Earlier presidents offered inspiring visions of bringing Americans together. When we unite, we can enjoy Ronald Reagan’s “morning in America” or Bill Clinton’s “spring reborn.” Earlier presidents saluted their predecessors and their opponents, paying tribute to their service and their sacrifices. They invited Americans to share their ideals and their abundance with people less fortunate than themselves. Earlier presidents struck the same chord that reverberated from Thomas Jefferson through Abraham Lincoln to Barack Obama: We can transcend partisanship by concentrating on the shared values that span party divides.

President Trump wanted nothing to do with lofty rhetoric, tributes to others in public life, Americans’ generosity, or conciliation with his foes. Unlike all who came before him, the new president painted a grim portrait of the nation he now leads as a hopeless and decaying land of blight and carnage, where gangs run rampant and students are “deprived of all knowledge.” Consistent with his campaign rhetoric, the president continued to get his facts wrong: Crime, poverty, immigration, and unemployment are down, not up. The wealth of the middle class has not been “redistributed around the world”; it has been gobbled up by plutocrats at home. His “new decree,” that he will now put “America first, only America first,” recalls the earlier failed attempt, in the 1920s, to defend America’s borders by turning the nation’s back to the world. Few Republicans or Democrats, and even fewer economists, share his faith that “protection will lead to great prosperity.”

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