My wife and children are American citizens. Every summer we fly from Europe to visit family. This year we won’t (cue shrugs from Trump supporters), mostly because I don’t want to holiday in Donald Trump’s America. Some of the other 77.5 million international visitors to the US in 2015 may feel similarly. Already, Trump is creating a new generation of anti-Americans. True, some despotic regimes such as Saudi Arabia also practise religious discrimination. But I don’t go on holiday in Saudi Arabia either, and I thought the US’s standards were higher.
I was always pro-American. I grew up on wartime stories of chocolate-distributing GIs liberating European towns. In 1980, aged 10, I moved from the Netherlands to California with my parents and was enchanted. The houses were bigger than in cold, pinched Europe, the TV more fun, and Americans spoke to strangers on the street. Even ordinary people had big houses, and they routinely ate out. (In Europe in 1980, a restaurant meal was a big deal, reserved for occasions like your grandparents’ silver wedding anniversary or a cousin’s release from prison.)
When I returned to the US as a student, I was enchanted again. By then I knew a bit about the country’s troubled past, but most Americans seemed open about it and keen to improve. One of my professors had a set speech in which he called race “the unfinished business of American democracy”. Though he was a pompous charlatan, I bought his general thrust: the US gets better.