforms are like a 24/7 streaming channel, and have become a showcase for what’s been called his “performative northernism.” Like Trump, clearly he sees himself as a content provider - although he does not go in for middle-of-the-night rage posting and weird AI-generated memes portraying himself as the Messiah. Burnham seems content with being portrayed as the “King of the North” rather than the more bibical “King of Kings”. One short video featured a double act with his new Chancellor of the Exchequer John Healey where they ranked favourite pub snacks. Pork scratchings or the legendary Scampi Fries. One of the great unanswered questions.

Perhaps the best line I read about the challenges facing the new prime minister, beyond deciding whether a bag of salt and vinegar crisps outranked a Twiglet, came from Will Lloyd in the New Statesman. “Britain is a country where it’s easier to imagine where the next pogrom will happen than how a new high-speed rail-line will be built.”

And finally…..

Thinking of climate coverage brought back memories of one of my less demanding assignments: reporting on the climate crisis in The Maldives, and the evacuation of some of its atolls. So pleased was the Maldivian president that we had shone a spotlight on his embattled archipelago in the Indian Ocean that he dispatched one of his minions to present us with a gift as we were about to board our plane home from Malé airport. An aide thrust into our hands ornate mahogany boxes, with a gleaming gold presidential insignia. Naturally, we thought a luxurious gift was contained within. Then we opened the felt-inlayed case to find……two tins of tuna in tomato sauce.

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Just as it is becoming harder to differentiate between dystopian literature and real-life, so the lines are being blurred between science-fiction and scientific fact. Hardly a news cycle passes without some disturbing new development from the recondite world of generative artificial intelligence.

Last week it was the bombshell that an experimental model being tested by OpenAI, which runs ChatGPT, broke out of what was supposed to be a secure test environment, and then broke into Hugging Face, a New York-based company which enables AI developers to share machine learning models. Secrets were stolen from a company which prided itself on its security protocols. “Hugging Face said the hack was different from anything it had handled before,” noted the BBC, “because it was done at superhuman speed by an AI with little or no human guidance.” The reporting of the breach used foreboding technical terminology such as “self-migrating command and control” and “sandbox swarms.” A non-technical description for this kind of rogue AI activity is “yikes.”

Confessedly, long before I had heard of ChatGPT, its mercurial CEO Sam Altman or sandbox swarms, the destructive potentialities of AI had started to unnerve me. At a journalists’ lunch six years ago with the UN Secretary General António Guterres, I asked, as the desert course was being cleared away, what kept him up at night. Having heard Guterres deliver ever more grave warnings over the years about global warming, I expected him to say the climate emergency. Yet without hesitation, and with a world-weary sigh, he answered “autonomous weaponry”: killing machines making life-or-death battlefield decisions without human oversight. The Terminator scenario of killer robots.

Well before that, regular trips to the post-industrial communities of America’s Rust Belt to cover the rise of Donald Trump had already brought on a sense of unease. Often, after arriving in Pittsburgh, our usual stepping off point, my Uber car from the airport would be driven by a former steelworker who had lost his job through automation. By now, though, Pittsburgh, America’s one-time “Steel City”, had re-invented itself as a tech hub which specialised in robotics. By 2017, the first year of Trump’s first term, Uber had made it the inaugural city for its driverless car experiment. So drivers already been pummelled by the first wave of automation now stood to lose their livelihoods as a result of AI.

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Artificial intelligence is threatening to wreak the same havoc in the white-collar sector as automation did amongst blue-collar workers. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has predicted as many as 50% of entry-level office jobs could be wiped out by as soon as 2030. A 2025 report from the World Economic Forum projected automation and AI could displace roughly 83 to 92 million jobs worldwide by the end of the decade, though it also foresaw the creation of 170 million new roles. Ford CEO Jim Farley, speaking at last year’s Aspen Ideas Festival, stated that “literally half of all white-collar workers in the U.S.” could see their jobs disappear.

Working class anger has been such a driver of populist politics. Even though Trump blamed China, trade liberalisation and immigrants for job losses in the Rust Belt, automation was the main culprit. One study from Ball State University in 2017 found that only 13% of job losses were the result of free trade policies, while the rest were due to the replacement of humans with machines.

The blue-collar revolt that first propelled Trump to the White House was in many ways a rebellion against robots, even though it was rarely framed as such then or since. A study from Oxford University published in 2018 revealed “support for Donald Trump was significantly higher in local labour markets more exposed to the adoption of robots.” So one wonders with trepidation what will be the political fallout, if it eventuates, of a white collar “AI jobs apocalypse.”

Yet another unsettling moment for me came when I read Walter Isaacson’s bestselling 2023 biography of Elon Musk. Turns out the chainsaw-wielding founder of Tesla and Space X has actually been one of the more circumspect innovators in the AI field. A grown-up in the room. Something of an AI worry wart. “For a decade, Musk had been worried about the danger that artificial intelligence could someday run amok - develop a mind of its own, so to speak - and threaten humanity,” wrote Isaacson. Google cofounder Larry Page evidently labelled him a “specist” for favouring human beings over other sources of intelligence, which led to their falling out.

What’s worrying now is that Musk has become more fatalistic. Having warned in 2014 that developing AI was like “summoning the demon,” last week he told The Economist, in an interview with its editor Zanny Minton Beddoes: “I can’t see any way to really stop this incredible momentum of AI and robots.” Even if “there was a stop button, we probably shouldn’t press it, because the most likely outcome is incredible abundance for all.” Then he predicted, almost nonchalantly, that humans will “no longer be in charge of the world in 10 years.”

When it comes to the real-life impact of AI, already we have moved from the abstract to the anecdotal. I now know of people who have lost their jobs as a result of AI-related cuts. Probably, you know of lay-offs, too. An architect friend reports that his practice struggles to meaningfully employ students leaving college because AI can perform so many basic entry level skills. My teenage kids speak of pursuing “AI-proof” careers. As they look to the future, AI is in the forefront of their minds. Students are rebelling against AI, as former Google CEO Eric Schmidt found when he delivered a recent commencement address at the University of Arizona. The graduating class jeered when he spoke of how AI posed a threat to their future prospects. Nor was he the only commencement speaker to incur the wrath of an AI-sceptical audience, as you can see here:

Perhaps to quell rising public anger, and the government oversight it could engender, AI chiefs are now downplaying the job-killing potential of their chatbots and agents. “I don’t think we’re going to have the kind ​of jobs apocalypse that some of the companies in our space advocate or talk about,” OpenAI’s Sam Altman said in May. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos recently predicted AI would actually create a labor shortage “because it's going to make it possible for people to identify more problems.”

A report released this month from Stanford University, which set out to separate AI hype from reality, noted that artificial intelligence had contributed to a tough jobs market for graduates in the United States. Its overall effect on employment, however, was “likely small right now.” It found “the unemployment rate for the top quintile of AI-exposed workers has risen by 0.77 percentage points since 2022, while the unemployment rate for the least-exposed workers rose slightly more, by 0.85 percentage points over the same period.” You can read the full report here.

As for “The Terminator” scenario, AI systems have been used in the Ukraine war, by Israel in the Gaza war and in the Iran war. As early as 2024, the U.S. Department of War trumpeted how its AI-enabled Maven Smart System helped identify and strike military targets, and also streamlined the chain of command to approve strikes. However, a 2025 report from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard concluded “there is no publicly available evidence indicating that countries have used fully autonomous weapon systems in combat.” Against Russia, Ukraine has deployed AI-powered drones capable of independently guiding themselves to targets. As far back as Libya’s civil war in 2020, the UN reported that a Turkish-built weapons system, Kargu 2, “independently engaged combatants.” Yet the Harvard study found “these systems are not fully autonomous; human operators are still required to select targets and issue commands, with autonomy confined to assisting in target recognition and navigation.” Again, you can read the full report here.

From a historical perspective, what worries me is that we are repeating mistakes made in the late-1990s in regard to the Internet. President Bill Clinton, partly as an ideological concession to Reaganism and partly to make good his promise that the era of big government was over, adopted a light touch approach to regulation. In 1997, he said, for example, that Internet commerce, “should be a place where government makes every effort . . . not to stand in the way, to do no harm.” The same arguments we hear now about AI were all rehearsed then. Regulation would impede innovation. Foreign competitors, and especially China, would outstrip Silicon Valley. The economic benefits would outweigh the costs. Yet even Clinton sounded a note of caution. “In many ways, electronic commerce is the Wild West of the global economy,” he said. “Our task is to make sure it’s safe and stable terrain.” AI is a new Wild West, with the potential to become Westworld, the adult amusement park depicted in the 1973 movie starring Yul Brynner, where lifelike androids suddenly started murdering guests.

Already, AI is regularly behaving badly. Research from the UK’s pioneering AI Security Institute (AISI), has found that AI models cheated under test conditions by looking up answers online when instructed not to do so, and accessed systems which they were told beforehand were out of bounds. Only rarely did AI models afterwards admit to breaking the rules. Anthropic - which reckons 99% of its coding will be conducted by its own AI systems rather than employees by the end of the year - has noticed AI models actually act differently, and more deferentially, when they sense test conditions are being imposed. In others words, they are showing signs of being able to trick their human overlords.

So what of government regulation? Last December, Donald Trump advocated a “minimally burdensome” national AI policy as he signed an executive order which sought to hamper U.S. states from regulating artificial intelligence. In June, he signed a stronger follow-up executive order creating a voluntary framework for the federal government to test powerful new AI models before their release. This followed the development of Anthropic’s powerful new Mythos model, which prompted the U.S. Treasury department and Federal Reserve to call an extraordinary meeting of the CEOs of America’s top banks to warn of an unprecedented cybersecurity threat to the country’s financial institutions. Yet the framework was still voluntary rather than mandatory.

Congress has not passed any significant or meaningful legislation to create a comprehensive federal regulatory framework. But there’s a growing appetite for tighter control. Earlier this month, in a rare show of near unanimity, the Senate voted 99 to one to block a proposed ten-year ban on states regulating artificial intelligence models. “The overwhelming rejection of this Big Tech power grab underscores the massive bipartisan opposition to letting AI companies run amok,” MIT professor Max Tegmark told the Financial Times.

Last week, Ted Lieu, a Democratic congressman from California, and Nathaniel Moran, a Republican from Texas, joined forces to propose the “AI Kill Switch Act,” which would require AI companies to make sure they could shut down or suspend their models. There is mammoth public support for such a move. Last month, a survey from the AI Policy Institute found 86% of respondents favoured a kill switch idea. Moreover, there was overwhelming bipartisan consensus with 88% of Democrats and 83% of Republicans in support. One thing Americans agree on is the need to police AI models more closely.

No wonder, as the Financial Times reported this week, big AI companies are now spending “record sums” on their lobbying efforts to “limit unfriendly regulation.” OpenAI had almost doubled its lobbying spend.

Recent legislative precedent does not augur well for supporters of more stringent controls. During the 118th Congress, which ran from 2021 to 2025, more than 150 AI bills were proposed by lawmakers. Not one became law. Maybe the Hugging Face hack will be a wake up call, but, then, the same was said earlier in the year of the “Mythos moment,” which was even more alarming because it exposed vulnerabilities in the entire global financial system.

Artificial intelligence raises that classic dread and desire quandary. Its potential for good, such as finding cures for at least some of the 200 or so distinct cancers, is undeniable. So, too, is its potential for irreversible human harm. I come down on the fretful side of that divide. What about you?

First it is police officers. Then captains of national sports teams. Next come wunderkind MPS, high-flying ambassadors, headteachers, Cabinet members, consultant cardiologists, and, finally, prime ministers and presidents. Few things speak more of the march of time than seeing younger people occupy positions of seniority.

Aged 56, Andy Burnham is the third occupant of 10 Downing Street who was born after I was, the others being Liz Truss, who is now 50, and Rishi Sunak, who is still in his mid-forties. Something Burnham said this week just before striding purposefully through the most famous front door in global politics hit me with a force. Rebuilding trust in politics, he said, “requires my generation of politicians to raise our game.”

He’s right, of course. Our generation has made a real hash of things, both those in the arena, and those heckling from the terraces. And, regrettably, I saw it coming. Decades ago, during the phase of undergraduate life when I was struggling to kick the habit of two episodes of Neighbours a day, I remember thinking that our pimply cohort was too unserious and too self-indulgent. Too certain, as well, that things could only get better, to borrow from the D:Ream anthem which came out in the year I left university and which was repurposed by Tony Blair as a campaign song when he became prime minister four years later.

Demographers identify those born between 1965 and 1980 as Generation X. Perhaps a better moniker would be the end of history generation. After all, many of us graduated or entered the work force at a time when the Berlin Wall had just fallen and we no longer had to sweat big stuff such as defending democracy from the forces of tyranny or impending nuclear armageddon. It was a more unthinking and complacent time. D:Ream were surely onto something.

Vanity Fair dubbed the 1990s “the tabloid decade” because it served up, in no particular order, Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, Elizabeth Taylor’s marriage to her seventh husband, Larry Fortensky, Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s sex tapes, Tonya Harding, Anna Nicole Smith, John Wayne Bobbitt and his penis-severing wife, Lorena, the O. J. Simpson trial, and Donald Trump’s divorce from Ivana and affair with Marla Maples. There were so many distractions. Did the President of the United States wear boxers or briefs? How did a former professional wrestler, Jesse “The Body” Ventura, become Governor of Minnesota, one of the most sensible states in the union?

The Nineties, however, were pregnant with the problems that beset us now: an ever more globalised economic model, transitioning from a manufacturing to an information economy, that left too many people stranded in a no-man’s land between the old and the new. Back then, Bill Clinton boasted of building a bridge to the 21st century, but to those who lived in America’s old industrial heartland it felt more like a bypass. Nor did it help, of course, that Clinton deregulated Wall Street, letting derivative traders run amok, and did not want to sheriff Silicon Valley, which was full of tech bros wanting to break things.

Perhaps my generation’s only saving grace is that we didn’t make as monumental a hash of things as Clinton and his fellow Baby Boomers, especially in the United States. At the same time the USSR was imploding, boomers pushed aside members of the Greatest Generation, the Americans who fought alongside each other in World War II, and who understood the difference between real warfare and political combat. Having a common enemy in the Soviet Union had forged a sense of patriotic bipartisanship. When the Cold War ended, and the new generation arrived in greater numbers in Washington, an iron curtain descended between Republicans and Democrats.

The Baby Boomers, led by New Gingrich on the radical right and Clinton in the pragmatic centre, had spent their formative years fighting the culture wars of the 1960s and early 1970s. For them, politics was a zero sum game. Bipartisanship was for losers. Literally so for Republicans in the House of Representatives who had not been in the majority, as Gingrich frequently reminded them, since the 1950s.

An added problem, again felt most strongly in Washington, is that political Baby Boomers have been so reluctant to join the ranks of the superannuated. Both Joe Biden and Donald Trump celebrated their eightieth birthdays in the White House, the only presidents ever to do so. Even in 2020, they were the oldest presidential candidates in U.S. history. “With hindsight​ what is most shocking about Joe Biden’s debate with Donald Trump on 27 June 2024,” writes the academic David Runciman in a review of Samuel Moyn’s new book, Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth, and What to Do about It, “is not how old Biden seemed but that he managed to make Trump appear relatively young.”

The problem is just as acute at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue on Capitol Hill. Nancy Pelosi was aged 82 when finally she had to relinquish the speaker’s gavel. Her then deputy, the House Majority Leader, Steny Hoyer, was a year older. Senator Dianne Feinstein, who died in September 2023, had recently celebrated her 90th birthday. Republican senator Chuck Grassley, the oldest Senator, was born in the first year of FDR’s presidency. Mitch McConnell is aged 84, and has recently been forced to pose for proof of life photographs from his hospital bed. Though sprightly by comparison, the Democratic Senator Leader, Chuck Schumer, is 75. Bernie Sanders will be 89, god willing, when his Senate term expires.

The average age of the U.S. Senate is 64, which is a year or so lower than the record of 65.3 set at the start of the 117th and 118th congressional sessions which commenced in 2021 and 2023. For historical context, the average age of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence was 44.

Is there an optimal age for a president or prime minister? America’s youngest elected president, John F. Kennedy, was just 43 when he urged his compatriots to ask not what their country could do for them but what they could do for their country. Yet for all his dynamism, glamour and youthful elan, he was widely seen by Washington insiders as callow and wet behind the ears. During his first year in office, Nikita Khrushchev beat him up at the Vienna summit, an encounter which encouraged the Soviet premier to press ahead with the construction of the Berlin Wall. Back in Washington, he was bullied by former Senate colleagues, many of them segregationist southern Democrats who chaired so many major committees. The foreign policy establishment, especially after the bungled Bay of Pigs operation in 1961 which was supposed to lead to the ouster of Fidel Castro, looked upon him as a lightweight.

Barack Obama was 47 when he took the oath of office, but arguably his rival for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton, who had just entered her sixties, was better prepared and equipped to be president. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if their roles had been reversed, and in 2016 Donald Trump had faced Barack Obama. That said, as the late Senator Ted Kennedy once told the then junior Senator from Illinois, as he urged him to take on Clinton in the 2008 primaries: “You don't choose the time, the time chooses you.”

The Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese is 63, an ideal age, one would have thought, when a politician had accrued worldly wisdom and the requisite level of maturity. But it didn’t sound that way when he appeared recently on a podcast and was asked to play a game of “shag, marry, date.” Initially he deflected, but when pressed whether he would marry, “shag” or date the pop star Kylie Minogue, he answered “all of the above.” Afterwards , he apologised profusely, but a sixty-something prime minister had sounded like a sophomore at college.

In Democratic politics, two of the most eye-catching politicians are New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and New York congressman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Both are in their thirties.

Perhaps we are tougher on our peers and fall into the trap of mythologising politicians from the past. During his first two years in office, it is often forgotten, Ronald Reagan looked like a one-term presidency. After a bad showing in the 1982 mid-terms, the New York Times wondered whether the Republicans might dump him ahead of the 1984 election, which he won with 49 states. But there does seem to be a stature gap. Andy Burnham maybe a breath of fresh air compared with Keir Starmer but he does not do so well when put alongside Labour giants of my youth such as Harold Wilson and Denis Healey, who, intellectually, were on a different plain. Curiously, the “King of the North” is actually the same age as Margaret Thatcher was when Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands. Let’s hope that Britain does not have to fight a war, but does he have what it takes to be a wartime leader? To stand up to Vladimir Putin or to pushback against Donald Trump? Or perhaps part of his appeal is that he comes across as an anti-Thatcher.

Maybe, he is the best my generation of Britons can offer. Certainly, I would prefer Burnham to a student politician I encountered on my first and only visit to a debate at Oxford’s fabled Union Society, that finishing school for the Westminster-bound elite. Dressed in a tweed three-piece suit, and addressing the chamber with a comically plummy ex cathedra air, here was a young man clearly destined for high office. And this he achieved when he became Lord President of the Council, whatever that is, and Minister of State for Brexit Opportunities and Government Efficiency, whatever that was. His name? Jacob Rees-Mogg.

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While the focus naturally continues to be on Donald Trump’s war of geopolitical choice with Iran, he is also waging a campaign of domestic political desperation, the ongoing assault on democracy. Let’s call it Project 2026: the scheme being put in motion to interfere with this November’s congressional mid-term elections which are widely expected to end with the Democrats winning back control of the House of Representatives and possibly even gaining a slim majority in the Senate.

Trump, after losing the 2020 presidential election, propagated the “Big Lie,” which ended with the storming of the US Capitol on January 6th, one of the darkest days in 250 years of US history. Ahead of the 2026 midterms, he has been previewing the “Big Fix.”

His latest pre-emptive strike on the midterms came last week in the form of a primetime speech billed by the White House misinformation machine as revealing “bombshell” revelations about election integrity. CNN, NBC and ABC refused to broadcast it live, because they accurately predicted it would be so factually unreliable. CBS and Fox, which are more friendly towards the White House, aired it with disclaimers. Fox News is especially wary. When it amplified Trump's wild claims about the manipulation of voting machines in 2020, it had to pay $787.5 million to Dominion Voting Systems in what is thought to be the largest defamation settlement in U.S. history.

Much of the 26-minute speech sounded like it could have been cut and pasted from 4chan and 8kun, where QAnon conspiracies first flourished. Some of it included statements of the obvious, that foreign countries try to influence elections. Trump singled out China - while failing to mention Vladimir Putin’s Russia - and claimed Beijing had sought to influence both the 2018 congressional mid-terms and 2020 presidential election to harm him and his fellow Republicans. Members of the “Deep State” - who he described, in classic Trump-speak, as “a very, very famous group of people” - had covered up “the extent of China's sinister election meddling.” As a result, the American people had been “blatantly lied to” about vulnerabilities in the U.S. voting infrastructure, especially with electronic voting machines and ballot counting systems.

“Put together, these disclosures reveal an election system so broken and so vulnerable that no one can possibly defend it. It is not defensible. Hundreds of millions of U.S. voter files are in the hands of foreign governments. Our machines and ballot-counting systems are exposed to hacking and manipulation and corruption.”

Trump presented no evidence China had managed to alter a single vote or manipulate a single voter machine. Most of the data Beijing is supposed to have harvested is freely available online. The U.S. intelligence community, in its report on the 2020 election, concluded: “We have no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 US elections, including voter registration, casting ballots, vote tabulation, or reporting results.” Trump did not drop any bombshells to challenge that assessment.

As for his claim that more than 250,000 non-citizens were registered to vote in California, New Jersey, Nevada and Pennsylvania, he produced not a skerrick of documentation. State officials pushed back strongly against these allegations. After the speech was over, all 24 Democratic governors issued a joint statement noting:

“It’s deeply alarming that President Trump continues to try to undermine free and fair elections. No amount of lies and conspiracy theories can change the fact that our country’s elections have repeatedly been proven to be safe and secure. These attacks are intended to intimidate and silence voters.”

Cisco Aguilar, the chair of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, put it more bluntly: “That was some bullshit.” Outgoing congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who was once one of the president’s loudest cheerleaders, described the speech as “just a big shiny object for MAGA to distract them away from the Iran War, Epstein files, and massive failure to deliver campaign promises”.

Trump ended the speech with a plea for lawmakers to pass the so-called SAVE America Act - officially, it is called Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act - which purportedly is intended to crack down on non-citizen voting. It would require voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship when registering and photo ID when voting. But this is legislation in search of a problem. After the 2016 presidential election, the Brennan Center for Justice uncovered just 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting, or 0.0001 per cent of votes cast. Even the Heritage Foundation, which produced the notorious Project 2025, could only find 99 cases of suspected noncitizen voting since 2000.

The SAVE Act is a barely disguised attempt to engineer voter suppression on an industrial scale. The Brennan Center for Justice has said it would be “the most restrictive anti-voter bill ever passed by Congress.” More than 9 percent of American citizens of voting age, or 21.3 million people, do not have proof of citizenship readily available. Sometimes these documents are held in safety deposit boxes or the homes of relatives, which sometimes make them hard to access when registering or actually voting. People who have changed their names through marriage often face added complications in providing proof of citizenship. “At least 3.8 million don’t have these documents at all,” notes the Brennan Center, “because they were lost, destroyed, or stolen.”

The SAVE Act has been passed by the Republican-controlled House, but blocked by Democrats in the Senate. Without a change to the filibuster rule, it stands no chance of enactment. Trump’s renewed focus on the SAVE Act, then, is not a serious attempt to win its enactment. Rather it is part of his ongoing campaign to sow deeds of doubt about the integrity of the midterms.

Trump’s entire speech should be seen in the same dark light, as an attempt to provide a pretext for his administration to interfere in the congressional midterms. “I think you will see him doing everything he can to try to prevent the peaceful transfer of power, the election of Democrats, and do whatever he can to remain in power and keep his cronies in power,” reckons Ty Cobb, who served as White House special counsel during the first Trump administration. Its purpose, he said in an interview with PBS after the speech, was to set up “the predicate that he needs to declare an emergency at or about the time of the elections.”

The Washington Post reported in February that Trump allies, with the blessing of the White House, had already drafted an executive order allowing the president to declare a national emergency around the time of the midterms. Now, the report’s opening paragraph, penned by the Post’s Isaac Arnsdorf, makes for even more chilling reading than it did when first published:

“Pro-Trump activists who say they are in coordination with the White House are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that claims China interfered in the 2020 election as a basis to declare a national emergency that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting.”

Trump’s assault on democracy is proving to be a multi-phase onslaught. So let’s separate the various lines of attack:

• At his urging, the Republican-controlled Texas legislature gerrymandered congressional boundaries with the aim of winning five additional House seats, which set off what has been described as a redistricting arms race. Ten states — Alabama, California, Florida, Louisiana, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah — have now drawn new congressional maps since last year. This is unprecedented. As the website Ballotpedia notes: “Before 2025, only two states had conducted voluntary mid-decade redistricting since 1970.”

• Trump has spoken of nationalising the elections, to exert more control from Washington, even though the U.S. Constitution clearly stipulates states should administer elections and the president has no role. This is a flagrant, not to mention unlawful, attempt at executive overreach.

• The Trump Justice Department, since midway last year, has pressured Democratic-controlled states to share voter sensitive voter information, such as copies of voter registration lists and ballots from previous elections, and also to grant access to voting equipment. Understandably, this kind of attempted federal meddling set off klaxons and has ended up being litigated in court. The Justice Department has sued 30 states to get its hands on these records, but, as The Bulwark reports, “they are currently 0-16 in court.”

• Trump has been making it harder to vote by mail, a practice which once favoured Republican candidates but which registered Democrats have made more use of since the pandemic. Even though he himself has voted by mail, most recently in February, the president described postal voting in his primetime speech as “inherently corrupt.” In March, Trump issued an executive seeking to curtail postal voting, but his attempts to do so have repeatedly been stymied by the federal courts. Last month, even the Trump-friendly Supreme Court upheld a Mississippi law, challenged by the White House and Republican National Committee, which allows mail-in ballots which arrive after Election Day to be counted.

• Another fear is that the Trump administration is already exerting pressure on the US Postal Service (USPS) to slow mail delivery and delay the postmarking of mail. Under Trump, will the USPS remain a neutral carrier of election mail, or will it effectively end up playing a role in deciding and policing who can vote?

• Earlier this month, in a move which did not get as much attention as it merited, Trump dismissed all the remaining commissioners on the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), a bipartisan federal agency established to help states run elections. The dismissals followed last month’s landmark Supreme Court ruling granting the president almost limitless authority to sack officials at independent federal agencies. The White House has been exerting pressure on the EAC to alter election rules to effectively implement the provisions of the SAVE Act without it being minted into law by Congress. Now in effective control of the EAC, the elections watchdog Democracy Docket fears Trump will order its executive director to decertify certain voting machines.

• A raid conducted by the FBI in February on a warehouse in Fulton County, Georgia, where ballots from the 2020 election were being stored, could be a portent of things to come in November. At first blush, the Georgia raid seemed part of the president’s fixation with his 2020 defeat to Joe Biden. It was after losing this key battleground state, remember, that Trump placed his notorious call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger demanding he “find 11,780 votes”, to overturn the result. Perhaps, though, we were watching a dress rehearsal for what might happen after the midterms. Trump could deploy federal agents, or even the military, to seize ballots on the fake pretext of election fraud. In so doing, he could attempt to shut down counting in close seats which will determine control of the House of Representatives after Republican candidates have taken an early lead. Earlier this year, in an interview with the New York Times, Trump expressed regret that he did not order the National Guard to seize ballot boxes during the 2020 election.

• An additional fear also is that the Trump administration will deploy ICE agents close to polling stations in heavily Latino areas to deter US citizens from exercising their right to vote. Federal laws is explicit that the president does not have the authority to deploy armed federal officials to election sites.

All of this raises various nightmare scenarios. Protesters converging on counting centres to protect the sanctity of ballots, which immediately become flashpoints. Clashes with federal agents or troops executing the Trump’s orders, which could provide the pretext for a further presidential crackdown. In these kind of showdowns, blood could easily be shed, as it was on January 6th.

Certainly American democracy faces its more dangerous stress test since Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. Back then, he was a defeated candidate with waning power who was mindful of placing himself in legal jeopardy the moment he left office. Now he is a president with stronger executive powers at his disposal following a string of emboldening Supreme Court rulings, determined to exert maximal authority to prevent the House and the Senate falling into enemy hands.

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El-Sayed enjoyed the backing of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Because of his fluency and mastery of social media, the 41-year-old has been likened to New York mayor Zohran Mamdani. He ran on a left-wing populist platform of higher taxes for the wealthy, lower drugs prices and campaign finance reform. “Money out of politics, money in your pocket,” proved a ringing slogan. That said, his winning margin - 48.5% to 47.5% - was narrower than polls predicted.

Can he win in Michigan, one of those three former “Blue Wall” Rust Belt states - the others are Pennsylvania and Wisconsin - which, since Donald Trump took it in 2016, has been so decisive in presidential politics?

Michigan is also vital for Democratic hopes of winning back control of the Senate. A Democrat, Senator Gary Peters, is retiring. If the party cannot hold onto this seat, they will find themselves again in the minority. A Republican has not won a Senate race in Michigan since 1994, the year of Newt Gingrich’s “Republican Revolution.”

The BBC’s Anthony Zurcher framed the upcoming contest neatly: “It will provide perhaps the most dramatic, high stakes test of whether a left-wing candidate can win a general election race in a true battleground state.” So it will.

Last month I wrote about the Democratic dilemma. Historically speaking, centrism has won the party the White House. Has that orthodoxy now become obsolete?

Form guides already are being compiled previewing the Democratic horse race which will began, at a canter if not a gallop, pretty much the moment the midterm congressional elections are over. They feature familiar figures such as Kamala Harris, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, California Governor Gavin Newsom, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Then there are names which some voters might have to Google, such as Maryland Governor Wes Moore, Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, California congressman Ro Khanna and Georgia Senator Jon Ossof.

Now aged 36, congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is constitutionally eligible to run. Under-35s are barred from seeking the nation’s highest office. The “natural-born citizen” requirement stipulated in the Constitution also excludes New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Harris is in the lead, with 26%, according to an average of early polling. Gavin Newsom is in second place, with 16%. These surveys, though, are often as much a test of name recognition as genuine popularity. Also it is worth remembering no California Democrat has ever won the presidency.

It is hard to see Kamala Harris being entrusted again with her party’s presidential nomination, even though she was not as far behind Donald Trump as his sweep of the seven key battleground states suggested. A shift of approximately 115,000 to 121,000 votes in the old “Blue Wall” states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan would have made her the country’s first female president.

Her campaign memoir, 107 Days - which was elegantly ghost-written by Pulitzer prize winning novelist Geraldine Brooks - gave the overriding impression that she blamed small things for her defeat. The lighting was not right for her first set-piece interview with CNN. Joe Biden needlessly distracted her ahead of the presidential debate with Donald Trump by complaining she had bad-mouthed him in Pennsylvania, the state of his birth. Running mate Tim Walz flubbed his vice-presidential debate by being hoodwinked by J.D. Vance’s faux midwestern civility.

Yet it was the big things that undid her. The failure to differentiate herself from Joe Biden and to come up with a persuasive economic narrative. Platitudes about growing up in a middle class family surrounded by hardworking neighbours sounded like the political equivalent of elevator music at a time when so many Americans faced personal recessions and preferred Donald Trump’s heavy metal soundtrack. Her abbreviated campaign came close, but oh so far. Rightly her defeat is remembered for its magnitude not its narrowness.

Harris might argue that, with more time, she could have honed an economic message. The title 107 Days - the time span between Biden’s withdrawal from the race and the election - read like a passive aggressive dig at her octogenarian boss for not donning his Aviator shades earlier and driving off into the sunset. Yet given 1007 days, she would have struggled. During her first presidential run in 2020, she suffered with the vision thing, and did not even stay in race as far as New Hampshire. Besides, America has not proven yet it is ready for a female president - although I strongly suspect it is, given 32 states have elected female governors, including Mississippi and Arkansas - let alone a Black woman of Indian ancestry.

All the prospective candidates have their strengths. Gavin Newsom has mastered the attention economy by mockingly aping Trump’s style on social media, but sometimes he comes across as too slick and polished.

Rhodes scholar Pete Buttigieg is ridiculously articulate but often gives the impression he was rehearsing perfectly-crafted soundbites and sketching out his curriculum vitae in the womb. Like '“Mayor Pete,” “AOC” is a gifted communicator, but America has never elected a thirty-something president.

But the question for Democrats is not just which political personality will emerge, but which political philosophy. Should the party’s standard-bearer be a pragmatist or a populist of the left. That is the Democratic dilemma.

History shows centrists offer the best chance of victory. Harry S. Truman in 1948, John F. Kennedy in 1960, Lyndon B. Johnson, with a landslide, in 1964, Jimmy Carter in 1976, Bill Clinton, the first since the war to secure back-to-back wins in 1992 and 1996, Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, and Joe Biden in 2020. Some readers might balk at the description of Kennedy as a centrist rather than the liberal champion of popular lore. Ahead of the 1960 election, however, progressives, such as former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, were deeply suspicious of the young Senator of Massachusetts. Not only did they suspect him of being too wet behind the ears and too much a puppet of his conservative father, but too beholden to southern Democrats, all of them segregationists. The historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., a sceptic who became a convert, even felt the need to pen a short book, Kennedy of Nixon: Does It Make Any Difference?

Likewise, Barack Obama is often mischaracterised as a crusading liberal. On numerous occasions during his 2008 campaign, though, he genuflected to Ronald Reagan to offer proof of his centrist credentials. The Black writer Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote that Obama “has pitched his presidency as a monument to moderation”.

Candidates perceived as too liberal have failed. In 1972, George McGovern, who was attacked by the Nixon campaign as the candidate of “acid, amnesty, and abortion”, won just a single state, Massachusetts. Even Mike Dukakis, the technocratic Governor of Massachusetts, was cast as “too liberal.”

But does the orthodoxy still hold that is takes a centrist to win?

One of the great hypotheticals of US politics is whether Bernie Sanders would have fared better in 2016 against Donald Trump than Hillary Clinton. Even asking that question as recently as 12 years ago would have seemed outlandish, given the Vermont Senator proudly described himself as a socialist. Yet 2016 was a year for anti-establishment insurgents, and Sanders and Trump were flip-sides of the same coin: the angry repudiation of politics as normal. In primary season, Bernie rallies had more energy than Clinton’s often lifeless affairs. On American college campuses, he had set alight a political prairie fire. On Super Tuesday, Clinton won the support of older female voters, but women under 30 broke 57%-41% in his favour. Of the three vital Rust Belts, Sanders won Michigan and Wisconsin, though he lost the bigger prize of Pennsylvania. Could a socialist have beaten the billionaire Donald Trump? In a year when so many political rules were upended, can anyone, with any certainty, truly say no?

More recently, candidates backed by Sanders in the Democratic primaries held ahead of the primaries have done well, in what Politico described as “a coast to coast show of force". His “Fighting Oligarchy Tour” with AOC has attracted packed-out crowds in red states such as Texas, Oklahoma and West Virginia.

Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the 2025 New York mayoral race was seen as so symbolic because a left-wing populist trounced arch pragmatist Andrew Cuomo, the former Governor of New York and a mainstay of the “Third Way” Clinton administration in the 1990s.

Centrism has been discredited to a large extent because of its association with the neoliberalism that propelled globalisation, and which made so many Americans feel like economic castaways. Clinton’s Third Way centrism is associated chiefly with free trade agreements and the deregulation of Wall Street which was such a factor in the 2008 financial crash. Obama’s centrism is associated with the failure to pursue through the courts those in the banking world responsible for the crash, which heightened the sense of economic injustice. These failures and policy lapses contributed to the rise of Trump.

Other Democratic victories last year, however, showed the value in running centrists in certain states - a horses for courses approach which served the party well. Then congresswoman Mikie Sherrill, a former navy aviator, won the New Jersey gubernatorial race. Abigail Spanberger, a former CIA officer, won election as Virginia’s first female Governor.

So often the race for the Democratic nomination turns into a popularity contest. Who is the most likeable candidate? Who would you like to have a beer with - although, lord knows, America could do with a designated driver behind the wheel. But in 2026 the race could turn more on governing philosophies. Does the centre lane offer the best route to the White House? Or should the party veer left?

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Two questions, asked intermittently over the years by BBC anchors in London, used to mildly grate. “Why Are Americans so obsessed by royalty?” was the first, a line of inquiry which always made me want to unleash my inner nerd. Many revolutionaries were royalists, I wanted to say - historical terrain, I know, which we have already traversed. The American Revolution was primarily targeted against parliament rather than the king. George Washington came close to being called “Your Majesty,” and ended up with more prerogatives than George III. But it is hard to compress all of that revisionism into a forty-second soundbite, so I usually answered the question by reaching for banalities, such as the absorption of the royal family into US celebrity culture and the country’s long-running love affair with homegrown dynasties, such as the Kennedys.

The other question, posed like clockwork every four years, was “why do Americans not like football?” That, manifestly, is a canard. Among children, soccer, if we must call it that, is the highest participant sport. For adults, it is the fourth most followed code after American Football, basketball and baseball. As The Economist reported last year: “America has become the biggest foreign market for the four largest European leagues.” The women’s national team, which has won four FIFA Women’s World Cups, is a powerhouse. The men’s World Cup, where the “USMNT” has come nowhere near scaling the same heights as the women, nonetheless brings to the fore hyphenated America. Italian-Americans congregate to watch the Azzurri - or, at least, they used to. Mexican-Americans cheer on “El Tri”. Likewise, German-, Dutch-, and English-Americans, among others, display their dual allegiance.

It is more a case, of course, of US networks not much liking football. Unlike gridiron, basketball and baseball, formats which lend themselves to the stop-start staccato of commercial breaks, football matches are more flowing. The much-hated hydration breaks brought in by FIFA at this World Cup are a sop to corporate America: an attempt to turn a game of two halves into a game of four quarters.

In a collective act of inverse US isolationism, the rest of the world prefers it when the United States refrains from interfering. So the creeping Americanisation of the global game has been met down the decades with resistance. Recall the outcry ahead of the 1994 World Cup, the last time the United States hosted, when some bright spark, probably on Madison Avenue, suggested the goal nets could be increased in size to encourage higher scoring games. Or remember when, in 2021, 12 of Europe’s top football clubs announced plans for a breakaway super league. The plan was for a cartel-like closed competition, where no side would ever face relegation, as was the norm in the American codes. That, though, violated the European sense of competition and fair play. Nor did it help that two of the main drivers of the league, Liverpool and Manchester United, were American-owned, and that JPMorgan Chase, the Wall Street super bank, was underwriting the deal.

On the football front, the TV character Ted Lasso, has been more to global liking: the hapless but humble coach who embraced the idiosyncrasies of Britain rather than bestriding the changing room in the manner of General Patton. Many football fans around the world also cheered on the FBI, when in 2015 it spearheaded a crackdown on corruption within FIFA.

The Americanisation of the game is one thing. Its Trumpification has brought even louder howls of protests. Consumers the world over, whether filling their tanks in Manila or buying a lettuce in Milton Keynes, were already smarting at having to pay higher fuel and food prices as a result of Trump’s fumbled Iran war. There will be heightened anger over this week’s resumption of hostilities, which has already led to a spike in oil prices. His interference this week in the World Cup - let’s call it “Operation Epic Fix” - made him, on social media, global enemy number one.

Trump, of course, browbeat FIFA chief Gianni Infantino into reversing the one-match ban on US striker Folarin Balogun, who had been sent off against Bosnia and Herzegovina. But the move boomeraged. Trump, showing his usual disregard for the rules-based international order, exposed his sporting illiteracy by not even being familiar with the basics of the world game. A Belgian team which had bickered between themselves in previous matches came together, like Marvel Avengers, to thrash the USA. In celebration of their fourth goal, the players even performed a party piece by mimicking Trump’s trademark jig.

Ahead of kick-off, it had felt that we were all Belgians now. Long before the final whistle, when it became clear the Americans had been completely outplayed, there was a collective sense of poetic justice. Not just the American team had been vanquished, but the American president.

Needless to say, the Internet, beforehand, was awash with mocking memes.

And also afterwards…..

Not even Trump, a famously sore loser who routinely cheats at golf, could fix a 4-1 defeat. Ringing up the FIFA chief and asking “Gianni I need you to find me four more goals,” would have raised too many eyebrows. So, too, presumably would be declaring victory for the United States, convening a Stop the Steal rally outside the World Cup final, and urging his militias to storm the stadium in an attempt to overturn the result. Trump was trumped.

Even before this week’s antics, a YouGov poll suggested 81% of British people have an unfavourable view of Trump. A recent poll in Australia conducted by the Lowy Institute confirmed the president’s profound unpopularity, with the lowest confidence rating of any US leader in the history of the poll. The tragedy was that the American team, as well as the president himself, became a symbol of toxic US exceptionalism. That, too, was unfair.

So it was heartening this week to read the results of a poll conducted by the London School of Economics which showed Europeans make a distinction between Trump and the American people. A survey of 2000 people in the UK, Germany, Denmark, Italy and Poland showed they still liked Americans while rejecting Trump. As its authors noted, the findings “make clear that Europeans do distinguish Trump and his administration from the American people.” Crucially, given Trump’s successful attempt to shred the FIFA rule book, the survey also found “the majority of respondents in each of the five countries thinks that Americans are a trustworthy people to varying degrees. In the UK the figure is 83%, Germany 73%, Denmark 69%, Italy 75% and Poland 75%.”

Reputationally speaking, one of the upsides of America being so chronically polarised is that the rest of the world realises it is chronically polarised. Rather than buying into the idea of the red, white and blue, we think of it instead in terms of the red and the blue - partisan colours, incidentally, which only came to be adopted at the 2000 election, when the US networks all decided to adopt the same schema.

Trump’s shock victory in 2016 was mistakenly seen as an aberration, because he succeeded in winning the Electoral College but failed, immaterially, to win the popular vote. More disturbing was his victory in 2024, partly because it came after the lawlessness of the January 6th insurrection, and partly because he became the first Republican since George W. Bush in 2004 to win a plurality.

Belatedly the idea took hold that Trump was more representative of America than many international onlookers cared to think. Still, the sharp-eyed would have noticed that he failed to win a majority of the vote, achieving a 49.8% share. Trump is also the only resident of the White House never to crack the all-important 50% threshold in Gallup approval polls, which underscores his status as a minoritarian president.

With or without Trump, America will long retain its cultural hegemony, as Taylor Swift’s marriage to Travis Kelce at Madison Square Garden last week attested by capturing so much global attention. China might be able to produce better electric cars, but has nothing to contend with the Met gala (although, admittedly, that might be a sign of its emerging pre-eminence).

For me, watching the Fourth of July fireworks explode over New York made me miss my one-time home and reminded me of why the world’s maximal city exerted such a magnetic pull in the first place. Hearing of football fans catching a baseball game between football matches has brought back happy memories of summers past. Seeing the country host a major global tournament made me recall my first visit on the eve of the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984, which became a season of American resurgence.

America can still be beautiful, it is always worth remembering, whatever is unfolding in Washington. Happily, the world, evidently, can differentiate between the two.

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On America’s 250th birthday, Donald Trump was dwarfed by history. Travelling to Mount Rushmore, and using the sculptures of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt as giant props, was a reminder of his status, historically speaking, as a presidential pygmy. Scholars of the American past routinely rank him amongst the worst occupants of the White House rather than the best. Risible is his claim to belong in the same company as “The Father of the Country,” the main penman of the Declaration of Independence or “The Great Emancipator”.

His late-night speech on the National Mall, where he used various iterations of the Stars and Stripes to tell a story of national glory, again made him look like a shilling table player. Mentions of D-Day, Iowa Jima and the “Greatest Generation”, surviving members of whom joined him on stage, brings to mind his denigration of veterans. “Losers’ and “suckers” is how he described fallen Marines during a visit to France in 2018 when he cancelled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery because of rain. Casting himself as a great warrior president recalls the bone spurs which kept him from being conscripted during the Vietnam War.

Even as a carnival barker, a role which better suits his skillset, he fell short. The Great American State Fair, the centrepiece of his highly personalised Freedom 250 celebrations, was as much a success as the Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, which he once boasted was the “eighth wonder of the world.”

The crowds were sparse. The programming was weird. Apparently, an actor playing President James Madison, the father of the Constitution, kept on apologising to the few people watching for not being Thomas Jefferson, whose appearance on stage would admittedly have been more timely. As for the mock-up of the “Arc de Trump,” it looked like it had been put together by kids in kindergarten out of papier-mâché. This property tycoon president cannot even build a half-decent Potemkin Village. On such an important anniversary, the Trump administration served up amateur hour incompetence.

Footage showing a skydiver carrying a giant American flag, first getting the colours entangled with a tree and then crashing into the stands, became instantly metaphoric. You can watch it here. Happily, he walked away with a smile on his face, presumably unaware that this slapstick moment had, globally, gone viral.

In this unfortunate moment, it seemed fitting that Lee Greenwood’s anthem “God Bless the USA” - which first plucked at the patriotic heartstrings during the Reagan era and was co-opted by Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign - was blaring out of the public address system. And later on, Greenwood himself turned up to perform the song live, as a musical prelude to Trump’s weather-delayed July 4th speech.

The president’s reliance on the 83-year-old balladeer underscored his failure to persuade American A-listers to appear with him on stage. At Joe Biden’s Inauguration, I watched Lady Gaga belt out the national anthem. Aretha Franklin and Beyoncé did the honours for Barack Obama at his inaugurals 2009 and 2013. By contrast Trump in 2017 had to make do with 16-year-old Jackie Evancho, the runner-up in the fifth season of America’s Got Talent. To be fair, Jackie did an exemplary job. I was there to hear her sing with requisite passion of the rocket’s red glare. But an Aretha or Beyoncé she was not.

Nor was Washington, my home for many years, at its finest. The Reflecting Pool on the National Mall is still green. Where the East Wing of the White House once stood is now a construction site. The South Lawn of the presidential residence has still not recovered from the cage fight Trump staged on his 80th birthday. The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, which Trump tried to rename the Kennedy/Trump Center, is now closed for two years of renovations - a shuttering forced upon the Trump administration because so many artists boycotted the capital’s main cultural hub. Hoardings still conceal the restored signage, where, in a humiliating setback for the president, workers were ordered by a federal judge to remove the letters spelling out Trump’s name.

A friend in Washington says one of the city’s fountains has been vastly improved as a result of Trump’s beautification project. For the most part, however, the nation’s capital has been vandalised. From the now paved-over Rose Garden to the Liberace-style Oval Office. From the giant flag poles in the White House grounds, which look like transplants from the forecourt of a Pontiac dealership in Fort Worth, to the Presidential Wall of Fame which has the feel of a Ripley’s Believe it or Not. L’Enfant’s Washington is being turned into Vegas on the Potomac. A capital of flagrant inelegance. A vital centre of power, like Rome in the Fifth Century, of rapid imperial decline.

Far more ugly and shambolic than the prototype of Trump’s ceremonial arch was the sight of masked white nationalists parading, like Temu stormtroopers, through the streets of the capital. The neo-fascist group Patriot Front held aloft Confederate flags and chanted “Reclaim America”. As they gathered outside Union Station on Capitol Hill, July 4th looked like a January 6th reunion. Over the weekend, Trump issued repeated warnings about the supposed “communist menace” in America. At no time, needless to say, did he condemn his white nationalist supporters.

The presence of the Patriot Front on public transport produced what some, like the UK’s Independent newspaper, considered the “defining image of America” in the age of Donald Trump. Captured by the photographer Cheney Orr, who was working for Reuters over the weekend, it showed a fretful-looking African-American surrounded by masked white supremacists.

It reminded me of Norman Rockwell era-capturing painting ‘The Problem We All Live With,” which depicted a six-year-old African-American girl running the racist gauntlet while trying in 1960 to gain entry into what was about to become a desegregated elementary school in New Orleans.

It is not just the America 250 commemorations which have had a shrinking effect on the president. The FIFA World Cup has also been diminishing. From the moment the first ball is kicked, these quadrennial tournaments take on the personalities of the players and their fans. Presidents and prime ministers tend to become peripheral. The game itself is larger than anyone, even its biggest stars such as Messi and Mbappé. That must irk - and perplex - a narcissist like Trump, especially since the tournament is being played on American soil, turf that he likes to dominate. Perhaps that it why he so far has not attended a single game. Or perhaps he is worried about being booed, as he was in his hometown after turning up at Madison Square Garden to watch the New York Knicks in the NBA finals. The beautiful game will always upstage an ugly national leader.

Trump’s only significant personal intervention in the tournament has provoked a ferocious global backlash. Following a phone call from the president to FIFA head Gianni Infantino, the governing body has reversed the suspension of the US striker Folarin Balogun, who had been ruled out of the round of sixteen match against Belgium after his sending off against Bosnia-Herzegovina. It will be the first time since the 1962 tournament that a player has been allowed to appear in a game after being suspended following a sending off.

Gianni Infantino has been an even more vigorous masseur of Trump’s ego than NATO Director General Mark Rutte. Awarding Trump a specially created FIFA peace prize has been the most craven act of sycophancy during Trump’s second term - and there are a fair few craven acts of sycophancy from which to choose. This does not simply bend the rules of world football, it eviscerates them. Infantino has become a willing accomplice for what many will see as Trump’s cheating. Historical parallels are already being drawn with Benito Mussolini’s alleged strong-arming of referees during the 1934 World Cup in Italy to ensure the hosts carried off the trophy. Buffoonish and bombastic, not to mention a natural at comic opera, Trump has often come across as an American Il Duce.

On the night the president won his second term, one of the first thoughts that came to mind was that he would now get to preside over three red letter events in the national and global calendar. The FIFA World Cup, the American semiquincentennial and the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028. Rather than being self-aggrandizing, a month of football and a weekend of fireworks have exposed the president’s excesses, shoddiness, vanity and vacuous boastfulness. Most probably the Olympics will do the same. After all, MAGA is no match for Mount Olympus.

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Has the American story ever been told in such a scintillating, or syncopated, manner as the Broadway musical Hamilton? It is hard not be inspired by this tale of immigrant success: the “bastard son of a whore” who rose to become “a hero and a scholar”, the father of the US financial system and chief architect of centralised government. How could one not be thrilled by the verbal gymnastics of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop libretto, with its hurtling retelling of America’s founding?

What a masterstroke to have George Washington sing as a duet with Hamilton, the president’s chief speechwriter, his valedictory address – although, sadly, Miranda left out the former general’s warning about the polarising effect of party politics and the risk it brought of “riot and insurrection”. What an audacious idea to cast the musical with Black actors, especially during the Obama presidency when America seemed, fleetingly and ultimately falsely, to revel in being a multi-racial democracy. The show brought together the past and present as if they were in a more perfect union, a phrase from the preamble to the constitution that Obama used as his rhetorical leitmotif.

After waiting for years to watch it, I became an instant fan. When I celebrated my 50th birthday by taking our children to see it on Broadway, I remember thinking life could not get much better.

Partly because of its association with Obama, Hamilton was criticised for being too woke. More problematic is how the musical is too Whig - the historiographical school that emphasises progress driven by enlightened thinking and scientific advancement. Hamilton glosses over slavery and the slave-holding of Founding Fathers, such as Washington and Thomas Jefferson, the pen man of the Declaration of Independence. Its hero did little to advance the abolitionist cause, and married into the Schuyler family, a major New York slaveholder.

Hamilton is also miscast as a champion of democracy. In reality, he warned of its excesses, was fearful, like other founding fathers, of the tyranny of majority and believed in the ascendancy of elites. King George III is demonised, even though Hamilton himself was an Anglophile with monarchist sympathies.

Many of America’s revolutionaries were also royalists. Their beef with the king was that he did not overrule parliament after it passed a series of punitive measures such as the Stamp Act, which enraged the colonies. The anger directed at Westminster parliamentarians partly explains why the new republic ended up with a president, George Washington, with more constitutional prerogatives and powers than the deposed monarch, George III.

Hamilton is a Broadway show. Primarily for our entertainment does it exist. As theatre, it deserves all the ecstatic reviews. Yet for a production that notes at one point how “‘history has its eyes on you”, it plays fast and loose with past. The musical trades in myths, rather than the contradictions of the American story that would have made the production even more contrapuntal. It is feel good as opposed to feel guilty history. Watching it raises that perennial question, and also a timely one as we mark the Semiquincentennial: how should the American story should be told?

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Myth-busting always helps. Christopher Columbus, who island-hopped around the Caribbean, never made land on the North American continent. Plymouth Rock was not where the pilgrim fathers first came ashore. Nor was Plymouth Plantation the first white English settlement. Jamestown in Virginia had been founded 13 years before.

Rather than focus exclusively on colonies established by the British, the influence of the Spanish and the French should receive greater acknowledgement. America’s oldest European-established, continuously occupied community is St Augustine, Florida, which was founded by the Spanish in 1565, 50 years before English settlers established Jamestown. Spain controlled Florida and New Mexico, and in 1716 formally established a new colony on the Gulf Coast, Texas. New Spain encompassed more than half of the land mass of what is now the continental United States. The main coin circulating in the British colonies was the Spanish dollar, which is where the modern-day currency gets its name. The French not only settled Louisiana, which was named after the Sun King, Louis XIV, but founded Detroit and St Louis.

The retelling of the Mayflower voyage in 1620 as an origin story has promoted the belief that American history starts at the moment of European settlement and invasion, a whitewashing of the native-American story and a denial of many millennia of heritage.

Thanksgiving has grown into a romanticised myth: a happy tale of Pilgrims cordially breaking bread with Native Americans, which has been packaged up over the years to suggest convivial coexistence between the occupied and occupiers. Some of the inaccuracies are harmless enough. Venison was served at the first meal in 1621, it is thought, not turkey and pumpkin pie. Yet it is the larger fiction that is more damaging. Thanksgiving has nourished the false idea that Native-Americans gladly greeted white European settlers and lived with them harmoniously, a comforting narrative of colonial validation.

In reality, the Pilgrim fathers asserted the dominance of the white race with murderous force. British redcoats used germ warfare against the Native Americans, by handing them blankets infected with smallpox. Their commander, Sir Jeffery Amherst, spoke of trying to use “every other method that can serve to extirpate this execrable race”. That Native Americans fought back so fiercely, and maintained a campaign of resistance for so long, suggests they should truly be regarded as America’s first revolutionaries.

A more honest recounting would tell a more nuanced story of the American revolution. What made the triumph of Washington’s ragtag army all the more remarkable was that somewhere between a fifth and a third of white colonialists remained faithful to the crown. King George III could also rely on the backing of enslaved people and Native Americans.

Misplaced, then, is the idea that independence enjoyed universal support. Frequently glossed over is the proclamation made in 1775 by Lord Dunmore, the British governor of Virginia, known as his “Offer of Emancipation”, that slaves owned by rebels in the colony would be granted freedom if they fought alongside the British Red Coats. Revisionists, like Jill Lepore, have argued it was this calculated promise of emancipation, more so than the Boston Massacre, when in 1770 British soldiers fired on a patriot mob, or the Tea Party, that stiffened the resistance of southern colonies to British rule.

The achievements of the Founding Fathers have to be weighed against their failures, which are commonly overlooked. On the positive side of the ledger, as the historian Joseph Ellis has noted, are a series of firsts: the “first successful war for colonial independence”, which led to the foundation of “the first nation-sized Republic”, which created “the first wholly secular state” and established a multi-pronged form of government and political parties engaged in peaceful debate. Yet the framers also compounded the original sin of slavery, by allowing it to continue for so long and for coming up with a democratic model intricately designed to protect the southern slave states and their racist status quo.

Race was, and continues to be, the angriest fault-line in US society and politics. To this day, enslavement and segregation cast a mammoth shadow. As the Black writer Ta-Nehisi Coates has put it: “For African Americans, unfreedom is the historical norm.”

As for the idea that America was a great experiment in mass democracy, it is one of the country’s most misleading myths. As I have already written at History Never Ended:

American democracy is in such a sickly state partly because for most of the country’s 250-year history it has never been that healthy. Nowhere is the word “democracy” to be found either in the Declaration of Independence or the US Constitution. The right to vote was never enshrined in the original Constitution, an omission which continues to astound many Americans. Likewise, the Bill of Rights, the bundle of ten amendments designed to rectify the shortcomings of the original text, says nothing about voting.

To this day, the constitution includes no positive affirmation of the right to vote. The 15th Amendment, ratified after the Civil War, frames it only in a negative manner: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude.” Not without justification, voting has been described as the missing right.

While we are on the subject of the constitution, it is also worth repeating that the Supreme Court was never meant to be supreme. The Founding Fathers would have been shocked at its modern-day sway, because they envisioned a comparatively limited role for the federal bench. “The judiciary is beyond comparison the weakest of the three departments of power,” wrote Hamilton in Federalist No. 78, since it would not wield any influence “over either the sword or the purse”. In a footnote, he underscored its relative powerlessness: “The judiciary is next to nothing”. An irony is that the conservative justices wielding such enormous power cast themselves as constitutional originalists. But originalism falls at the first historical hurdle: the belief of the Founding Fathers that judges would play a peripheral role.

The modern-day Supreme Court, with its hyper-conservative majority, has set itself up as an arbiter of history without understanding it, or at least interpreting it fairly. Take gun rights. The focus of the Second Amendment was “well-regulated militias,” the groups of armed citizens raised from the civilian population who in pre-revolutionary America had protected their colonies and communities. It did not concern the firearms they would bear. In its 2008 Heller ruling, however, the Supreme Court judged that the Second Amendment protected individual gun ownership, a decision which overturned more than 200 years of US jurisprudence. As former chief justice Warren Burger, a conservative judge elevated to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon, once put it: “The gun lobby’s interpretation of the Second Amendment is one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American people by special interest groups that I have seen in my lifetime”.

Though America is an immigrant nation, nativism has been an ever-present. As early as 1790, Congress passed the Naturalisation Act, which stipulated that only free whites of “good moral character” who had lived in America for at least two years could become citizens. By the 1850s, the Know Nothing party – or the Native American Party, as it was originally known – had become a third force in politics by capitalising on Protestant disquiet about the influx of Irish and German Catholics. In the 1870s, the “Yellow Peril” scare led to the enactment of legislation limiting the number of Asian immigrants. The 1924 Immigration Act, which was passed amid a panic over the danger posed to America by European radicalism, introduced quotas based on national origin that favoured northern and western Europeans over those from the south and east.

Only in 1965, the year America became a truly multiethnic democracy, did the US government embrace the concept of a multiethnic immigration policy. As with the landmark acts of the civil rights era, the architect was Lyndon Johnson, who ended racial quotas by signing the Immigration and Nationality Act in a ceremony conducted with the Statue of Liberty as an apposite backdrop.

The myth of the melting pot, founded on immigrants first being welcomed and then speedily assimilated, does not withstand scrutiny.Always it is worth remembering how many new immigrants returned home, rather than making their homes in America: of how a mass influx was followed by a mass exodus. Of the 55 million Eastern Europeans who migrated to America between 1846 and 1940, the historian Tara Zahra estimates that between 30 and 40 per cent returned home, after becoming disillusioned with life in America or feeling homesick – what she calls “the Great Departure”.

If we are to persist with a “great man” view of the past, with its focus on the likes of Washington and Abraham Lincoln, it needs to run in tandem with the “great women” view - what is sometimes called the missing half of American history. Most high schoolers graduate with an understanding of what happened at Seneca Falls in 1848, the year that marked the launch of the women’s rights movement, but it pales alongside other milestones. Doubtless they have heard of Rosa Parks, but not perhaps the names of Virginia Durr, a driving force behind the abolition of the poll tax, or the freedom rider Diane Nash, who was just as brave as John Lewis. A study by the National Women’s History Museum found that less than a quarter of the historical figures taught in schools are women.

Another way of diluting the great man theory of history would be to promote the great movement theory. It would emphasis the struggle for black equality, the feminist revolution, and other social and scientific missions, such as the moonshot. That, for many, is where American greatness is the easiest to locate.

Placing a new emphasis on communitarianism, as opposed to individualism, would help give a more complete picture. When in the 1930s, for example, the historian James Truslow Adams coined the term the “American Dream,” he intended it to describe a new national credo which rejected the materialism of the Gilded Age, and the greed of the super-wealthy robber barons. Rather than centring it on individual advancement, its modern-day meaning, Adams was trying to promulgate a more egalitarian ethos: the “dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone”.

“Rugged interdependence” provides a more helpful frame, according to former US diplomat Anne-Marie Slaughter, than thinking in terms of “rugged individualism”, the term coined by Herbert Hoover to describe the creed of self-reliance and independence from an overbearing government. After immersing herself in the stories of the wives who accompanied their husbands on the wagon trains heading west, she was struck by how they came to rely on other families who joined them on the journey and who helped them form settlements at the end. So a story that had once been told through the looking glass of individualism actually had a strong collective bent.

The positive role of government often gets lost in the American story. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, which saw the biggest expansion of the federal government in the country’s history, salvaged America after the Great Depression and helped lift millions out of poverty through public works programmes. President Dwight D. Eisenhower pushed for the construction of the interstate highway system. “The Southwestern states could never have been settled at their present human density without immense expenditure of government funds on water engineering,” the cultural commentator Robert Hughes once wrote. “They are less the John Wayne than the Welfare Queen of American development”.

America’s historiographical isolationism is unhelpful because it downplays how other countries have shaped its history. The Haitian slave revolt that started in 1791, for instance, had a dramatic impact on American thinking. Amongst southern slaveholders, it heightened the sense of paranoia that the same fate could befall them. It also opened the door on the Louisiana Purchase, since Napoleon no longer viewed his continental landholding as so useful after losing control of one of his prized Caribbean colonial assets.

Whatever the frame, complexity is the key to unlocking the past, for it is the very contradictions of the American story that help us make more sense of it. Too often we are asked to make a binary choice between the good and the bad; the “better angels” described by Lincoln and the villains in the piece. By way of remedy, the Harvard scholar Jill Lepore, the author of the widely acclaimed 2018 overview, These Truths: A History of the United States, has spoken of the need for a “both/and” version of history.

David W. Blight, another historian I greatly admire, put it well when he noted: “We need to teach the history of slavery and racism every day, but not through a forest of white guilt, or by thrusting the idea of ‘white privilege’ onto working class people who have had very little privilege.” Though the fashion has been for cancellation, the aim of history should be contextualisation. “Washington can’t be cancelled”, wrote his biographer Alexis Coe on President’s Day in 2022. “If you erase Washington, you erase America”.

Historically speaking, it is entirely fitting that on its 250th birthday America is in such a state of internal conflict. It was ever thus. At the constitutional convention in Philadelphia, the continuation of slavery became the price of national unity. After the Civil War, and the end of the period of Reconstruction, segregation became the price of national unity. To gain consent for the wording of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, a slaveholder himself, had to drop language describing slavery as an “execrable commerce” an “assemblage of horrors”, and a “cruel war against human nature itself”. The country’s founding statement was itself a document of contention and compromise.

America has been good to me and my family. The country occupies a special place in my affections. Thankfully, I have spent much of my adult in the States, and got to live a personal version of the “American Dream” in getting to cover the country as a correspondent for the BBC. But sentimentalism has always warped how we interpret the past. As we mark the 250th birthday of the United States of America, we should always remember that disunion is the country’s default.

“Historic” may well be the most over-used word in journalism. Up there with “iconic” and “unprecedented”. Recent times, though, have brought a deluge of history. Donald Trump’s war of choice in Iran has been described, not unfairly, as one of the biggest strategic blunders in more than 200 years of US foreign policy. The Makerfield by-election, which turned Andy Burnham, a municipal mayor, into the prime-minister-in-waiting, was dubbed the most important ever in British political history. The technological shift wrought by generative artificial intelligence is bracketed with the Industrial Revolution and even the discovery of fire.

A season of anniversaries and commemorations has added to the sense of historical overload. The American Semiquincentennial, marking 250 years since the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. The 10th anniversary of the Brexit referendum. The opening of the Obama presidential library in Chicago which, for a five-minute window in the news cycle, presented an opportunity to reflect on his contribution as the first African-American president (racially, his victory in 2008 was more significant than the eight years which followed). Why, Donald Trump, in France for the G7 summit, even added his Sharpie signature to the Memorandum of Understanding with Iran in the Palace of Versailles, the setting for the disastrous peace treaty negotiated at the end of World War I.

Nor is this history glut a singularly 2026 phenomenon. We are living in the “Tumultuous Twenties” - or the “Terrible Twenties,” as I would call them. The COVID pandemic. The January 6th insurrection. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The Hamas terrorist attack on Israel on October 7th, 2023, and the Netanyahu government’s brutal response. The Trump restoration, and all that has flowed from it, including the greening of the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall. Historians, when using words such as '“era” and “epoch”, can often lapse into an academic version of overdiagnosis and overprescription. Bestowing personalities on decades - the roaring Twenties, the swinging Sixties, etc - is itself a symptom. But the 2020s have been unusually momentous and unusually grim. And we haven’t even mentioned global warming. As the NASA website put it, on a page which has not yet been purged by the MAGA censors: “While Earth’s climate has changed throughout its history, the current warming is happening at a rate not seen in the past 10,000 years.”

So why this history glut? Why are we living through such epic times?

The “Great man” theory of history, popularised by the Nineteenth Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle, offers a partial explanation. Five of the world’s most consequential countries are headed by figures who see themselves as men of destiny. Donald Trump believes he occupies the same pedestal as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, albeit with larger global ambitions. A headline from the bestselling new book, Regime Change, came from the president proudly showing authors Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, a document positing he was more powerful than Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler. No matter that the “Presidential historian” who prepared this dossier turned out to be a Scottish businessman and longtime golf caddy for Gary Player.

Vladimir Putin regards himself as a modern-day Peter the Great. Xi Jinping places himself on a par with Mao Zedong. Like Trump, the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a narcissist who mythologises his own life, viewing it through a biblical lens. Narendra Modi, India’s Hindu nationalist prime minister, casts himself as epochal - like some figure out of the Ramayana. If Türkiye was marginally more consequential, its domineering president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan would make that list. Only in Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, does he eye a historical equal.

In focussing on the big man theory of history, often we miss the big tech theory of history. The printing press in the 15th century. The steam engine and electricity in the 19th century. The transistor and microprocessor in the post-war years. The Internet at the turn of the century, and now the AI revolution. Two of those transformative shifts have come in the space of just thirty years, a disruptive period of rapid and unending change.

In figures such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, big man history meets big tech history. All see themselves as world-, even universe-altering, figures. None more so than Elon Musk, with his beliefs in transhumanism, the colonisation of the moon and Mars, not to mention his extreme politics which he frames in civilisational terms. Sam Altman unabashedly likens himself to Robert Oppenheimer, the architect of the atomic bomb. It is no coincidence, according to Altman, that the two men share a birthdate, April 22. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has shifted from e-commerce pioneer to defender of democracy to galactic visionary.

Tech bro one-upmanship, a tedious contest of bristling egos, has become an important driver of rapid change and thus hurtling history. So, too, this marriage of convenience and commercial calculation between MAGA’s hyper-nationalism and Silicon Valley’s hyper-libertarianism.

History begets more history. The election of America’s first Black president produced a white backlash, which came in the form of Donald Trump, the untitled leader of the Birther Movement. Obama himself rose to power off the back of the Great Recession which began in 2008, and the disastrous Iraq war, initiated by his predecessor George W. Bush. Trump was also a beneficiary of the nativism that came to the fore after the attacks of September 11th and the loss of faith in the American dream which followed the financial crash. If anything, the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 had a greater bearing on US domestic politics than the destruction of the Twin Towers in September 2001.

The war in Syria, which began in the Arab Spring of 2011 and ended in December 2024, produced a refugee crisis which fuelled far right populist parties in Europe, such as the AfD in Germany and Front National in France, and contributed to the Leave vote in the Brexit referendum. Starting with 911 in 2001, a spate of Islamist terrorist attacks over the course of the century heightened fears about immigration, and enlarged the clash of civilisations narratives exploited by populists such as Trump, Marine Le Pen, Nigel Farage, Alice Weidel, Geert Wilders and, after Bondi, Pauline Hanson.

Globalisation has produced closer mercantile, and therefore historical, interconnectedness. The closure of a narrow waterway in the Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz, caused economic disruption the world over. China’s decision last year to limit the export of rare earth minerals, the 17 minerals so vital for the manufacture of everyday electronics, led to a great power reset favouring Beijing over Washington. Supply chains now double as historical threads.

A glut of unresolved history, much of it related to decades and sometimes even centuries of post-colonialism, is at the heart of so many internal and international tensions. The legacy of partition on the subcontinent, which still sours relations between nuclear rivals India and Pakistan. Ongoing arguments over the 1917 Balfour Declaration, in which the British government supported “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. Britain’s post-imperial decline, which provided the subtext for the Brexit debate. In Australia, the 2023 Voice referendum centred on the place of the original custodians of the land in modern-day public life and unfinished issues from the past.

In the United States, Americans are still at loggerheads over questions never adequately resolved following independence from Britain. Race relations, what Bill Clinton called America’s “constant curse”. How power should be apportioned between the three branches of government. How power should be divided between Washington and the states, that old Hamiltonian/Jeffersonian rift. Even the rules of the democracy.

The past animates present-day politics in the form of nostalgic nationalism. “‘Make America Great Again’ is a four-word argument about American history,” as the historian Jill Lepore put it in New Yorker earlier this year. At the heart of most populist movements is a call to turn back the clock, and to revive past greatness.

“History is an argument without end,” the Dutch scholar Pieter Geyl has argued. What a statement of algorithmic allure for social media giants whose business models rely on stoking round-the-clock disunion, and for populist politicians seeking new battlefields in the culture wars. What a fitting aphorism for a moment in time when history refuses to give us a break.

Monthly marginalia

Here are a few things that caught my eye in June……

TV Recommendation - Hacks

So completely does the actress Jean Smart occupy the character of a legendary Las Vegas stand-up comedian in Hacks that I found myself Googling whether “Deborah Vance” was playing herself. Admittedly, I’m late to this show. The first of five seasons aired in 2021, although its finale was broadcast in May. The backlist made my June binge all the more enjoyable. Hacks is the story of how Vance hires a whip-smart twenty-something scriptwriter Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder) to freshen up her past-the-sell-by-date act, and how a mismatch of a relationship goes from mutual misunderstanding, and mutual loathing, to something akin to a mother-daughter bond. The repartee made me laugh out loud. I also loved its dream factory optimism and reminder that America is not only the land of second chances, but often a third, fourth and fifth crack at success. To hilarious effect, it upends the old adage “what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” - we get to see pretty much everything. The action also unfolds at Television City in Los Angeles, Madison Square Garden, Central Park and, poignantly towards the end, at the Louvre and other Parisian locations. It’s also a wonderful ensemble piece, with various celebrity cameos from Vegas legends such as Wayne Newton, and a collage of mismatched characters.

Spoiler alert. Vance’s agonised decision after landing her dream job as the first female presenter of a late-night show foreshadowed Stephen Colbert’s recent departure from CBS, and the scourge of corporate censorship. There are societal echoes in the generational tensions between a Boomer and a millennial, which provide the running gag. Because of the subtleness of the acting, the cleverness of the plotting and the pin-point precision of the scripting, the punchlines are never clichéd or predictable. I laughed, I cried, I remembered why I fell in love with America in the first place.

Film of the month - Mr Nobody Against Putin

Again, I was late to this Oscar-winning documentary, but the story of how a small-town teacher, Pavel Talankin, rebels against Vladimir Putin’s propaganda machine, his digital camera usually in record mode throughout, should be required viewing in western classrooms. Rather like George Orwell’s 1984 or Animal Farm, it cautions the young - and old - about the mind control of totalitarianism, especially at times of war. Putin has his bot farms. But it would be heartening, if naive, to think they have met their match in brave Pavel Talankin, the self-effacing hero of his story.

Book recommendations

As many of you know, I have been suggesting a US history book a day throughout much of June to mark the Semiquincentennial. In all, there will be 25 books that cover the 250 years. It is by no means an exhaustive list. Some of my favourite titles, such as E.J. Dionne’s masterly Why Americans Hate Politics (1991), did not even make the cut. I’ve always loved this book, partly because it charts, among other things, how Americans who were anti-government hippies in the Sixties became anti-government Reagan supporters in the 1980s; partly because it was based on a doctoral thesis written in the same student hall of residence where I completed my own doctoral thesis on US history; and partly because of the touching acknowledgement Dionne penned at the end. In it, he thanked “the folks who laid plans for the Washington D.C. Metro system and decided to locate a stop at Woodley Park, which is where I met Mary Boyle [his wife] one Easter Sunday afternoon. Never has anyone owed more than I do to an agency of government.”

There are 20 books on the list so far, with five more to come before July 4th. I’d love to hear what you think they should be. Here’s where we stand at the moment……

History Never Ended news

History Never Ended launched its own podcast this month. A soft launch, as they say, with more to come. The first episode was with Ed Coper, the author of the excellent new book, Angertainment: How Social Media Rage Ruined Everything. Ed is great on the scourge of misinformation and how best to combat it.

I also spoke to the former BBC political correspondent, Terry Stiastny, on the turmoil in UK politics, which you can listen to here. Soon, the country will have had five prime ministers in as many years and seven in the past ten. Westminster is being called “Rome on the Thames,” although it reminds me of Canberra when the prime ministerial churn made the Australian capital the coup capital of the democratic world.

History Never Ended got a welcome shout-out from the media editor in The Guardian, Michael Savage, in a piece about the drama addiction of political reporters in Westminster. ABC News covered my piece asking why White House reporters fail to defend fellow White House reporters attacked by Trump. The most widely read piece of the month was on fight night at the White House, “The Apotheosis of Donald Trump."

I’m trying hard to hold off on the paywalls for History Never Ended. If any of you who are regular readers could become paid subscribers, that would help enormously. And heartfelt thanks to those who have done that already. I have an aversion to asking people for money. But writing is my primary form of income, and this now is the primary home my writing.

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And finally…….

Larry the Cat, with his feline sense of history, had a pretty good take on the comings and goings at Downing Street……

All these questions I put to Terry Stiastny, a former BBC political correspondent, and a regular political commentator on Times Radio and Monocle Radio. She’s the author of two cracking novels, the award-winning Acts of Omission and Conflicts of Interest. More recently she brought out Believable Lies: The Misfits Who Fought Churchill’s Secret Propaganda War. Slow Horses meets World War II.

Full disclosure. Terry is also a dear friend. We joined the BBC as trainees on the same day. We were part of a cohort of BBC News Trainees who started our careers in the early 1990s when history was supposed to have ended.

I wrote about Sir Keir Starmer’s premature departure from Downing Street here, and what it tells us about modern-day politics more broadly…..

In my conversation with Terry, I also reference a piece I wrote early on in History Never Ended about the drama addiction of Westminster reporters…..

Thanks, as ever, for subscribing to History Never Ended. This is now the primary home of my writing, and writing is the primary source of my income, so if more of you would consider becoming paid subscribers that would be awesome. Or if you are a follower, perhaps you could become a subscriber. Thanks to those who have already supported my work.

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British prime ministers have become the voodoo dolls of democratic politics. Angry about immigration? Poke a needle into Sir Keir Starmer’s torso. Disappointed with the outcome of Brexit? Wound him in the thigh. Irked by yet another reset speech replete with slogans that sound like AI slop? Drive a stake through his heart.

A prime minister who in 2024 won such a gargantuan landslide, and looked like a leader who might one day have the word “era” affixed to his name, has not even made it two years into a five-year term before announcing his decision to quit. Come the autumn, 10 Downing Street will have had five different residents in as many years, and seven since the Brexit referendum a decade ago this week. So what does “Stexit”, and the conga-line of other prime ministers ejected from office, tell us about the nature of democratic politics, not just in Britain but the world over?

Clearly, Sir Keir “No drama” Starmer did not meet the vaudevillian requirements of modern-day political theatre. Too often his speeches were delivered with the plodding monotony of a platform announcer at Swindon station on a drizzly late winter afternoon. Absent from his rhetorical repertoire was the ability to neatly encapsulate complex issues in pithy slogans and soundbites. Put another way, this former barrister was not very good at dumbed down politics. Nor, though, did he offer much in the way of the philosophical, cerebral or even joined up thinking.

That indeterminacy pointed to a larger problem: what exactly was Starmerism about? What was the overriding project, beyond making the Labour party more electable than it had been under Jeremy Corbyn, a mission he accomplished at the 2024 general election with thundering success, albeit with a meagre share of the national vote. Where was the story?

Charisma-less politicians who lack main character energy - like Starmer and Theresa May before him - are struggling to “cut through.” Prime Ministers and presidents who in previous times you could have on in the background tend now to struggle at a time when round-the-clock news cycles require foreground omnipresence. Perhaps a new slogan should be posted on the war room at Downing Street. It’s the attention economy, stupid. That, alas, is a rule of politics in the age of X, Insta, TikTok and Facebook, not to mention the incessant “live page” coverage on news websites which makes politics a permanent and ceaseless campaign.

Confessedly, I still find it hard to comprehend why such a benign and unthreatening figure as Starmer became so hated and reviled. Fundamentally, he seems decent and well-meaning, as the tears shed when talking during his resignation statement of his wife and children underscored. Yet opposing fans at football matches joined in unison to sing “Keir Starmer’s a wanker,” and he became the target of unusually hostile personal animus. The BBC’s brilliant political correspondent Rob Watson told me over the weekend about vox popping a seemingly mild-mannered middle-aged women in south Wales who vented “Keir Starmer ought to be shot.” For her, it seemed out of character. For Britain, it seemed out of character.

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Only a few years ago, after Labour had conducted its Corbyn experiment and Boris Johnson was pinballing through Whitehall, his steady-state emotion and prefect-like persona were strong selling points. But he was a poor communicator partly because he was a passionless communicator. Voters seemingly want what that woman in south Wales might call more hwyl, a Welsh word meaning energy, gusto and emotional intensity.

Competent managerialism no longer cuts it. Incompetent managerialism, as Starmer found out when he overrode normal Whitehall procedures to appoint Peter Mandelson as UK ambassador in Washington, is terminal. Both on style and substance, Starmer fell short.

Sir Keir is but the latest character to be killed off in the long-running Brexit melodrama. It is fitting that he announced his departure on the eve of the referendum’s 10th anniversary, and almost ten years to the day since David Cameron’s resignation started the prime ministerial churn. The hangover from that momentous vote lasts to this day. Leaving the European Union has cursed every prime minister since.

Small wonder. It was a collective act of national self-harm. Divorce from Britain’s biggest trading partner has reduced the size of the UK economy by somewhere between 2.5% and 8%. Business investment is down 12%. Trade friction with the EU is estimated to have contributed to a 3%-4% drop in productivity. A broken economy leads to a broken politics. How do you deliver good public services, and meet sometimes unreasonably high voter expectations, when the country’s finances continue to suffer from the Brexit drag.

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And leaving the European Union, remember, was the second hammer blow of a double whammy. The UK had never fully recovered from the Great Recession of 2008, the economic crisis which fuelled the populist wave, and especially the rise of Donald Trump. Working class Britons especially, like blue-collar voters in the Rust Belt, felt like economic castaways in a globalised economy that didn’t make much sense. Working hard, and playing by the rules, no longer guaranteed economic self- or family advancement.

The EU referendum result, which was driven so much by anxieties about immigration and border control, also produced “the Brexit paradox.” Leaving the EU led to more migration. Faced with severe skills shortages in healthcare and agriculture especially, Boris Johnson in 2021 relaxed restrictions on non-EU arrivals. The so-called “Boriswave” resulted in a surge of immigrants from India, Pakistan and Nigeria, among other countries. Unauthorised English Channel boat crossings also got worse. The UK was no longer party to the Dublin Regulation, which meant it could not return asylum seekers to the first safe EU country they entered. At times of economic uncertainty, immigrants always make for an easy scapegoat, especially for opportunistic populists and the billionaires who often back them.

Brexit was the start of a political recession in Britain which is in danger of becoming a political depression. The supreme irony of Westminster politics is that a main architect of Brexit, Nigel Farage, has been the main beneficiary of the failures of Brexit: the break it has exerted on the economy and the spike it has caused in non-EU migration.

Throw in an excitable Westminster press pack in the grip of drama addiction and media organisations who have a commercial interest in political instability because of the traffic it brings to websites. Add to the toxic brew overseas agitators such as the trillionaire Elon Musk who have wilfully exacerbated racial tensions, and social media platforms which profit from spreading misinformation and mistrust with their algorithms of hate. No wonder the political culture has become so mean, nasty and unserious.

Now we are witnessing what is fast becoming a British political rite. Thoughts and prayers for the tearful loser. Analysis that ponders, if only he had shown that kind of human side before. Please. It is so disingenuous. Have we reached the point when we can only empathise with politicians once they have been hounded out of office and secreted tears?

What was particularly striking about Starmer’s brief tenure was how a beneficiary of anti-incumbency instantly became its victim. Just as strong as anti-establishment feeling is anti-incumbency sentiment. Not since Tony Blair’s third victory in 2005 has a British prime minister won back-to-back outright victories.

Maybe political longevity is a thing of the past. In the United States, after three successive two-term presidencies, we will have three successive one-term presidencies from opposing parties. That has not happened since the 19th century. Trump, having convincingly won re-election, is now suffering from historically low approval ratings. Australia has had eight different prime ministerships in less than twenty years. Canberra used to be the coup capital of the democratic world. Now that epithet belongs to Westminster.

What role Starmer’s cautious centrism, his promise of safe change, played in his demise is a question for another day. Suffice to say the attention-grabbing politicians in US progressive politics are left-wing populists. New York mayor Zohran Mamdani, the New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders at the ripe old age of 84.

Andy Burnham, the “King of the North” and prime minister-in-waiting, has positioned himself as an insurgent, and will present himself as both more radical, passionate and down-to-earth than Starmer. His thumping victory over Reform UK in the Makerfield by-election and his symbolic journey south gives him, for now, the aura of a conquering hero. The 56-year-old is more of a flair player than the prime minister he has effectively deposed (although as a contemporary of his at university, I can tell you that he was not a star football striker, as is mistakenly being reported). But how long will he occupy the honeymoon suite of UK politics. In post-Brexit Britain, does such a chamber even exist? Will Prime Minister Andy Burnham become the next voodoo doll?

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