2016 was by any measure an historic year. A different America revealed itself to its own people and to the rest of the world. Donald Trump was unlike any Presidential candidate in history and now is set to be President. This FRDH podcast special explores How America Got This Way. FRDH stands for First Rough Draft of History, which is what journalists like to say they are writing and in this FRDH special four London-based journalists with a cumulative century of reporting on America and the way America effects the world talk about their own rough drafts of American history.

Robin Lustig, former presenter of Newshour on the BBC World Service, Mina al-Oraibi Iraqi-British journalist formerly of pan-Arab newspaper Asharq al-Awsat, and Ned Temko, former political editor of The Observer, join Michael Goldfarb to talk about America, isolationism, Iraq, Syria, Putin. They ask can American institutions - especially Congress - stand up to the surprising changes in American society and is 2016 as historic in comparison with other years when modern history changed: 1968 and 1989.