Aureus (Coin) Portraying Emperor Nero, 66-67 CE. Art Institute of Chicago. Public domain.

The view from 4,000 miles

When I first visited Europe in 1974 and for years after, news reports from the U.S. were typically slow to arrive. There were no smart phones or internet, no 24-hour news channels, and local papers were a day or so behind in their coverage of U.S. events. The same time lag existed for the English language International Herald Tribune, published in Paris and filled with stories from U.S. wire services.

Phone calls were still expensive and cumbersome in the 1970s and ‘80s. In France and Italy, they generally required a trip to the post office, the help of an operator, and a vacant phone booth or cubicle. For news and entertainment, I mostly read local newspapers, though with difficulty, given my poor foreign language skills. In those days, when you were away from the U.S., you were really away.

Not anymore. Having this week passed my one-year anniversary as an American expat in Norwich, UK., I can definitively say that living abroad ain’t what it used to be. Not only am I a captive of the U.S. news cycle, so is much of the British media, from the gutter press (Daily Mail, The Sun, etc) to the sober BBC. In addition, the venerated organs of the British left – London Review of Books and New Left Review (NLR) allot copious column inches to American politics and the fundamental question in the age of Trump, “What is to be done?” Given the surfeit of available news, my political outlook here in Norfolk is probably not much different than it would be 4,000 miles away in Florida, from whence I came in late May, 2024.

“Minimalism vs Maximalism”

Last week, the American historian Mathew Karp published a short column in Sidecar, a blog run by NLR, that offers a broad perspective on the Trumpian present. It succinctly laid out the terms of the ongoing debate in the U.S. and U.K. between what may be called “minimalists” and “maximalists.” What follows is an extrapolation of his argument, followed by my disagreement.

Minimalists argue that if you set aside his bombast, corruption, and criminality (the president is a convicted felon), Trump is little different from other presidents. Granted, that’s a lot to put aside, but the 47 American presidents have, with only a few exceptions, been an undistinguished lot to say the least. For every Lincoln or FDR, there have been ten James Buchanans or Calvin Coolidges. The former, by supporting “state’s rights” assured the coming of the civil war; the latter by turning a blind eye to rampant speculation and corruption on Wall Street, made inevitable the stock market crash a year after he left office.

So, while Trump may be high on most historians’ list of worst presidents, he has plenty of company. His bonehead economics – tariffs one week, no tariffs the next, rinse and repeat – are no stupider than Herbert Hoover’s. After the 1929 stock market crash and quick onset of economic Depression, he refused to offer relief to laid-off workers; unemployment soared to 23% by 1932, further depressing demand and hobbling industry, leading to even higher unemployment. Hoover’s support of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 also deepened the recession; tariffed nations reciprocated and even encouraged boycotts of American goods. Sound familiar?

Trump’s restrictions on immigration and his cruel deportation policy are also nothing new. Starting with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, a succession of U.S. presidents have sought to limit immigration and speed deportation of people considered undesirable aliens. The deportees were generally either non-white, non-Protestant, or politically radical, and sometimes all three. President Roosevelt in 1942 issued an executive order mandating the internment of some 120,000........

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