For years I have defended America from the scorn of friends and family. But now I falter

Trump squandered the opportunity to rally the nation in the wake of Charlottesville, and in doing so, he divided the country even further

Anti-Trump activists demonstrate ahead the President’s arrival in Manhattan on Monday (Reuters)

Driving to a dinner party on Saturday, we urgently roamed the radio dial trying to fathom the terrible violence unfolding in Charlottesville and how President Donald Trump was, or was not, responding to it. Another of the expected guests, we had learned, was considering bailing out at the last minute; he was just too distressed for dinner-table banter.

In the end, everyone showed up but a deal was struck to get through the evening without mention of Trump. It was hardly the first time we’d been at a social event where the President had been banned as a topic of conversation. Nor was it the first time that the prohibition failed. It’s an impossible edict to respect, because we all share the same anger, the same deep worry.

We do know people who voted for Trump and who are still glad he is in the Oval Office. For the most part, I can still discuss his record with them without endangering our friendships. But that is an increasingly rare luxury. I have lost count of how many acquaintances have told me they can no longer talk politics with their own wider families. Otherwise china, if not bones, might be broken.

I randomly hear strangers airing their despair into their cellphones on the street. “It is so depressing. We are seriously considering moving to Canada,” declared a young man one recent morning, apparently on his way to work like me. Less anecdotally, protestors gathered in their thousands to heckle Trump as he returned for the first time on Monday to his Manhattan skyscraper-home. “Shame! Shame!”, they chanted.

That Trump is a horror show for most of my circle won’t surprise you. The friends I mentioned who like him don’t live in Gotham, where the President’s approval rating is 20 per cent. Moreover, I belong to a subset that is especially sensitive to what’s going on: expats who chose to make the United States their home and in many cases took its citizenship, like me. What do we say now when we go home and people tell us the country we live in has become a bad joke?

In the 25 years I’ve lived here, I have grown accustomed to the scorn. I have two Canadian brothers who have long expressed their sympathy for my being south of their border. Our arguments over the years have been about the Iraq War, of course, and more generally about the harm they see America inflicting on the wider world. I have grown quite good at pushing back. Canada? Zzzz.

I still try. Trump is not America. Things that made it great before he showed up still make it great. All the nation’s rituals still go on. Hot dogs and mustard, black bears and glaciers, oysters and lobster, Sikhs and Jews. Labor Day, back-to-school, the golden arches. Trains run through the Rocky Mountains and get stuck under the Hudson. God and big skies. Giving and philanthropy.

For years also I have listened to folk smarter than me predicting the demise of the American empire. Clinton debased the presidency. Decline. Bush launched a war on a lie and led the country into its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression; families lost the roofs over their heads. Decline. Obama drew red lines only to ignore them. For years, I tried not to pay heed.

Now though, I falter. August will become September and it’s possible memories of Charlottesville will fade. Trump will commit some even greater faux-pas than failing for two whole days explicitly to condemn those who marched into town and provoked the conflagration in the first place – the white nationalists, supremacists and the KKK, sometimes collectively dubbed the alt-right. And perhaps their movement, in the face of near universal disgust, eventually even from Trump himself, will somehow fray and disperse. But I doubt it.

I reluctantly admit that it feels like we are truly in a dark space now. America the Beautiful more than ever is America the Divided. The idea we nurtured after the election of Barack Obama in 2008 that a post-racial era was upon us has been exposed as a myth, ripped apart notably by Trump, for whom Charlottesville will surely turn out to be what Hurricane Katrina became for George W. Bush. The far-right is not in retreat. Trump has egged it on and its leaders openly celebrate him for it. “We are determined to take our country back,” David Duke, the one-time KKK leader, said in Charlottesville. “We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump.”

It is not just Trump who has fractured this land. Social media has too and cable news. Those who watch MSNBC for its liberal, anti-Trump viewpoint, will never watch Fox News and its hosts for whom Trump can rarely do wrong. Americans are for Rachel Maddow or for Sean Hannity and ne’er the twain shall meet. Prejudices are reinforced by social media. My Twitter feed is different from your Twitter feed. Tribalism is ascendant. Its the new American Grand Canyon.

Being an American will have meaning only in those increasingly rare moments when we are made one tribe again. It happens, or almost happens, at times of remarkable national achievement – Olympic golds, the first man on the moon – or national tragedy. Ronald Reagan re-forged the nation with his televised address after the 1986 explosion of the Challenger space shuttle. Obama got close after the school shooting in Connecticut and the attempted assassination of Gabby Giffords in 2011. I was in Tucson for that one.

America needs bringing together today like never before. A shared love of grilling and cold beers only goes so far. Trump had the opportunity to do so on Saturday and squandered it. Actually, it was far worse than that. He is a hamburger salesman and he couldn’t bear to offend his most important customers, the bigots and racists of the far right. Even on Monday when finally he issued the condemnation we had all been waiting for he looked like a man gagging on his own words. He is incapable of uniting, because the nation does not come first for him. He does.

It is glib to borrow from Trump’s own Tweeter lexicon. But I will. Sad.