When was America ever great?

So my question for Trump and his supporters is: When was America great, and when did we fall from greatness?

Did we peak in 1945 after we helped defeat Germany (without the Soviet troops pressing in from the Eastern Front, who knows how long it would have taken to squelch Hitler) and then dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, bringing them to submission?

Then the Cold War began, and Stalin went from ally to enemy (though it should be said that he was never fully trusted by Churchill or FDR). Domestically, Jim Crow was still in full force throughout the South, and restrictive covenants prevented “people of color” from buying or renting in white neighborhoods throughout the nation.

In the ’50s, we reached a stalemate in Korea. In the ’60s, we had the Cuban missile crisis, JFK’s assassination, then a conflict in Vietnam that led to massive demonstrations against the war. In the ’70s, Watergate, the oil embargo and the Iran hostage crisis happened.

So maybe we were still great in the ’80s, despite the Beirut barracks bombings that killed 241 U.S. troops — 40 times more than were killed in Benghazi, and despite the Iran-Contra mess.

This story was originally published December 9, 2016 at 7:25 PM with the headline "When was America ever great?."