Since 2016, Donald Trump has divided America into two tribes. Everyone has been bound by their opinion of him. Were you for or against? The nation has orbited him like a planet around a great orange sun. The stakes on both sides were so high that other opinions wilted. Only two positions became credible: awful loyalty or complete hatred.
This tribalism has been worsened by fragmentation. Increasingly, voters aren’t even glowering across no-man’s land at the enemy; they are living in their own bubbles. Progressives fled X to agree with each other on BlueSky. Fox News has been supplemented by Newsmax and Real America’s Voice. To itself and the country, the New York Times pretends to be a newspaper for the whole of America – but is really a progressive redoubt. Podcasts are consumed thanks to an algorithm, delivered according to pre-judged political tastes. Tucker Carlson has amassed millions of views with a singular worldview. Voters stick to their informational siloes.
This partly explains why American and British politics feel so different despite being buffeted by similar forces. Back home, people are united in their contempt for politics generally, not just one politician in particular. To many UK voters, all of those who sit on the green benches of parliament are incompetent charlatans, not just one side or the other. Keir Starmer might have elicited widespread dislike, but he was just the latest to do so. The country wants fundamental, structural change and is prepared to keep changing course until it gets its way. Hence the rapid cycle of governments, one after the other, since Brexit.
Meanwhile, the objective in the US – either putting Trump in the White House or keeping him out of it – has been pretty clear for more than a decade. If you think the Democrats are communist extremists, or that Trump is a Hitlerian threat, then changing your vote costs too much – in relationships, reputation and self-esteem. Polarisation in the US and volatility back home. Britain has been cynical, whereas America has been fearful.
For sure, Trump blew up the old party binary and so blurred the policy lines between these two camps. For instance, the Trump administration struck a deal with Intel last year in which the company gave the government a 10 per cent stake. Partial nationalisation of the tech giants, I hear you say? Yes, but it’s not as if Trump was doing this because he’d been reading Lenin on the commanding heights of the economy. He uses the state as a weapon of extortion. He can’t separate the state from himself and so he will fight for the national interest – America First.
But the other side of that coin is that the president will use the state to make money for himself. A similar dynamic works on tariffs. Trump isn’t that concerned with protecting factory jobs. He’s interested in getting paid by other countries in the zero-sum game of power politics. His muddling of ideological lines only goes to show how much opposition or support for Trump was the real dividing line.
Of course, the parliamentary system explains a lot of the difference between the two countries. Even if the advocates of proportional representation will tell you otherwise, our system allows for third-party representation. Look at Labour in Edwardian Britain, or the SNP, Plaid Cymru, Restore and Reform today. Politics is not as concentrated around single figures, and there are alternatives for voters. By comparison, gerrymandering in the US makes large switches in the House of Representatives hard to come by. Presidential elections are decided in a handful of swing states. Yes, Trump’s hostile takeover, presaged by the Tea Party, shifted the Republican Party towards demagogy, border control and protectionism. But it’s hard to argue that the give and take of politics day to day has been about policy, not personality.
How long can this last? Possibly not that much longer. Trump and his bifurcating effect are retreating from the political scene, even with several years left in his second presidency. It’s not enough to be for or against the man. While Never Trumpers represented a powerful liberal force in the late 2010s, they now feel slightly anachronistic. The Maga movement is casting around for a new leader. A record 45 per cent of American adults identified as political independents in 2025. Some Democrats want to emulate the president’s unique communication style. Broadening the tent is in vogue. Blind opposition to Maga feels passé – not so much because Trump is less objectionable, but because the energy has gone out of it. Actual policy issues, such as American support for Israel, are becoming more important. A tight-lipped debate has even begun among the online left about whether Tucker Carlson is that bad; he’s critical of Israel after all.
The tribes are breaking up and reforming. Trump’s obsolescence will allow other issues – and other, less charismatic figures – to come into the foreground. Don’t expect an outbreak of comity, or some new age of bipartisan consensus. But once you remove the man who has divided a nation for the last ten years, then suddenly there is space to argue about something else again.
[Further reading: Can Andy Burnham move fast enough for voters?]
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This article appears in the 12 Aug 2026 issue of the New Statesman, A Very British Scandal
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