On CNN International and later on PBS, Tehran-raised Christiane Amanpour demonstrated she was very enamored of Trump-hating Yale history professor Timothy Snyder's phrase "superpower suicide" to explain what Trump is doing in the foreign policy arena.
Funny, I thought giving pallets of cash to a "Death To America" Islamist regime so they could build nuclear weapons looked more like suicide. Here's how Amanpour set it up:
AMANPOUR: And so is such a walloping row between American president and a Pope, in this case, an American Pope, Leo. And this is also very unusual. There have obviously been disagreements between world leaders and the Pope in the past, but this huge disagreement is pretty noticeable. And you have started using afraid -- a phrase, sorry, "superpower suicide," to describe the state of America. You know, it's not decline, it's not collapse.
You've also called it "attempted suicide." I'm not sure whether that's, you know, to leave room for a little hope. But tell us what you mean by that.
ON CNN International AND on PBS, Christiane Amanpour is every enamored of the phrase "superpower suicide" to explain what Trump is doing in the foreign policy arena.
— Tim Graham (@TimJGraham) April 23, 2026
Funny, I thought that was giving pallets of cash to a Death To America regime so they could build nuclear… pic.twitter.com/tgUToepVSI
Snyder, who wrote the leftist-celebrated books On Tyranny and The Road to Unfreedom to sound the anti-Trump alarm in his first term, obliged:
SNYDER: Well, I think, look, we've been talking about the war in Iran, which is a war for which we didn't have a justification, which we're losing, and, as we've discussed, we're covering in genocidal rhetoric. And I think that's not a coincidence. I think that's a symptom of something deeper.
And when I say superpower suicide, I'm trying to emphasize choices that are being made to make the United States much weaker than it has to be. And those choices involve things like governing as a group of oligarchs rather than as a state. They involve not having a coherent ideology about the future of the United States.They involve deliberately missing technological transitions that are very important, especially involving energy. They involve having a completely impossible fiscal policy, where you're spending much more than you're taking in. They involve undoing science and education, which are the pillars of long-term strength. And all of this is a matter of choice, and all of it's happening in the last year.
Snyder added "deliberately alienating allies, which is historically very weird, not being able to handle adversaries, losing a trade war to China, assisting Russia, breaking down the international order, which for generations was built up to put America in the center."
It's not surprising that a leftist would suggest it's suicide to fail to line up with the Europeans on climate-alarmist "transitions" and do whatever they want on Russia, which keeps the "international order" as the Left likes it. It's weirder to argue about bad fiscal policy and overspending, which is exactly what the left does, constantly suggesting the Republicans are in engaged in heinous cuts in social services.
In sum, this is just two lefties discussing how Trump is an absolute disaster. It's nice that PBS can't make us pay for this bubble any more.
