Macron said, “I wish to tell the United States: France believes in you. The world believes in you.”

While France offers universal health care that is a model of humane and sensible treatment, Trump has backed a Republican bill that could take health care away from more than 20 million people, perhaps literally killing his fellow Americans by neglect.

And while Trump has been caught on tape espousing the kind of barbaric sexual treatment of women that would get him fired at any job but the one he now holds, Macron has set a new standard for the affairs of men and women by his 10-year marriage to someone who is a generation older than him.

“Glam Brigitte” and the “amorous pair,” as the European tabloids refer to the new first lady of France and her husband, have brought to the world stage something nouveau and vitalizing. There they are riding bikes in the countryside — a type of exercise, like nearly all diversions that are not golf, singled out for criticism by Trump in the campaign last year. And there was Macron, walking the streets of Paris in a downpour, without an overcoat, on the day he was sworn in.

The symbolism is significant. So, at the Group of 7 meeting in the lovely Sicilian hilltop town of Taormina, all the other world leaders walked to a closing photo-op while Trump insisted on transport in a golf cart. The message was: One nation is tired, out of gas and out of ideas.

For most of our history, an American export was youthful optimism. Teddy Roosevelt, our youngest president, sworn in after an assassination at age 42, was said to be so full of energy that his clothes could not contain him. Kennedy, elected at 43, looked to the moon and said, why not? Bill Clinton, 46, and Barack Obama, 47, were carried into office by a youthful electorate willing to take chances.

A president bereft of fresh ideas, Trump can only fall back on a gauzy past. He wants dirty coal emissions to foul the skies again. He wants a grim do-over of the failed, costly and unjust lock-’em-up days of the drug war. He seems to want a return to Cold War treatment of Cuba. Is there any “good old days” failure he has yet to embrace?

Well, monarchy. But then, if you saw that cabinet meeting on Monday, the man who would be king may still believe that the best days reach all the way back to before the American Revolution.