When America Stopped Being Great

'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 PostIn 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.

Bryant has an encyclopedic knowledge of public affairs and popular culture ... The result is riveting, often revelatory, crammed with facts … The great strength of Bryant’s book is his ability to make large structural changes vivid through outsized personalities and his own personal experiences … Readable, powerful and instructive., A masterclass from an outstanding chronicler of modern America ... Insightful, thoughtful, and beautifully written., Nick Bryant writes like a dream, and is one of those very rare things on TV - a man who makes you want to turn up the sound. His eye for description is sublime, and he has a way of showing you what you’ve been missing from the whole story, whilst never leaving you feeling stupid. , An absolutely belting achievement ... An elegy for a lost nation and a lost cause., There are all too many people who can opine about the United States but there are very few with Nick Bryant’s depth of knowledge, experience and empathy for the country and his ability to communicate intelligently, engagingly and entertainingly.

Nick Bryant is known for being one of the BBC’s most senior foreign correspondents, with postings in Washington DC, South Asia, Australia and, most recently, New York. He is the author of The Bystander: John F. Kennedy and the Struggle for Black Equality, Confessions from Correspondentland and The Rise and Fall of Australia. Nick studied history at Cambridge and has a doctorate in American history from Oxford. The Washington Post has noted: ‘Bryant is a genuine rarity. A Brit who understands America.’ In 2021, he left the BBC, and now lives in Sydney with his wife and children.