If you select “virtually any date in US history, it would be possible to find the same poisonous ingredients [… that] percolated violently to the surface on January 6th, 2021,” writes journalist and historian Nick Bryant in his new book, The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict with Itself.

Over two centuries ago, in 1787, Thomas Jefferson, America’s third president and principal author of the Declaration of Independence, wrote: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”

The quote has been repurposed by Donald Trump’s supporters: you can even buy a MAGA T-shirt emblazoned with it.

Review: The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict with Itself – Nick Bryant (Viking)

According to Pew, “Republicans and Democrats are more divided along ideological lines – and partisan antipathy is deeper and more extensive – than at any point in the last two decades.”

This often leads to the conclusion that Trump, especially, is uniquely unprecedented in US history – as is the particular threat he poses to American democracy. It seems contradictory, but this is both true and untrue.

Trump, and the movement behind him, is both new and old; times are unprecedented but also, to historians of America, frighteningly familiar. Bryant, a historian by training, meticulously makes sense of these contradictions, methodically unpicking the mythology of US history to clearly argue that Trump – and his support – is the product of that history.

President Joe Biden has repeatedly said this election cycle is nothing less than a “battle for the soul of America”, and that this is why he’s compelled to run again, aged 81. But as Bryant so clearly outlines, that battle has been raging for centuries. In the context of its divisions and inherent violence, is it even possible to argue America has one “soul”?

The battle is, and perhaps has always been, over which soul – which version of America – should reign supreme, and who gets to decide. In that sense, the attempted insurrection on January 6 2021 was not a departure from America’s history, but a continuation of it.

“All politics is history. All history is politics,” Bryant writes. And that is the only way, really, to understand modern America and what is at stake in the November elections.

The dismal spectacle of the first presidential debate last week – in which democracy did not appear to be a priority, Biden stumbling dramatically and Trump lying constantly – certainly highlighted what is at stake. For Biden and his entire political career, and for US democracy.

Bryant is one of few commentators who saw, early on, what Biden’s age meant – beyond shallow observations that he is just too old to be president.

In one of many illuminating anecdotes, Bryant recalls an image of Biden’s 2021 inauguration ceremony that has stayed with him. In a city overtaken by troops “dressed in full combat fatigues, with M16s, the military version of the AR-15, strapped diagonally across their flak jackets”, all in the expectation of more........

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