Do you remember the uproar when President Barack Obama accepted a shiny $50,000 gold coin from the Sultan of Brunei? Critics said he was “selling out the presidency.” Republicans called for his immediate impeachment. Even some Democrats said he had “betrayed the office,” particularly after Obama refused to return the gift, saying he “deserved it for the outstanding job I’ve done as your President.”

Of course you don’t remember it because it didn’t happen! It could never have happened. Not under Obama. Not under any president until the present one. Because we Americans have always understood that when one assumes the presidency of the world’s mightiest country, one also assumes a sacred obligation to the people of this nation. That obligation is to put, as one recent president describes it, “America first.”

Today, though, the hollowness of that slogan echoes even louder than the twang of country guitars floating across the empty National Mall during Trump’s tragic festivus marking America’s 250th birthday. What should have been a raucous celebration of the unique characters of our fifty states is, instead, yet another P.T. Barnum put-up job, with eighty million dollars in taxpayer dollars apparently spent on a Ferris Wheel and a Spinal Tap-sized “Arc d’Trump.” The ice cream has melted.

It’s been easy—and hilarious—to poke fun at the flaccid fair, but the laughter obscures a painful wound in our nation’s belly: That the President of the........

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