There is a lot in American politics (and in American life) that is angry, greedy, reckless and violent.

Optimism....is neither weak nor naive. It can be tough and pure and earned just as clearly as any brooding existential despair.

You know, what genuinely makes me uneasy with the way things are going are not - is not really that Trump is going to do everything he said he was going to do, it`s that he has no idea of his job as president. Plus, the people who have been up close and realized that he has no idea how to do this job are leaking like sieves.

Every president learns on the job because nobody`s really prepared for the kind of decisions that cross your desk every day. No one`s prepared for that. No vice president who has scended to the presidency has ever truly been ready for that. Certainly, no vice president who`s assumed the presidency in extremis, like Harry Truman, has been ready for that. But this Trump guy doesn`t seem to be ready for a career in government.

The idea that America elected a black man to be its president forty years after it declined to allow Martin Luther King Jr. to stand on a balcony without getting shot still maintains its power to awe and inspire.

There is a barbarism in the American soul, and we must protect some of it by law. To root it out is to endanger our lives on the one hand, and our liberty on the other.

We create our own government. We are responsible for its beauty and for its ugliness. We are responsible for its glories and for its failures and, most important, we are responsible for amending those failures no matter who are their most immediate architects.