To the editor:
In the 1930s the U.S. couldn’t figure out that Hitler’s Germany was taking a hard right turn toward dictatorship. However, in 2025, Germany’s diplomatic corps clearly sees what it calls America’s “maximum concentration of power with the president at the expense of Congress and the states.” (“Leaked memo reveals alarming German warnings over Trump,” Politico, 1-19-25)
America’s intellectual and constitutional downturn started long before 2015 and even well before the steep decline in SAT scores beginning in the 1960s. It essentially started with the authoritarian veer of Franklin D. Roosevelt in our own 1930s but was checked to a degree and rolled out more slowly here.
After defeating Hitler’s Germany in World War II, America has been braying about world dominance so loud and so long we stepped into the same hot mess Germany did nearly a hundred years earlier.
How sad for us and for the world.
Kimball Shinkoskey
Utah
