A Short History of America: From Tea Party to Trump, by Simon Jenkins
The brilliance of condensed history books is that they are an invaluable précis of all the stuff you vaguely know but should know better.
They make an excellent gift for an uneducated godchild about to go on a gap year to, say, Korea, or an alien planning to land his spaceship there. The best of them was The Shortest History of Germany, an award-winning summary which broke the objectivity rules by positing a fiercely contentious theory.
Its author, James Hawes, argued that everything bad that had come out of that country had come from East of the Elbe – the bit the Romans never reached. And everything good from Goethe to Beethoven came out of the West.
But this book was an outlier. For most of them, the aim is to deliver a scrupulously accurate account of what happened in that territory from the dawn of time to the present day – one that would not trouble the fact-checkers on the New York Times.
The polymathic Simon Jenkins sticks closely to the formula in a crisp but comprehensive account of the behemoth delivered, one has no doubt, on deadline and in rapid time. His racy narrative, scattered with interesting ‘Did You Know?’s makes up in pace what it lacks in humour.
But something is missing, and after a while one realises that the fault lies not with the author, but with the brief itself. For asking someone – anyone – to write the history of the USA now (nearing the 250th anniversary of Independence) is madness.
It would be like commissioning one on France in 1788, Russia in 1916, or Germany in 1933. Or a news editor demanding a report of a school shooting before the SWAT team arrives.
For the one thing even dullards know about the USA is that Big History is happening right now in real time. As the ICE teams make their way through the back streets of Chevy Chase, ‘lifting’ gardeners and house-cleaners as suspicious aliens, as the judiciary appears to have merged with the executive as an arm of presidential revenge, as USAID, the universities and research powerhouses of the nation close for business, something big is clearly going on.
Even moderate MAGA sympathisers must concede that the Great Orange in the half-demolished White House has his eyes on not just Canada and Greenland, but a Constitution-defying third term.
For Jenkins, however, there is a deadline to meet, and no doubt two or three other books on the go, demanding his attention.
In consequence his 272-page canter can spare only 14 for the Trumpian finale. And as he has to leave the theatre before the Third Act, it has a dying fall. Rather than tell his readers, ‘Don’t look away now,’ he ends with a somewhat limp-wristed ‘It will probably be all right in the end.’
‘If today’s United States ceased to exist, it would be a global catastrophe,’ he concludes. ‘There is no other nation that could take its place.’
Well, up to a point. But isn’t China auditioning for the job?
Surely the question we all want answered is: is the Manichaean America we see today – both technically brilliant and yet also totally insane – obsessed with violence and a total liability to the world at large?
Of course, we all know charming, tweedy Harvard professors with a homely love of medieval romance poetry, and kindly, apple-cheeked Midwesterners who will put you up for a month in Wichita after a chance meeting over a beer in a bar.
But what of the others: the school-shooting teen incels, the born-again militia men yearning to update the KKK, the billionaire tech bros funding Europe’s far right while devising ways to live for ever?
It is surely indisputable that madness is deep in America’s DNA. The Mayflower Pilgrims may have been yearning to be free, but they were soon burning Quakers at the stake and organising the Salem witch trials. In the land of the free and the home of the brave, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act.
And it seems to be getting worse. In JFK’s day, the US was deeply embarrassed by 6,500 annual deaths by gunfire. In 2024, that figure was 45,000, and it is no consolation to hear that 27,000 of those were suicides. By October 2025, the US was recording gunfire in schoolyards at a rate of two a week. And meanwhile, the chief product of the Los Angeles dream factory that used to stage Fred Astaire and Rodgers & Hammerstein musicals, is a relentless torrent of realistic or fantasy violence, lightly leavened by a burgeoning porn industry in the suburbs.
The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, fresh from abolishing US humanitarian aid, is urging civil unrest in the UK, France and Germany while negotiating a trillion-dollar pay package.
To use an appropriate, contemporary Americanism, you couldn’t make it up. US history? It’s not over yet, though we may sometimes wish that it were.
Ivo Dawnay was Washington Bureau Chief for the Sunday Telegraph
