Discovering the Real America (05.05.2026)

An interview with Edward Stourton

Edward Stourton is not only a veteran journalist but also a man of integrity. That was my first impression when we met at Old Government House for a half-hour chat before his talk at St James. My other two were of a congenial and generous individual, who was happy to lend me his time in the ‘library’ of the O.G.H. It was his first visit to Guernsey, and he commented on its beauty.

He was visiting the island for the Guernsey Literary Festival, where he was interviewed by Sarah Montague on Saturday the 25^th April. His book, ‘Made in America. The dark history that led to Donald Trump’ is a deceptively easy read that sweeps the reader along, entertaining and educating in equal measure. Time and again, I found myself saying aloud, “I never knew that” or, more importantly, “Ah, that makes sense.” The book’s purpose is to explain to us bemused and befuddled Brits that Donald Trump is not an aberration but something deeply American; that we would be far less surprised by him if we better understood the nation’s history.

And this is what I found most fascinating about the book, that its central character is not really Donald Trump, but the United States itself. The America we encounter is a nation pulled between competing conceptions of its own identity. As in all psychodramas, there are times when the liberal, rational side prevails—the America of the United States Constitution—and times when a more illiberal, religious-nationalist, and imperial instinct comes to the fore.

Stourton’s inspiration for writing the book came in the aftermath of the infamous meeting between Trump, J. D. Vance, and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, when we witnessed, before our eyes, the seismic shifts taking place in global politics. While Europe reeled in confusion, Stourton set out to make sense of events—not by probing Trump’s psychology, but by placing him within a broader historical context.

This desire both to dig deep in search of understanding and to stand back for a wider view is rooted, perhaps, in Stourton’s family history. His parents met in Nigeria, where his father was working as a businessman, and each of their children was born in a different country. Stourton began life among cultures not wholly his own, and he carried that international outlook into his career, working in both Washington, D.C. and Paris.

His series, ‘A Year in the Arab Israeli Crisis’, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service in 2005, while in 2001 he won the Amnesty International Award for Best Television Documentary for his work in the Khiam Detention Center during the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon.

One especially charming anecdote concerned his marriage: he and his wife were born in the same hospital in Nigeria only months apart. As he put it, these are the sorts of things that forge a marriage.

His narrative approach to the news began with studying English at Trinity College, Cambridge, but it was truly nurtured in the newsroom of ITN where telling a story was of central importance.

Edward Stourton’s interests range from theology and history to current affairs, and these three strands come together in the opening chapter of Made in America. Possibly the most compelling section of the book, it lays out the genetic blueprint for many of the tensions the United States continues to experience and helps make sense of the MAGA movement and its currents of Christian nationalism.

While the separation of Church and State has largely held firm in Europe, America was in part shaped by English Puritan settlers seeking a land in which they could establish a religious commonwealth—something close to a theocracy. As governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop argued that it was the duty of the state to uphold divine law. Through a notably repressive interpretation of that principle, he sanctioned harsh punishments, from the whipping of dissenters to their execution. Trump might not be lashing and killing the liberal left, but his culture wars slip easily into a modern version of this religious framework.

This position stands in sharp contrast to the Enlightenment thinking of James Madison, the principal architect of the Bill of Rights and a key force behind the First Amendment to the US Constitution, with its enduring commitment to religious freedom.

Of course, it is possible to trace a conservative–liberal tension in most modern states. It can be seen in Spain, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, while conservatism can readily subsume within itself a fervent nationalism. Some have suggested that Stourton occasionally stretches historical precedents to fit his thesis. Yet the very fact that such precedents can be woven into his account of the American phenomenon is itself a powerful indication that he has identified something important.

The book is divided into six sections, and the next, Imperial America, makes for salutary reading. It serves as a reminder that we have adopted, often uncritically, the United States’s anti-imperialist posture on the world stage. Even if we are familiar with the Louisiana Purchase and have a glancing awareness of the plight of Native Americans, I challenge any reader not to be shocked by what they read.

In light of this, Donald Trump’s threats to take Greenland and make Canada the fifty-first state seem less shocking, even if no less egregious. They are a modern rendition of a historical reality: that nineteenth-century United States “resorted to absolutely every trick in the book to achieve its ambitions” — namely, to expand its territory.

Stourton carries the journey forward. Donald Trump’s attacks on immigrants and deportation policies are presented as echoes of John Adams’s Alien and Sedition Acts, under which foreigners could be detained or expelled without trial. Trump’s attempts to override the courts are likened to Andrew Jackson’s refusal to accept a Supreme Court’s ruling. And while William McKinley championed tariffs of around fifty per cent, Joseph McCarthy, of 1950s fame, used the machinery of the state to pursue revenge against his enemies.

By the time you reach the end of the book, you are no longer “seeing through a glass darkly”; everything that is happening begins to make sense, or at the very least can be understood within a broader context. It may not bring solace, but it does bring understanding.

An important question, then, is whether Americans see their own history in the same way. He ventured that they probably do not. Just as we often overlook the darker side of Britain’s own colonial past, many Americans downplay—or seek to explain away—the harsher episodes he identifies in the book. Amusingly, he added that he has no American publisher and may not be allowed back into the country as a consequence of writing it. Certainly, he said, he would consider taking a burner phone with him on his next visit, if he makes one. At present, he has no plans to do so. He is happy with his farmhouse in France.

Given Stourton’s thesis, the pressing question becomes: what hope can he offer us for the future?

This question is more difficult, and Stourton is wise enough to recognise the limits of prediction. He challenged my simple pendulum-swing theory. Yes, things will change; the Madisonian version of American identity will re-emerge—we are at “peak-Trump,” as he told Sarah Montague—but it will do so in a different form.

There are Murrow-like figures ready to bring him down—Murrow being the journalist whose reporting helped destroy Joseph McCarthy—but there is no longer the same shared media space in which such a reckoning might unfold, and no one can predict when, or how, it will happen.

This is where questions of Donald Trump’s psychology inevitably come into play. The world is confronted by a man whom many believe displays serious personality disorders. We want to know who he is as a person, and not merely as the expression of historical forces. Yet Stourton refuses to tread on that terrain. He is not qualified to do so, he explains, and he agreed that much of the commentary on the matter amounts to speculation.

Is this a problem? Probably not, because ‘Made in America’ offers a kind of hope, even if some will disagree with me here. Donald Trump may be unpredictable, but that unpredictability is played out within a recognisable historical framework—and because of that, there always lingers the shadow of the other America. If today we are living with a Winthropian vision of the United States, tomorrow we may yet find ourselves under a Madisonian one instead. And that can only be good news for the world.