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When I became a US citizen in 2022, I believed I was ready to fully embrace being an American. I only applied for citizenship when I felt I could swear the oath of allegiance, and genuinely mean every word. I felt lucky to have the chance to do this, without having to foreswear my British citizenship. The US and the UK were such historic close allies, with shared values and a similar outlook on the world, such that I would never be forced to choose loyalties between them. When I married my husband, there were lots of jokes about us consolidating “the special relationship.”
Trump’s slurs against Britain are putting my loyalties severely to the test. The America to which I pledged my allegiance is not the America of today. I still admire the original “idea” of America. I like living here. I have built a community of friends and family here which I value enormously. But, true peace of mind would require me either to tune out what is actually happening, or pretend Trump’s excesses don’t exist, which is both dishonest and corrosive.
I am now struggling to work out my identity. I became rather alienated from the UK in the years immediately after Brexit, when I felt my birth country had fallen prey to some weird anti-EU cult, fuelled by false promises and misinformation. Now, I feel the same thing happening to me here. When I write about the US these days, I often can’t decide whether to use the pronoun “we”, identifying myself as an American too, or “they”, to put some distance between us.
The dissonance is increasing.
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At a recent Sunday lunch gathering which I was hosting, one of my American guests innocently asked me, not what I thought, but how I felt, about Donald Trump’s insults towards the UK. Taking everyone aback, including myself, her choice of words triggered an intense emotional reaction from me. For the next ten minutes I delivered an almost ranting, nonstop monologue in which I expressed my anger, loathing and disdain for Donald Trump – not just concerning his outrageous slurs towards my country of birth, but also his greed, his corruption, his crudeness, his sleaziness, his vanity, his ego, his arrogance, his bigotry, his cruelty, his grotesque abuses of office, his bullying of allies and coddling of dictators, his values-free foreign policy, his cavalier war-mongering, and his wanton destruction of everything which once made America great.
There was a stunned silence when I finished.
My emotional outburst came after months in which I had tried to contain the extent of my anger towards Trump in front of my American friends and family, for fear of offending them. To be clear, none of them like Trump either, and most of them are as horrified as I am by his egregious behaviour. Many of my American friends say they are ashamed and embarrassed by Trump, and tell me that when they travel overseas they make clear to people they meet that they did not vote for him. Some even try to pretend they are Canadian.
But, America is still their country, and most of them still believe better days will come again. Though they share my disgust at Trump, most of them seem surprisingly passive in the face of events. They will certainly not vote for Trump. Some may come out and stump for Democrats nearer the elections. But only a handful of them are actively engaged in acts of protest or resistance. Only one other friend came out with me to join a #NoKings protest. They sigh, and tut-tut, and shake their heads with despair, but they don’t seem to think it is their job to actively push back.
They are trusting that America’s democratic processes will still work. They are pinning their hopes on the courts reining in Trump’s worst excesses, and the Republicans doing badly in the mid-term elections – even though the Trump administration continues to bulldoze through court rulings against them, and is ever more explicitly looking for ways to rig the elections in its favour.
If the passivity of too many ordinary American voters is disappointing, this is nothing compared to the manifest failure of America’s elites to stand up to Trump. Too many in the elite circles of the media, academia, the legal profession, or in business, have decided the easiest course is to keep their heads down, or actively collude with the administration, in the hopes of avoiding Trump’s wrath, and instead securing favours, economic benefit, or other advantage over their competitors.
Where were the adults in the room when Trump threatened civilisational destruction of Iran? Why was this not an immediate clarifying moment for all the Republican members of Congress who have enabled him for far too long? Why was this overt declaration of intent to commit war crimes not a moment of mass resignation from the administration? Why was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff not actively denouncing this as incompatible with US military codes and decades of military practice?
Yes, Trump’s favorability ratings are declining across the board – on his handling of the economy, foreign policy, and even immigration, his signature policy. But, given the chaos he’s unleashed, how is it possible that almost 40% of Americans still have an overall positive view of him?
Why do so many Americans still seem to think that someone else, from somewhere, will eventually intervene and do something to stop this madness? For how long will they rely on TACO – that Trump will always do a u-turn, if the markets crater? There’s increasing evidence that the markets are beginning to bake in Trump’s madness, and assuming he will back down at moments of crisis, so they are no longer working as effectively as before as a signalling tool to him.
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Trump is becoming more extreme, and more erratic, with each passing day. Not content with castigating his NATO allies, raging at former MAGA acolytes who are now criticising him, threatening to bomb Iran into oblivion, and close down the Straits of Hormuz, he is now taking on the Pope, and posting pictures of himself as God.
What if Trump is so irked by all the TACO crowing by his critics, that one day he decides not to back down from one of his most preposterous declarations?
How bad does it have to get, before enough Americans wake up?
America has always pitched itself as the champion of democracy around the world. For decades, American administrations poured millions of dollars into supporting democracy building in other countries, campaigned on behalf of opposition leaders, civil society organisations and pro-democracy movements in authoritarian countries, and scolded the leaders of countries where human rights and freedoms were not respected. Even though American foreign policy actions have often been inconsistent or imperfect, they have always been dressed up in a veneer of values and principles. Despite the views of some cynics that it was only ever about oil, George Bush’s ill-fated Iraq War was in part genuinely motivated by a desire to spread “freedom” in the Middle East.
With his threats to commit genocide in Iran, Trump has singlehandedly destroyed America’s moral standing. It’s not good enough to claim, as some of his defenders have, that these comments were just a negotiating ploy, or “Trump being Trump.” It’s simply unacceptable for any responsible world leader to say something like this.
There is a measure of hope in Viktor Orban’s recent electoral defeat in Hungary. But, the lesson far right populist movements will take from his defeat, including his backers in the US, will be that they will need to go even further and faster to consolidate their power.
I therefore don’t believe it is either “just a joke”, or a coincidence that Trump has been openly declaring that he will pardon everyone who works closely with him. He means it, as a way to authorise even more flagrant criminal behaviour by his associates, to protect him and his cronies from accountability.
After the lunch where I completely lost my diplomatic cool, a close associate pulled me aside, and suggested I needed to be less emotional, and more analytical, about the state of America. I don’t agree. I think more Americans need to be more angry, more outraged, more fired up and more active than they are at the moment, before it is too late, and there is nothing left to salvage.
Perhaps American democracy will eventually right itself. It’s withstood severe tests before, including a bitter civil war. But, I say, why leave it to chance? Hope is not a strategy.
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