'A Divided and Polarised Nation'
As the USA celebrates its 250th birthday, Byline Times contributors Alexandra Hall Hall, Heidi Siegmund Cuda and Scott Lucas share insights with Adrian Goldberg and Peter Jukes on the Byline Podcast
The founding 13 states of the USA declared their independence from Britain on 4 July, 2026. To mark the United States’ 250th birthday, Byline Times Podcast editor Adrian Goldberg gathered a collection of key contributors to share their thoughts on America’s standing in the world today; and how it relates specifically to the UK.
Alexandra Hall Hall is a former UK ambassador to Georgia and now a naturalised US citizen, living just outside Washington DC. “This is a country that is very divided and polarised,” she said. “The damage that has been caused [by Trump] is not going to be easy to resolve.” But she added that during the World Cup, “America has shown itself to be a friendly, welcoming, hospitable place, and it really has provided a little bit of a fillip. It’s reassured Americans who are anxious that actually it still has a lot to offer the world and it’s shown a lot of its visitors that this vision of America as a country where you’re constantly dodging bullets in school yards and ICE raids, that’s actually a very narrow vision of this fantastic country.”
Byline Times executive editor Peter Jukes suggested that President Trump’s baleful influence has “killed” US soft power – at least for the time being. “When you think of America, you don’t think of Scorsese or Marlon Brando or Paul Newman or even Obama – you think of Trump.” But, he added, “the pushback against ICE shows the world the other side of America, the ‘city on the hill’, the place of freedom, of revolution, of human rights and civil rights.”
The Emmy Award winning investigative journalist Heidi Siegmund Cuda, a US citizen currently living in Europe said, “Something’s gone very wrong with our country, and I don’t see an easy way out of it. There is tech surveillance going on. People are living within a prison of tech and tech surveillance, and people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are all part of this. The people that Trump has put into positions of power are profiting so much, completely destroying the institutions that I grew up with. I do not recognise America.”
Scott Lucas, a US-born, Dublin-based professor of international politics as the Clinton Institute, UCD said: “America isn’t simply what comes out of Washington, and it’s not what comes out of a Trump centre circle. You’re going to have state and local celebrations for America’s 250th across the country, and a lot of those will be genuine community celebrations. I think back to 1976 and – at a very critical time in the States – people did come together.”
Watch the podcast in full here.