Father’s Day: By chance, I stumbled onto a vitriolic Atlanta radio station tied at the hip to this president’s Truth Social network. In just a few minutes I heard he was the greatest of all presidents to lead the greatest of all nations. The United States did not need old friends in Europe because they had turned liberal, inclusive, and were in any case weak and doddering entities swollen with dark-skinned interlopers and reliant on the U.S. for their own defense. I learned all Democrats were deluded or brainwashed Marxists. I learned that America did not need a federal government but should rely instead on private corporations such as Space X or Meta. I was told the U.S. was in its rights to seize Greenland or any other territories It deemed essential to national security. Finally, I learned that the president should become a kind of czar with greater executive power, especially over the annoying judiciary. None of this is entirely new. It was spoken in part during the red-baiting era of the 1950s and, soon after, extolled by the reactionary John Birch Society. It resurfaced in the 1990s and reached new peaks, witness the Tea Party, when the “Islamist” president ascended to the White House. But the radio broadcast also reminded me of the words of my father, who on our first weekend trip to New York — I was 11 — told me that while it was fine to marvel at the skyscrapers and wide boulevards, I should always remember the U.S. was not New York City at heart. It was provincial and parochial, even isolationist, and had become a true world player only as a result of World War II and the ascent of Stalin’s communism. If the Cold War ever ended, he said, America might well retreat into a belligerent shell, suspicious of all that did not strictly adhere to its cultural norms. But my eyes were too focused on the Empire State Building to pay him much attention. Now, 62 years later, it’s clear I should have been listening.