During Donald Trump’s first presidency, many critics comforted themselves with the notion that he was a bizarre aberration from the mainstream of American history. With Trump’s second term bringing daily devastation to American and world democracy, such an illusion is impossible to maintain. Edward Stourton’s Made in America is a very timely book because it promises to reveal the “dark history” of the US that has led to the present. Stourton argues that Trump is not abnormal but as “American as apple pie”.
Written by a BBC Radio journalist, Made in America is a highly accessible account. It would appeal to readers who know a little bit about American history and are looking for a lively introduction that connects it to current events. But those looking for a more sophisticated understanding of Trump’s place within American history should turn elsewhere.
Made in America eschews a single historical chronology. Instead, it takes some of the key themes of Trump’s reign and relates them to relevant aspects of the American past. For example, to explain Trump’s contempt for the rule of law, Stourton turns back to the 19th-century president Andrew Jackson. Jackson similarly over-reached his authority, notoriously ignoring court rulings to order the Trail of Tears: the forced relocation of about 60,000 Native Americans from the American south. Of the 20,000 Cherokees made to march in the dead of winter, a quarter died along the way.
In some chapters, Stourton merely repeats better-known episodes in American history such as the development of racism in the Jim Crow South and the career of anti-Communist demagogue Joe McCarthy. However, in most chapters, Stourton admirably explores lesser-known aspects of American history. For example, to explain the Christian nationalism that suffuses Trump’s movement, Stourton goes back to the Puritans who settled Massachusetts in the 17th century.
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The Puritans came not in the name of religious tolerance but of religious intolerance: to ensure that theirs was a godly community that admitted no heretics. Typically the Puritan story is told with reference to the Salem witch trials of the 1690s, which are memorialised in everything from Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible to the campy Disney family classic Hocus Pocus. Yet, Stourton turns instead to the Puritans’ grisly prosecutions of Quakers, who were subjected to whipping, banishment and even death.
Stourton also has a fresh account of William McKinley, first elected president in 1896. Trump has brought new interest in this president, who until recently was largely forgotten, restoring the name Mount McKinley to Alaska’s Mount Denali on his first day in office. McKinley was called the “Napoleon of tariffs” in his time, so it is no surprise that Trump cites him as an inspiration for his trade policy.
Stourton also connects Trump’s naked power grabs on the world stage to the earlier American belief in its “manifest destiny” to spread across the continent. Though the US emerged out of revolution against the British Empire, its genocidal wars against Native Americans and forced acquisition of much of Mexico mean the US was an “imperialist” nation long before it acquired overseas territories of its own (under McKinley).
This American history of ruthless expansion resonates in, for example, Trump’s recent threats that the US will gain possession of Greenland the “easy way” or the “hard way”, whether the Danes or the people of Greenland “like it or not”.
Without question, Made in America succeeds in showing that there are ample historical precedents for Trump’s reign. Yet there are better methods for relating that history than Stourton employs. He treats the present-day United States as smoothly continuous with its past as if it were a person or a thing rather than a complex social structure that is radically different from the original English colonies in North America established more than four centuries ago.
Stourton turns to American history as a kind of grab bag into which he reaches – from any period at all – for relevant stories. He does not connect the dots necessary to understand how we got from there to here. It seems a stretch, for example, to see the origins of the 21st-century Christian Right in the 17th-century Puritans, given that the Puritans’ lineal descendants, the Congregationalists, are today one of the most liberal Christian denominations and New England one of America’s most liberal regions. To go back to the religious revivals of the 19th century makes a little more sense, and yet here Stourton elides the very different politics of 19th-century evangelicalism, which was central to the most radical movement of the era: abolitionism.
Turning back to older periods of American history, Stourton ignores the proximate roots for Trump’s rise. He draws a parallel with McCarthyism, and yet he does so in terms of shared demagogic methods when he might have followed the thread of right-wing hatred of liberalism that runs through the history of the Republican Party from the mid-20th-century to the present.
Indeed, Stourton has almost nothing to say about American history since the 1950s. And yet Trump’s rise must be seen as part of a long reaction to 1960s-era social movements promoting racial equality, feminism and LGBTQ rights. The authority that Trump wields as president was enabled by the rise of the national security state since the cold war that has concentrated unaccountable power within the executive branch.
Trump has far more power at his disposal – most notably the ability to initiate nuclear war – than Jackson could have dreamt of. Nor can Trump be understood without an account of the rise of neoliberalism, bringing it its wake deindustrialisation, extreme wealth inequalities, declining social welfare protections and decaying public trust.
Stourton’s elision of the history of neoliberalism may be related to his political perspective, which seems to be one of classic liberalism supporting individual rights and free trade. Thus, he puts Trump’s tariffs as disturbing policies on par with his racism, attacks on democracy and disregard for the rule of law. He even equates Trump with Bernie Sanders as “committed protectionists”, ignoring differences between the haphazard Trump tariffs with their politics of “America First” and a progressive state-led industrial policy of the kind Sanders supports designed to bring about widespread economic prosperity.
Stourton praises Ronald Reagan, who in many ways anticipated Trump: inventing the slogan Make America Great Again, disregarding international law in his interventions in Latin America, engaging in racist demagoguery in his attacks on what he called “welfare queens” (African-American women supposedly exploiting the welfare system), and presiding over an obscene upward redistribution of wealth that laid the ground for the grievance politics on which Trump thrives.
Stourton bizarrely includes Franklin Roosevelt’s plan to expand the number of supreme court justices as an instance of presidential overreach akin to those of Jackson and Trump. Yet, unlike Trump, Roosevelt represented a democratic movement stymied by a deeply conservative supreme court that had ruled many of his popular New Deal reforms unconstitutional.
The US constitution does not stipulate the number of supreme court justices. While Roosevelt’s plan failed, it put pressure on the court. This saved the New Deal as one judge dropped his constitutional objections: the “switch in time that saved nine”. In the 21st century, any serious movement to democratise the US will have to follow Roosevelt’s lead to overcome the resistance of the supreme court’s current conservative majority.
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While Stourton is right that Trump is no historical anomaly, he risks the opposite error of seeing Trump as the logical culmination of American history. I have taught a class on race and ethnicity in America at Trinity since 2008. During the Obama years, I told students that the US had not overcome its racist past. Yet, during the Trump years, I insist that there is an American antiracist tradition that has won significant victories, notably the dismantling of Jim Crow.
Just because someone wins the presidency by a narrow margin does not mean that their politics define what all or even most Americans think. That is especially true in Trump’s case. He was not re-elected to carry out the policies of the radical right, but because he promised to end the inflation associated with the Biden administration. After his inauguration, Trump quickly became deeply unpopular with the American public. Trump represents not a majority of Americans but a large radicalised minority. Of course, that does not make him any less dangerous in power.
Finally, Stourton treats the history of the US in isolation. Yet much of America’s “dark history” of racism and illiberalism is deeply connected to the history of European imperialism and settler colonialism that reshaped the globe. And Trump has not been a uniquely American phenomenon. He is best understood as the American variant of a global radical right that has taken power in nations as far-flung as Argentina, Hungary, India, Italy and the Philippines. This radical right is on the rise across the globe, including in Stourton’s Britain. Perhaps five years from now an American journalist will publish an account of those features in Britain’s dark past that explain prime minister Farage.
Further reading
Other accounts examining the “dark history” of the United States that help explain Trump include:
Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power (Basic Books, 2022) by Jefferson Cowie. This Pulitzer Prize-winning book examines a powerful tradition of American “freedom” rooted not in liberty for all, but in the freedom of white men to dominate others free from the encroachments of the federal government.
Illiberal America (WW Norton, 2024) by Steven Hahn reveals the illiberal tradition in a nation once considered to be a paragon of classical liberalism of the kind spelt out by philosophers such as John Locke. Hahn explores a deeply rooted anti-egalitarian and antidemocratic tradition within American politics from the nation’s founding to the January 6th insurrection.
A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America (Belknap Press, 2024) by Richard Slotkin examines how competing national stories have shaped the US and how the Maga movement is rooted in myths about the conquest of the frontier and Confederate resistance to racial equality.
