Two days after Donald Trump’s Inauguration, in 2017, Karl Sharro, a Lebanese-Iraqi satirist better known by his Twitter name, Karl ReMarks, wrote an essay for Politico that went viral, titled “America, You Look Like an Arab Country Right Now.” Arguments over the existence of a “deep state” sounded like conspiracy theories from home; the same was true of the scenes at Inauguration protests: the police cordon lines, the tear gas, and the foreign correspondents trying to explain what the heck was happening to a startled outside world. “Which side will the Army take?” Sharro asked in a satiric leap, probably never imagining that, three and a half years later, a U.S. senator would call to deploy the Army against American protesters. This summer, memes proliferated on Twitter likening American police behavior to that of security forces in countries that the U.S. typically lectures on human rights and democracy. And, in the runup to the 2020 election, the similarities have eclipsed those Sharro poked fun at in 2017. Rigged election? Peaceful transfer of power? “Come on! This is bordering on plagiarism now,” Sharro wrote, back in 2017. “Please write your own plots and stop borrowing ours.”
“It is stunning for me, as an African, reporting on it, that the same things that America has been lecturing Africa on appear to be happening right here,” Larry Madowo, a journalist for the BBC, says. In the short documentary “The America Bureau,” he is joined by twelve journalists from all over the world, who speak about their experiences covering the U.S. election for other countries’ networks. Many of the journalists share Sharro’s bewilderment, his Schadenfreude, and, above all, his impression of just how badly the U.S. is doing. They point to America’s economic and racial inequality, and the cost of health care and education. Living in America can be an outrageous ripoff, and it baffles outsiders that Americans don’t just accept these conditions but seem to think that their system is the best one possible. “There is this notion among Americans that you seem more free than the rest of us,” Jesper Steinmetz, a reporter from Denmark, says. “In so many ways, you’re the opposite of, of exceptional,” Arjen van der Horst, a reporter from the Netherlands, adds.
As the Presidential election approaches, the rest of the world is watching, sometimes amused but also afraid. As much as many hope that the U.S. will wake up to its unwarranted smugness, most don’t want to see the nation fail. “When there’s a forest fire in California, the air in Canada is hazy,” Alexander Panetta, a Canadian, points out. Burning fossil fuels in the U.S. contributes to droughts everywhere from the African Sahel to Guatemala, leading migrants to areas where the climate, so far, is more hospitable. Much of the responsibility for these events is collective, but few countries have as large a role in determining the fate of the world as the U.S. does. American “voters are not always aware of how their vote counts, a lot,” Sonia Dridi, from France, says. “Not only for them but for the rest of the world.” And no Presidential election is observed with keener interest by the rest of the world than an American one.
I was twelve years old when I followed the Bush-Gore election, in 2000, from a small town in the Egyptian Nile Delta. I was too young to understand much, but I remember poring over the bright polling charts that often ran in the Arabic edition of Newsweek, pausing at one that displayed the faces of George W. Bush and Al Gore side by side, and feeling immense pressure to take a side. I doubt that I could have articulated why the election mattered, but it was clear that it did. I was twenty—and, by then, I knew why it mattered—when I stayed up into the wee hours of the morning in a university town in Scotland to watch the results of the Obama-McCain election, in 2008. “Nothing that happens in the United States spares—whether good, bad, or ugly—the rest of the world,” Abderrahim Foukara, a reporter for Al Jazeera, says. And, as with those that preceded his, the next President’s decisions about war, the economy, migration, and climate change will be felt around the world.
