Prof. Vittorio Valli will present the main contents of two chapters of his recent bookThe American Economy from Roosevelt to Trump, Palgrave-Macmillan, November 2018 . He will discuss how president Obama was rather successful in his neo-Keynesian countercyclical response to the “great recession”, but could not solve the great structural problems of the declining US economy, which contributed to Trump’s success in the 2016 presidential election. Yet, Trump’s America First policy contributes determining strong and dangerous divisions both in the domestic economy and society and in international relations.