Tornado Alley (PROG)

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How to make America not-great again, in one easy lesson: You take all those things that America helped to create which brought about a more just and peaceful world and which helped America become a leader of a better world, ana you rip them to shreds.

More excerpt: The story of how we turned the chaos and trauma of the Second World War into something better—and not Americans alone but Americans working with allies, working with defeated adversaries—that is not as dramatic as the battles of World War II. I don’t know that people are going to make successful documentary series out of trade negotiations in food aid and the negotiation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. But those achievements were great, and they are the things that at the eighth-decade interval require us most to be mindful, because they’re the things that are most in danger of being lost. You know, they’re marble and bronze statues that commemorate all the horror and bloodshed of the war. But those quiet victories of peacetime that built a better world, we’re in danger of forgetting them because right now, the United States is, step by step, unraveling its own great achievement.

You know, Winston Churchill described the Battle of Britain, in 1940, as Britain’s finest hour. If Americans are looking for a finest hour of their own, it’s not anything that happened during the war—when America was, by the way, a late entrant. It’s the five, seven years, 10 years after the war, when Americans and others learned from the mistakes after the First World War and built a better world that we still enjoy. Now all of those lessons have been forgotten, and Donald Trump is single-handedly determined to repeat all the mistakes that after the First World War put the world on the path to the Second World War: protectionism, isolationism, narrow nationalism, lack of forbearance, lack of mutual understanding, lack of any understanding of America’s place as a leader—because of its values, because it’s a country that is admired and trusted, not just because it’s a country that is strong and powerful and feared.

We should think of the 8th of May, and the Victory in Europe Day and Victory in Japan Day, as the beginnings of our modern story. And maybe the message that we need to hear from leaders is not a message of self-congratulation and self-celebration but a message of rededication to the work that was done after the end of the war to build a better world that those of us who grew up in it had the privilege of enjoying and that we are at risk of not bequeathing to the generations that come after us.

And now my conversation with Anne Applebaum. But first, a quick break.

Your - https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2025/05/the-david-frum-show-the-most-corrupt-presidency-in-american-history/682720/