In broad terms, most people I know here and in England and Europe think well of the United States.  Here are some aspects of life and governance in the U S that give us pause.

• Guns.  The first aim of government is to preserve the peace.  The U S Constitution refers to ‘Tranquillity’ and the ‘General Welfare’.  The U S has not achieved this first and most vital objective, and it sickens the world with its likeness to the Wild West and the days of the gangsters – and its ‘thoughts and prayers’ for the dead.
• The Welfare State.  The U S refuses to provide the basic level of welfare adopted by the rest of the civilised world.  Both of these failings come from an inclination to ideology that is rejected in most of the English-speaking world, and show why people like us would never want to live in the U S. 
• Ideology.  And this leaning to ideology – theory over practice – is the opposite to what we have been brought up to here under the Anglo-Saxon common law.  They have a reverence for the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution that looks as alien to us as it is naïve.  Their addiction to this moonshine is a fundamental difference that we might be forgiven for describing as immature.
• World leadership.  The U S reached its apex in helping Germany and Japan recover after the Second World War.  Then came Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and, now, Iran.  All faith destroying failures.
• Failed presidents.  Too many since Eisenhower have been flawed intellectually or morally.  They have also shown a worrying tendency to keep it in the family – nepotism.
• Acquiescence.  By and large the electorate lets the system get away with all this – although its voting systems are badly bent.  Their addiction to ideology has led them to refuse to make voting compulsory – something that would have delivered a very different political machine.
• God.  Religion has influence in the U S that would be unthinkable outside Asia or Europe.  And it appears to us to be incandescently hypocritical and bad, for both God and the nation.  From the Puritans on, they have followed a crude Darwinism that equates success with the dollar with favour in the eyes of God.  They could never have adopted laws for dealing with poverty that were made by the English parliament under Elizabeth I – before white people arrived in America.  They now have beggars on the street in the richest country in the world.  That appalls us.
• Exceptionalism.  From the Pilgrims through the Founding Fathers and beyond, they have seen themselves as exceptional – God’s chosen people.  The Puritan stain persists.  Their tourists used to be notorious braggarts, so that we were relieved when we went to America to deal with sensible people who wanted to get on with us – and who did not have a chip on their shoulder.
• Patriotism.  Except when it comes to sport, we, and the English, do not embrace ‘patriotism’.  The Americans do, big time – as part of their exceptional proximity to God.  This is not new.  In 1838, de Tocqueville wrote: ‘Nothing is more embarrassing in the ordinary intercourse of life than this irritable patriotism of the Americans.’
• Race.  Their problems of race are such that their treatment of the Black American puts in the shade their treatment of their First Nations.  And it, too, is linked with their exceptionalism.  The Declaration of Independence was premised on a lie.
• Inequality.  People who know more about business and money than I do say that the American economy is unstoppable.  The U S has the most resilient business model in the world, but does it depend on its workers’ having no effective group strength or political expression?  And the inequality of wealth and income is morally appalling and has a life-threatening aspect that blew up a whole nation in 1789.
• Intemperance.  Partly because of matters referred to above – like ideology and God – U S politics have lost the tolerance and restraint that are essential to democracy.  If its business model looks frayed, its political model looks busted.
• Corruption.  Again because of its attitude to the State, God, and the Dollar, the U S is susceptible to corruption that is now a cancer on the political process and the nation as a whole to an extent not seen outside of Asia or Africa.
• Blindness.  In spite of all these intimations of failure, they carry on blithely – insolently, even.  They do not know or accept how Europe and the English-speaking world now think so differently of them.

When you list those differences, you see immediately that the current president, Donald Trump, perfectly exemplifies each such failing of the U S – to the letter.  Trump has no friends and he will leave the U S in the same condition. 

A perfect example is his intervention in the World Cup.  He defiles everything he touches.  (Including the Fourth – when out came the hammer and sickle!)  He has now lowered the sporting reputation of the United States to that of Russia – and his great mate.  But his ego leaves no room for shame.

We are not talking of a failed state, but a fallen republic, that we look on with the despair described by Shelley.  But Trump lives fiercely in his own Wonderland.  He has barely ever read a book.  He therefore would not know of Shelley, or that a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen gave us the phrase ‘the emperor has no clothes.’