Jon Sopel’s seven years as the BBC’s US correspondent, which has just ended, coincided with an extraordinary period in that country’s history.
Sopel joined the BBC in 1983. He's been the chief political correspondent for BBC News 24, a Paris correspondent and a correspondent from conflicts in the Middle East, Iraq and Afghanistan.
He's the author of multiple books on news and politics - most recently Un-Presidented - Politics, Pandemics and the Race that Trumped All Others.
Photo: BBC
Leaving his role in the US was “simultaneously a relief and a great sadness,” Sopel told Emile Donovan.
“I had loved my time in America, and the Trump presidency was quite the most exhausting thing that I'd ever been involved with.
“Unpredictable, exhilarating, chaotic, but you were never off the news. And if you're a TV reporter, a radio reporter, newspaper reporter, you want your story to be front and centre every night. And oh boy was it front and centre every night.”
The job was intellectually challenging, he says, but in different ways to previous postings.
“Often in journalism that I'd done a politician would make a claim … and you might arch an eyebrow. But so often [in the US] you were hearing things that were totally untrue.
“And you can't, as a journalist, say some people say that two plus two is four, but some people say two plus two is six - only time will tell who's right, you've got to say, no, two plus two is four.”
He first faced that conundrum on the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration.
“The claim was made that record numbers had attended his inauguration, the biggest in American history, and you just have to look at the photographs of Barack Obama's first inauguration in 2009, to realise that that was untrue.
“And so I had to say, that is not true. And there were a number of other occasions as well. But if you went on the TV or radio every day and said 'liar, liar, pants on fire', people say, 'oh, come on, give it a rest'.”
He first encountered Trump’s campaigning brilliance in South Carolina, Sopel says.
“Once Trump started it was absolutely clear that he was connecting with people in an extraordinary way. And I remember going to Dallas, Texas, and this is 15 months out from an election and he's taken over the American Airlines Arena for a rally. And people have been queuing since dawn. And they're all dressed up. They've made themselves costumes supporting Donald Trump. And there are thousands and thousands of them out there.”
At another rally in South Carolina, he struck up a conversation with a woman.
“A woman comes up to me and I'm chatting, she says, ‘I love your accent’. I said, ‘well I like your accent too madam’. And I said, ‘tell me why you like Donald Trump?’ She said; ‘Donald Trump says what I'm thinking, but I'm not allowed to say.’”
By contrast Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016 lacked focus, he says.
“I think that Donald Trump appealed to a certain section of the American public, maybe not college educated, mainly white, who felt that America had been going in the wrong direction, it had become too liberal, it was time to turn the page back.
“And that Donald Trump would be their champion, and Donald Trump went in with a very, very clear manner, he was a much better candidate than Hillary Clinton by a mile in 2016.
“He said, look I'm going to build a wall, I'm going to renegotiate trade deals, I'm going to keep Muslims out. And he was clear what he wanted to do. And that chimed with enough of the American public, that he won an improbable victory in 2016.
“You might not like the messages that Donald Trump was delivering, but they had clarity, whereas Hillary Clinton's messages had zero clarity at all.”
Fast forward to January 6, 2020 and the atmosphere was much darker, he says.
“That frigid morning in January last year, outside the White House, there was no atmosphere of fiesta, the mood was ugly from the off, these people were angry.
“Whereas once they used to laugh at and with Donald Trump, and knew that a lot of what he said was maybe only half true, that day they thought the only truth that existed emerged from the lips of Donald Trump.
“And it was a really dangerous moment when they took over the Capitol. I went on our main evening news that night and uttered sentences I thought I would never say out loud that I thought American democracy was ‘tonight in a precarious position’.”
Photo: Penguin Books
Deep fault lines remain in American society, he says.
“People say oh well, it was just a spasm, it was just protest that got a bit out of hand. I think another way of looking at it was it was a failed coup attempt.
“And it was a coup that very nearly happened. And so, when people say to me, what does America look like today, and I use a metaphor of you can take a champagne bottle, and you can shake it up and as long as the cork is still screwed in it's fine. It looks like a normal champagne bottle. But you take the protective cap off around it, and it will go everywhere.
“And I feel that America is slightly like that today. The divisions are deep and polarised. And there are an astonishing number of people who believe Donald Trump when he says the election was stolen.”
American media became “triggered” by Trump, he says, forgetting what its role is in a healthy democracy.
They [would] say 'I'm not a liar, you're the liar'. How dare you say that to me? You know, you're the fake news. I just think that it kind of became angrier and angrier.”
This polarisation also made financial sense, Sopel says.
“These channels recognised that if Fox was going to corner the market in being pro-Trump, we should try and corner the market in being anti-Trump.
“And so, you saw presenters going on air and say, ‘God can you believe it? What an idiot that man is we've got in the White House.’”
The middle ground has been abandoned by media, he says.
“You go not to be informed, you go to have your views affirmed. And so, what you want is someone who's going to be the echo chamber for what you're already thinking.”
Biden’s initial conciliatory tone had become more strident too, he says.
“Joe Biden, one year on from taking office, one year on from the anniversary of January 6 was actually using the same sort of rhetoric – ‘these people were holding a knife at the throat of American democracy’. You know, all of this has happened because one man couldn't accept that he lost, he took the fight to Donald Trump.
“Now, some people would say it was long overdue, and that just by trying to ignore it would not deal with the problem.
“But now you have the American President, Joe Biden one year in going for exactly that same polarising rhetoric.”
Sopel believes journalism has never been more important.
“As we start 2022, there has never been in my time as a journalist, a more challenging time to be a journalist where you're accused of being fake news, or the legacy media or whatever it happens to be or liars or dishonest people.
“But there has never been a more important time. I don't care how people vote. If I can play any role at all, as a journalist, my job is to make people better informed when they go to vote, so that they have got good information on which to base their judgments.
“And part of that is holding people in power to account with respect with dignity, not being cynical, not calling them all a bunch of liars and a bunch of charlatans, but to hold people calmly in a measured way to account and then you say to the voters at the end of it, that we've given you the news, and we've tried to give you our analysis, it’s up to you now what you do with it.”
