Book Review: If Only They Didn't Speak English - Notes From Trump's America by Jon Sopel

I expected so much more from this book. It starts with a central thesis - the UK over-indexes on America because we speak the same language, but there is an enormous gulf in attitudes between the two nations. We rarely hear on the news what's happening in France, Germany, or Ireland even though they're much closer geographically, politically, and culturally.

That sounds like a pretty good book!

Instead, we get "what I learned on my holiday to the USA by Jon Sopel aged 57 and ¾".

We learn, for example, that America likes guns. There's a bit of an analysis of why and how lobbying shapes it, but it is fairly surface-level stuff. There's a little bit of a comparison with the UK's attitudes, but not much. Similarly, they're much more religious, racist, and have a convoluted relationship with the truth. Their constitution, elections, and media landscape are also different. It feels like pop-facts rather than anything deeper.

There are some brilliant insider anecdotes which, thankfully, don't stray into fawning name-dropping. For example, this little nugget about the Hillary Clinton victory rally that never was:

Throughout the evening two men were posted to each corner of our broadcast ‘riser’ and they sat at machines with large conical funnels pointing upwards. These were the machines that would launch into the air millions of shards of shiny paper to recreate the effect of a glass ceiling shattering.

He also makes some grimly accurate prophesies:

And are you really going to start a trade war with China – and everyone else for that matter, with all the consequences that might bring for the global economy?

Towards the end, when discussing how Trump came to dominate, he says:

Books much weightier than this will be written about the abject failure of the conventional media to comprehend fully the parameters of this new world

I think I was expecting this to be a bit weightier and to set out some way forward.