by Sarah Churchwell (Bloomsbury, ISBN 9781408894804)
One of the many things that chilled the blood in Donald Trump’s inauguration speech on 20 January 2017 was his repetition of the phrase, ‘America First’. Commentators were quick to point out the unsavoury history of the phrase and asked (not for the last time) whether Trump’s provocation was deliberate or the result of ignorance. In her timely and revealing study, Sarah Churchwell unearths the history of the term and, in alternating chapters, compares and contrasts it with the seemingly more appealing and aspirational ‘American Dream’.
