Optimism has been the official American creed ever since. George H.W. Bush adopted Reagan’s sunny themes — and Bobby McFerrin’s happy song — for his campaign. Bill Clinton ran as the man from Hope. George W., the former Yale cheerleader, brought a sanguine sense to his pre-9/11 presidency. Barack Obama made Hope and Change his campaign catch phrases.

Nominated by the GOP the following year, California optimist Ronald Reagan labeled the opposition the “gloom and doom” Democrats and said, in essence, that the national problem was the policy, not the polity.

Back when a fretful Jimmy Carter was diagnosing the nation with a case of spiritual doldrums, which he called a “crisis of confidence” in an address now known to history as “the malaise speech,” Republicans were of a decidedly different state of mind.

It could all get a little hokey at times, but there was also a generosity, an expectation, even a certain grandeur to the idea of America.


The Western world looked to America for leadership, and American presidents led. In a phrase that rings through history, Ronald Reagan challenged Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall” — inspiring the freedom-aspiring world with his words. Under Bill Clinton, special envoy George Mitchell brokered the historic Good Friday Agreement. George H.W. Bush organized the coalition that ran Saddam Hussein’s forces out of Kuwait. George W. Bush’s anti-AIDS and anti-malaria initiatives have made him a hero in Africa. President Obama helped galvanize the world to battle global warming and negotiated a nuclear deal with Iran that even some critics concede is working.

Yes, the United States made its share of blunders, some of them big, under presidents of both parties. Still, it undertook difficult international challenges, and succeeded as often as not.

There was something special — exceptional, conservatives would say — about America, and about being an American, something that made people in many foreign countries want to make a connection, to tell you about relatives they had in the United States, or the trip they had taken here, or the one they hoped to make.


But under Trump, we’re losing all that.

Lead the West? This president doesn’t see our NATO allies as a community of nations but rather an assemblage of deadbeats and freeloaders hardly worth defending.

Trade freely with other nations? They are smarter than we are, have cut much better deals, and are likely to pick our pockets.

Then there are the times when chagrin at Trump’s grim, benighted view of the world gives way to outright embarrassment at his conduct as head of our nation. Can anyone imagine another president pursuing a false and petty feud with the mayor of a city reeling from a terrorist attack?

Rather than join the world as it confronts the 21st-century challenges of climate change, Trump chooses to retreat into the mid-20th century. Our president, after all, doesn’t identify with the Paris of 2017, but rather the Pittsburgh of the 1960s.

The challenge of transitioning from fossil fuels to greener energy is ripe with opportunity for a nation blessed with a full complement of scientists and engineers and entrepreneurs, of inventors and adapters and do-it-yourselfers. But instead of tackling that task, the national administration will retreat and retrench — and indulge the fool’s hope that climate science is wrong.

This is not the natural mood or attitude of the nation. Most Americans disapprove of Trump’s leadership. Rather, it’s the limitation a petty, peevish, petulant, prevaricating president is imposing on America.


And that’s what is most dispiriting of all. Trump’s defeatist, polarizing, paranoid presidency is dragging us all down. He is keeping America from its natural greatness.

Scot Lehigh can be reached at lehigh@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeScotLehigh.