'Nick Bryant is brilliant. He has a way of showing you what you've been missing from the whole
story whilst never leaving you feeling stupid.' - Emily Maitlis 'Bryant is a genuine rarity a
Brit who understands America' - Washington Post In When America Stopped Being Great veteran
reporter and BBC New York correspondent Nick Bryant reveals how America's decline paved the way
for Donald Trump's rise sowing division and leaving the country vulnerable to its greatest
challenge of the modern era. Deftly sifting through almost four decades of American history
from post-Cold War optimism through the scandal-wracked nineties and into the new millennium
Bryant unpacks the mistakes of past administrations from Ronald Reagan's 'celebrity
presidency' to Barack Obama's failure to adequately address income and racial inequality. He
explains how the historical clues unseen by many (including the media) paved the way for an
outsider to take power and a country to slide towards disaster. As Bryant writes 'rather than
being an aberration Trump's presidency marked the culmination of so much of what had been
going wrong in the United States for decades - economically racially politically culturally
technologically and constitutionally.' A personal elegy for an America lost unafraid to
criticise actors on both sides of the political divide When America Stopped Being Great takes
the long view combining engaging storytelling with recent history to show how the country
moved from the optimism of Reagan's 'Morning in America' to the darkness of Trump's 'American
Carnage'. It concludes with some of the most dramatic events in recent memory in an America
torn apart by a bitterly polarised election racial division the national catastrophe of the
coronavirus and the threat to US democracy evidenced by the storming of Capitol Hill.
