If Only They Didn’t Speak English: Notes From Trump’s America

230 Pages·2017·1.9 MB·English

by  Jon Sopel

Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Title Page
Dedication
Foreword
Introduction
1 Anger
2 Race
3 Patriotism
4 Government
5 God
6 Guns
7 Anxiety
8 Special
9 Truth
Index
Copyright
About the Book
As the BBC’s North America Editor, Jon Sopel has had a pretty busy time of it
lately. In the 18 months it’s taken for a reality star to go from laughingstock to
leader of the free world, Jon has travelled the length and breadth of the United
States, experiencing it from a perspective that most of us could only dream of:
he has flown aboard Air Force One, interviewed President Obama and has even
been described as ‘a beauty’ by none other than Donald Trump.
Through music, film, literature, TV and even through the food we eat and the
clothes that we wear, we all have a highly developed sense of what America is
and through our shared, tangled history we claim a special relationship. But
America today feels about as alien a country as you could imagine. It is fearful,
angry and impatient for change. Reflecting on his journey across the continent to
cover the most turbulent race in recent history, Jon Sopel lifts a lid on the
seething resentments, profound anxieties and sheer rage that found its
embodiment in a brash, unpredictable and seemingly unstoppable figure.
In this fascinating, insightful portrait of American life and politics, Jon Sopel
sets out to answer our questions about a country that once stood for the grandest
of dreams but which is now mired in a storm of political extremism, racial
division and increasingly perverse beliefs.
About the Author
Jon Sopel has been the BBC’s North America Editor since 2014. As a BBC
presenter of 16 years, Jon has worked variously as the corporation’s Paris
Correspondent, Chief Political Correspondent, hosted both The Politics Show
and Newsnight and is a regular on HARDtalk, as well as a number of Radio 4
programmes. As North America Editor, Jon has covered the 2016 election and
the Trump presidency at first hand, reporting for the BBC across TV, radio, and
online. He has travelled extensively across the US and recently rode a Harley
Davidson down the West Coast (that wasn’t for work though). He lives in
Washington and London.

To Linda – who’s shared this wonderful American
adventure (and Alfie, the miniature German Schnauzer
who came along too).
And to Max and Anna, our gorgeous grown-up children
who were left behind in London.
Foreword
Some books are the result of a blinding flash of inspiration; others have the
gestation period of an elephant. This book – and how in tune with the 2016
madness and Donald Trump zeitgeist is this? – is the product of a tweet.
I had been on BBC Radio 2 with Simon Mayo, talking about some aspect of
the presidential election campaign, when I received a tweet from a man
purporting to be a literary agent. He said he’d like to talk to me as it seemed I
could tell a story. Unusually, for Twitter, he turned out to be who he said he was.
So I spoke to this charming and clever man, Rory Scarfe, and he suggested I
scribble a few hundred words of what I would like to write about. This I thought
would be enough to secure a big, fat literary contract. But no, he now wanted
15,000 words to show to publishers. And I thought, well that is simply not going
to happen. Too busy with a presidential election to cover.
And this is where my wife, Linda, intervened. We were about to go to
Barbados with our kids, who live and work in London, and assorted friends. I am
not the best person at lying around on a sun lounger and, it is said, I can be
annoying to others who are happy to do nothing but read books, listen to their
music and soak up the sun. So I was told in no uncertain terms that instead of
irritating everyone I should start work on the book. And each morning in this
little piece of paradise, in the aptly named villa ‘Eden’ at Sugar Hill, I would sit
in the gazebo and write. I also spent a good deal of last summer in the
Hampshire garden of my oldest friend, Pete Morgan, trying to make progress.
Linda has also been a source of brilliant ideas about how the book could be
improved; what should be included and what left out.
That was the start. For getting it finished, and getting a whole bunch of half-
formed ideas into a vaguely cogent shape, I need to thank a number of people.
Most of all my editor, Yvonne Jacob at BBC Books, who has been a source of
endless enthusiasm and encouragement, my brilliant colleague and friend from
New York, Nick Bryant, who read the manuscript and offered really perceptive
observations. BBC bosses get a bad rap, but I want to thank them for being so
supportive in this endeavour – particularly Paul Danahar, the bureau chief in
Washington, who would, on the rare quiet days, let me slip away to write. He
was the person who, when we were discussing some extraordinary aspect of the
campaign and the problem of explaining the craziness – and foreignness – of it
to our British audience, said, ‘If only they didn’t speak English.’ I thought to
myself now that would one day make a great book title. Malcolm Balen in
London tried to keep me ‘free, fair and impartial’ with what I have written. And
then there’s the team. My cameramen, John Landy and Ian Druce, and producers
Lynsea Garrison, Sarah Svoboda and Rozalia Hristova, who’ve been the ‘band
of brothers’ (and sisters), and shared so many of the experiences that have
formed the backbone of these succeeding chapters, deserve a huge thank you
too. Without Jonathan Csapo to sort, fix and manage in the bureau I am not sure
I would be able to function.
And of course this book is only possible because of all the people in all the
places we’ve met and interviewed along the way.
Without this becoming like an Oscars speech, where the music wells up to
drown out the person spending far too much time gushing at the microphone, I
want to say one other thank you. The family across the street from us in
Washington are the Powells – I mention them in the book. When we arrived they
could not have been more welcoming to us. And they were a constant source of
insight and stories – invariably over a negroni or two. As I was finishing the
book, Elizabeth, at the age of 39, was diagnosed with – and died two months
later from – a rare and aggressive form of lung cancer. As a family they are all
that I love about America – positive, optimistic, kind, decent. So this is to Jeff
and his two beautiful children, Eleanor and Charlie; and in memory of an
exceptional woman.
Jon Sopel, July 2017
Washington DC
Introduction
We’re going to play a game. I’m going to say a name and I want you to write
down what comes to mind. OK. Let’s start: New York. I reckon you’re going to
put skyscrapers, shopping, the Empire State Building, steam rising out of vents,
cycling in Central Park, yellow taxis. Broadway. Bustle. Trump Tower – yup, I
guess we can’t ignore that any more. The soaring clarinet at the opening of
Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’, Sinatra belting out ‘New York, New York’ or
Jay Z’s ‘concrete jungle where dreams are made of …’ in ‘Empire State of
Mind’. Or that scene when Harry met Sally in a diner, and any number of
Woody Allen films – in fact his whole oeuvre. Midnight Cowboy, King Kong,
Fame – and on and on and on.
And if I were to say LA, I bet you’d write tall palm trees, Sunset Boulevard,
soft-top cars, ripped men on Muscle Beach, silicone-enhanced film stars in
Beverly Hills, rollerbladers in Santa Monica, the Hollywood sign. And Miami?
Steamy hot, Art Deco buildings, old Cuban men playing dominos, water,
powerboats, wide beaches. Or the Grand Canyon? Las Vegas? San Francisco?
Yellowstone? Chicago? Nashville?
Through music, literature, film and TV, and even through the food we eat and
the clothes that we wear, we all have a highly developed sense of what America
is; through our own visits we feel we know the country; and through our shared,
tangled history we claim a special relationship.
But America in the election year of 2016 – and its extraordinary aftermath –
felt about as foreign a country as you could imagine. It was fearful, angry and
impatient for change. Journeying across the continent to cover the most turbulent
race in recent history lifted a lid on seething resentments and profound anxieties.
And most of that rage would find its embodiment in one unlikely person, who
was brash, unpredictable – and, in the end, unstoppable.
And in my 30-plus years of being a journalist, I had never covered an election
like it, nor witnessed anything like its bitter aftermath. The new president,
having scaled the mountain-top, was not enjoying the view – he still had enemies
to slay: Republicans who questioned him, the intelligence services, Democrats
whom he had put to the sword. Even America’s favourite actress, Meryl Streep,
got a kicking for daring to question whether the new president was being
divisive. He raged at suggestions that his inauguration had fewer people
attending than Barack Obama’s. He claimed that five million Americans had
voted illegally for Hillary Clinton. And he went after the media with a rare
ferocity and contempt.
I would even sample a little taste of it myself. There had never been anything
like President Trump’s first proper news conference in the East Room of the
White House (and if the walls could speak, I suspect they’d have nodded sagely
and said, ‘You’re right, we never have seen anything like it’). He lashed out at
the media for half an hour, as being the most dishonest, loathsome perpetrators
of fake news. He swatted away an earnest young orthodox Jew who dared to ask
him about anti-Semitism. An African American reporter asked whether the
president had plans to meet the Congressional Black Caucus. With a casual
racism that shocked nearly all the journalists in the room he asked whether she
would fix up a meeting – in other words, perhaps, all you black people know
each other, you could sort it out for me. She demurred.
I was the only foreign journalist to get called. And I wanted to ask him about
the problems he was having over his attempts to ban travellers from seven
mainly Muslim countries. It should have been straightforward. It was not.
Having spoken just one word, my English accent alerted him.
‘Which news organisation are you from?’
‘BBC News,’ I replied.
‘Here’s another beauty,’ says the president.
‘That’s a good line. We are free, impartial and fair.’
‘Yeah. Sure.’
‘Mr President …’
‘Just like CNN, right?’ he asked sarcastically.
‘On the travel ban – we could banter back and forth …’
I eventually got to ask my question, and he replied. When I tried to ask a
follow-up I was told to sit down, and then, a little menacingly, he added, ‘I know
who you are …’
I have never seen politics done like this anywhere. And don’t take that as in
any way disapproving. It’s not. This news conference was enormously
entertaining. The whole 75 minutes went by in a flash. You had no idea what
was going to happen next. And that’s the way it has been for the past 18 months,
and that’s the way it is going to be for the foreseeable future. It was – and is – as
foreign as foreign can be.
And can you imagine, back in March 2014 when I went through the selection
board for the job as North America Editor, if I had said I think a reality TV star,
property developer and golf-course owner called Trump with no political