Trump is not an historical accident and journalists and news organisations were complicit in his rise, says Nick Bryant, the host of the ABC's Saturday Extra. In talking about his own experience, he raises important questions about how to report a leader like Donald Trump. Just how close to the line should the media go?
Nick Bryant with Gia Metherell, Vice-President, ABC Friends NSW&ACT
I was covering Trump for the BBC and for the first hundred days of his presidency, I just couldn't find a way to explain Trump that fitted in with the BBC's impartiality rules. I found it really hard. Everything I wrote didn't seem to land. I was struggling.
One of my younger colleagues said a very wise thing when Trump was elected. "We are going to have to muster everything we've ever learned as journalists in this moment." And he was absolutely right.
I went down to Washington one day and I was coming back to New York on the Acela, which is supposedly the fast train that connects the capital to New York. And I started writing an essay.
I decided that the frame should be the America that I was reporting on now [2016] and the America I first experienced in 1984. I arrived there as a 16 year old for the Los Angeles Olympics. That was the summertime of American resurgence after the long national nightmare of Vietnam and Watergate and the Iranian hostage crisis. America had got its mojo back.
The Soviets boycotted the LA Olympics so America won virtually every medal. It was extraordinary. McDonald's did a promotion where if the US won gold in an obscure event, you got a Big Mac; if they won silver, you got fries; and if they won bronze, you got a Coke. And they were winning in so many events that it was a nightmare for McDonald's.
I just had free food as a 16 year old.
Whenever I hear USA, USA, which was the chant that originated with the LA Games, I expect somebody to hand me a free burger to this day.
Anyway, I wrote an essay that compared the America I fell in love back then with the America I was reporting on in 2016. When I got home to New York late that night I kept writing, almost until the sun came up.
I wrote a 3,000 word essay and we called it 'When America Stopped Being Brave' or something along those lines. That's where the title of my book 'When America Stopped Being Great' came from. It ended up being one of the most read pieces I ever wrote for the BBC. I finally found a way where I could try to explain how abnormal Trump was, while staying in the boundaries of normal BBC rules.
The white tie
After arriving in New York in 2014 I went to see Donald Trump. This was about nine months before he came down the golden escalator. We were doing a story, not about his presidential ambitions, but about the shuttering of his casinos in Atlantic City. He gave us an interview and I didn't think much of it at the time. I thought it'd be fun.
Weirdly, I wore a white tie. I'd never worn a white tie before. I looked like a New Jersey wedding singer. It was a kind of Trump aesthetic and I hate myself for that because I think I made a sartorial concession to him that spoke to other journalistic concessions that we made over the years and continue to this day.
In the flesh, Donald Trump seemed a more likeable and sophisticated version of his crass reality-television self: less brash, more intelligent, disarmingly charming.
These days, Donald Trump was better known as a television personality than a property tycoon … he seemed to regard appearing on the British Broadcasting Corporation as a status symbol. It was as if he regarded us as an offshoot of the monarchy, which may have explained his near-courtly manner.
Turning on the camera instantly made him more recognisable. The red light activated his showman self, his performative persona. It was as if he had inhaled some intoxicant. Over the course of the interview I witnessed first-hand the traits and tics that would soon be transferred from the business to the political realm.
Nick Bryant, When America Stopped Being Great
I saw two Trumps that day. I saw this sensible version and I saw the red light version, the Trump that performed, the Trump that was doing it for the cameras. And when he got elected, I wondered which one we'd get.
What the camera did not record that day was Trump’s roving eye. ‘Booootiful’ was his libidinous reaction to my producer, as he looked her slowly up and down after the interview was over. It was the kind of rich-man sleaziness that revealed both his shamelessness and misogyny.
The fact I let it go, and lightly laughed it off, also anticipated some of the recurring journalistic failings of the presidential campaign: a hesitancy on the part of reporters to hold him to account, a tendency to be overawed by his Trumpian aura, and a cravenness in handing over airtime to this proven ratings winner, whatever the moral outlay …. But were we not complicit as journalists in letting him so effortlessly achieve weightlessness?
Nick Bryant, When America Stopped Being Great
On the day he was inaugurated, I was on the inaugural platform. I was really close to him and I wondered that day, which Donald are we going to see? And we got the red light version times 100, times a thousand.
As soon as he uttered the words American carnage, I thought, we've entered a different world.
I think the Trump I see now is different from the Trump I saw in 2014. I think there's been a decline. I think the presidency has fueled his narcissism. The power of the presidency has fueled his megalomania.
Often the presidency had a humbling effect. Many people who occupied the oval office said that when you walk in that office, it has a chastening effect on you when you realize the power at your disposal. There's a form of imposter syndrome.
Trump did the opposite of that. After about a week and a half he was already comparing himself to Abraham Lincoln, who is widely regarded as the best president America ever had.
How do you cover Trump?
I was always very much of the opinion that you have to be right on the line between analysis and opinion, and I think the problem is that many news organisations retreat to a safe distance. They don't report right on the line. They report a little bit back from the line or a long way back from the line. Some occasionally cross the line. I always believed that we should use strong language and at the BBC this would be a daily, hourly debate that would often rage until minutes before bulletins – what language to use, how strong should we go?
There was an episode in the first presidency where Trump targeted four Congress women of colour called the squad and he basically said go back to where you came from. Now this is textbook racism to me, so I said we've got to call it out. It was a racist tweet. The BBC's ruling was that programs themselves should decide whether it's racist or not, rather than what it should have done, which was to have a universal position. We had a strange hybrid where some programs called it racist, and others didn't. It was daft, but it spoke of a timidity around using strong language.
A media lifeline
Trump came down the golden escalator in June 2015. He always had great appeal in the rust belt, those deindustrialised towns where the empty steel mills and the empty factories became the echo chambers of make America great again.
But there was another wasteland he threw a lifeline to, and that was the media. He was a guy who was a ratings winner, a ratings juggernaut. I'd write a piece about Hillary Clinton and it would get 500,000 hits. That's a good number but write a piece about Trump and we were guaranteed a million.
News organisations like big numbers so there were lots of ways in which we were complicit in his rise. When I talk about wearing a white tie, I'm kind of joking, but we played his game. We submitted to his rules rather than ours and I think we paid the price for that.
Just to give you another BBC example that I've written about in The Forever War.
Trump described his handling of Covid as a 10 out of 10. This was a guy who had talked about injecting your body with bleach. I said that was a ridiculous quote, and the BBC complaints unit found against me. I thought it was ridiculous not to say it was ridiculous.
And in their ruling, they said it wasn't offset by criticism of Joe Biden. And you say hang on a minute, this is both sidesism gone mad. This is impartiality taken to the point of obscenity. How am I supposed to find Joe Biden saying something equally ridiculous? I mean Joe Biden didn't say you should be injecting yourself with bleach
And this speaks to the institutional timidity of the BBC complaints unit, which was independent of the news division. The news division backed me to the hilt, but it spoke of a problem which re-emerged on January the 6th. I was asked to write a piece for BBC online about it and I wrote an anodyne piece, but it did say this was coming. It did talk of the attacks on government and misinformation and the erosion of democracy
The BBC spiked that piece. I'd never had a piece spiked in 25 years and they didn't run the piece and they wouldn't let me amend it and I thought this is really worrying. I'm not criticising the BBC. I love the BEEB, but these debates are happening all the time and news organisations don't always get them right.
Not an historical accident
It was easy to see Trump's victory as an historical accident, a radical departure. And I am guilty of having seen it that way, but in the words of Alexis de Tocqueville describing the French Revolution of 1856, it was so inevitable and yet so completely unforeseen.
This is the thesis of both of my books, When America Stopped Being Great and The Forever War.
The argument is that Trump is as much product of American history as Barack Obama or Joe Biden or Ronald Reagan or Lyndon Johnson or Jack Kennedy or Richard Nixon or Abraham Lincoln.
It's the history we tend to forget, the history we bury, the history we misremember, the history we mythologise. And if you retrieve that history, if you excavate that history, it makes a lot of sense of Donald Trump.
There's a long history of authoritarianism from unexpected quarters. Lincoln had an authoritarian streak. So did FDR, the great liberal hero. John Adams, who was the second president, tried to ban the opposition. So, if you're looking for authoritarian presidents, start with number two. For the strong man you can start with number one. There was a cult of George Washington if you're looking for where the cult stuff comes from.
If you wonder why American democracy is weak, it's because it's never been strong. It wasn't a mass democracy that the founding fathers wanted - that terrified them. They were worried about the popular will and so they created a minoritarian system. That's why they've got a Senate. That's why they've got an electoral college where you can win the presidency, as Donald Trump did in 2016, without winning the popular vote.
There's a long history of racism. America got rid of slavery but replaced it shortly afterwards with segregation, and segregation lasted until the 1960s. It wasn't until 1965, with the passage of the voting rights act, that America truly became a country with universal suffrage. It was only then that blacks in the south could really vote. Up until then they'd been given literacy tests, but they'd be asked stupid questions like how many bubbles are there in a bar of soap or asked to interpret arcane bits of state constitutions.
So, there's a long history to Trump. And if you look at American history in a slightly different way, you see he shouldn't have been such a surprise.
Division is the default
Originally, slavery became the price of national unity and that compromise lasted until the Civil War. After the Civil War, slavery ended and there was a period called the second founding. Those amendments gave black men the right to vote, not women. And then you had the period of reconstruction. The blacks in the Senate did enjoy the full menu of rights, but reconstruction ended after a disputed election and in came segregation and that became the price of national unity. And it was only in 1964 and 1965, with the passage of the great civil rights acts, that segregation started to be dismantled. But the divisions remained.
Many people thought that the election of Barack Obama was a moment of atonement, to atone for segregation, to atone for slavery. But the idea that Obama would usher in a post racial America, which he never believed he could, was fanciful. I don't think there would have been a Donald Trump without Barack Obama. Trump rose to political prominence as the entitled leader of the Birther movement, questioning the very legitimacy of the black president.
In many ways, America is still arguing over the same things. It's still arguing about race. It's still arguing over the separation of powers between the states and the federal government. It's still arguing over the division of powers within Washington between the branches of the government, the executive the judiciary, Congress. These things have never been resolved and that's why I talk about the forever war.
This is an extract of an In-Conversation between Nick Bryant and Gia Metherell, which was held in Canberra on 16 April 2026 for ABC Friends NSW&ACT.
Listen to Nick Bryant on the ABC's Saturday Extra. Or read his superb Substack column, History Never Ended.
During a distinguished career with the BBC, Nick Bryant came to be regarded as one of its finest foreign correspondents. He has also written for an array of publications, including The Economist, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New Statesman, The Monthly, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
He is the author of the critically-acclaimed When America Stopped Being Great: A History of the Present; The Rise and Fall of Australia: How a Great Nation Lost its Way; and The Forever War: America's Unending Conflict with Itself. He is a history graduate from Cambridge University, and holds a doctorate in US politics from Oxford University.
Cassandra Parkinson
National President
ABC Friends