Welcome to Trump’s America, The i Paper’s World Insight series presenting the sharpest, deepest thinking on an era-defining shift in history and politics, investigating how Donald Trump and his administration have changed the US and the world – and where we go from here.
• The heavy price America has paid for Jeff Bezos’s ambition• The US is becoming impossible to live in• I told Trump over dinner he didn’t have my loyalty – it sealed my fate• This is how the world will look after Trump• I’ve seen what ICE has done to Minnesota. Farage wants to import that to the UK• The men who want to stop women voting• Trump isn’t damaging America. He’s reinventing it’
In 2011, I was sitting in a conference in Kabul, representing my special operations task force as we planned the next phases of the war in Afghanistan.
The surge President Barack Obama had ordered in 2009 had brought the number of US troops deployed to a high-water mark of more than 100,000, with a built-in expiration that would drop the level to 65,000 by the end of 2012.
A Norwegian colonel took his turn to brief the coalition commander, and I reflected on the unique pattern of desert camouflage worn by soldiers from a country known for fjords and glaciers.
