Trump built Trump Tower using mob concrete, not Bethlehem steel.
America is, in many ways, as much an idea as it is a country. And Americans have long marketed that idea around the world through our popular culture.
The Hollywood of Frank Capra's era, when Reagan became a minor star, sold the world an image of American pith and patriotism in many ways as defining as the moon landing or the A-bomb.
Our love of Hollywood-style glamour helped elect two presidents: JFK and Reagan, who fulfilled the prophecy that a country so enamored of actors would eventually make one their president.
Americans are locked into our traditions.
It is uncomfortable in the extreme for people, and particularly for members of the press, to confront the notion that a president could be so far outside the bounds of tradition that he must be treated differently from his predecessors.
There are few instances when American history offers us two clear sides of a moral line.
Republicans don't vote Republican because of Nancy Pelosi. They vote Republican because they are Republicans.
The criminal justice system in the United States is designed to do two things really well: to railroad black and brown bodies into prison, and to keep police officers out of it.
American populist politics has a long tradition, from Andrew Jackson to Huey Long to Joseph McCarthy. But the politician Trump is most like could be George Wallace.
Protest is, at its core, designed to move policy.
The presidency is, in many ways, America's comment on itself; our collective national costume. In the occupant of our sole nationwide elected office, we see who we think we are, or who we want to be.
Dwight Eisenhower presented a face of America that was heroic and resolute; Ronald Reagan represented a return to confidence and glamour after the weary Carter years.
Trump is, in every way, the anti-Obama.
Hillary Clinton's time in the Senate indicates she is happier being a policy workhorse than a show horse.
America after Trump may be more like the European Union; a rambling alliance of interstate compacts, rather than the forced marriage of a country that emerged after the Civil War.
Trump is reviled around the world, as is the U.S. under his leadership.
The American presidency combines elements of the efficient and the dignified. The president presides over governance - not making legislation but proposing it, cajoling the co-equal federal legislature and then signing and executing the laws.
To be sure, the Trump administration is shot through with corruption.
For many Americans - many humans - Trump's presidency can often feel unbearable.
