When he ran for president in 2008, Mr. Obama was the candidate of the young and the demographically ascendant. He eventually attracted strong majorities among African-Americans, Hispanics, Asian-Americans and voters under 30.

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.

Republicans have relentlessly pursued investigations of Hillary Clinton, going back to her time as secretary of state (to say nothing of the 30-year project to take down both Clintons by right-wing outside groups).

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.

We Americans think quite highly of ourselves, and nothing makes us think more of ourselves than our romantic view of our presidents.

Americans are locked into our traditions.

Americans have, at various times, leaned on the FBI for a measure of justice that local and state police couldn't be counted on to deliver, and recoiled in fear at their exercise of raw federal power. That uneasy trust; the combination of need and dread, is the lot that FBI agents live with day to day.

In many ways, Trump is both a boon and a bane to Republicans. His insanity and moral decrepitude keep the country focused on things other than the horrible public policies the GOP is attempting to ram through. But because he has no loyalty to anything other than himself, he's much more useful to them as a shiny object than as an ally.

Of all the liberal resentments during the Obama years, one of the sharpest has been the failure to secure a public insurance option as part of the Affordable Care Act.

I've written before that the president is our national avatar - a stand-in for what we believe we are, or want to be.

If I had to reduce 'Black Panther' to a single word, it would be 'glorious.'

Whether on guns, race, culture or feminism, there really are two Americas.

If you are Black or Brown, or a liberal or immigrant or Democrat, or a woman unwilling to quietly submit, then Ailes was the ultimate villain. You were the object of mockery and scorn - sometimes overt, often subtle. You were the thing to be gawked at, pawed at, jeered at, propositioned or feared.

Bill Clinton had a hell of a first 24 months, even though he, like Trump, enjoyed a congressional majority. Scandal after scandal befell the White House, including the failure of Hillary Clinton-led healthcare reform. But Clinton's scandals, from 'filegate' to 'travelgate' to a brouhaha over a haircut, were petty, personal and domestic.

The Trump phenomenon might feel both interminable and unprecedented to Republican elites, but of course it isn't.

The work of anti-racism can only take place inside each individual soul, where we all try to grow into better people. There is no national tonic or instant cure.

Whatever its cause, the media's general Hillary Clinton loathing is a foundational truth that would define her as president.

The reversion of American society to a nation of the superrich and the rest... is straining the country in ways that go way beyond economics.

Obama has presided over sweeping cultural advances, particularly in the rights of gay and lesbian Americans.

Trump's cabinet picks seem designed to unwind government itself, leaving the average citizen completely exposed and vulnerable to full exploitation by corporate interests.

Trump is a big businessman. He's your boss or CEO, not one of your brothers on the line.

It sounds terribly cynical, but the real surprise in the Philando Castile case is not that the officer was acquitted but that he was charged at all. The prosecutors in the case deserve great credit for even trying. But no one should be shocked about how it turned out.

The Trumps have spent exactly zero percent of their lives caring about anyone other than themselves.

Trump is reviled around the world.

Popularity has always been the key currency in choosing a president.

What stalwart Republican would stop Trump from profiteering for his businesses from the White House the way he's gamed his companies and the tax code for decades, or prevent him from letting his adult children milk their father's position to benefit his supposed 'blind trust?'

Trump is an erratic figure - seemingly fragile, consumed by his own unpopularity and desperate to somehow exceed Barack Obama in public acclaim.

Wakanda, in short, is the Africa of black dreams.

A major loss by a Democratic prosecutor at the hands of the BLM movement could alter the political landscape in a way that might actually change the way prosecutors, and ultimately police departments, operate.

To be white in America is to assume, with total self-confidence and little afterthought, the personal ownership of public spaces.

Trump channeled ethno-populist rage as naturally and charismatically as George Wallace had during the 1960s, while seating a billionaire cabinet.

In fundamental ways, the 2016 Democratic primary has been a litigation of the Obama years, and of whether the president's 2008 campaign vow of 'change we can believe in' succeeded or failed.

To be sure, police do a dangerous job and take tremendous personal risks to safeguard the public. Most officers just want to do their jobs and go home alive.

Trump's real Achilles heel, and the thing most likely to keep him out of the White House, is his brazen contempt for women (plus his lack of impulse control and inability to stay off his Android phone).

The one woman Trump does seem to totally respect is his daughter from his first marriage, Ivanka, on whom he heaps constant, effusive, at-times borderline creepy praise and physical affection.

Trump's trade and immigration policies will deliver an economic shock to states like Texas where trade produces a substantial share of the jobs, and which depend on high oil prices.

Trump is beset by clear and alarming conflicts between his international business concerns and the national interest.

Trump built Trump Tower using mob concrete, not Bethlehem steel.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

To be sure, the Trump administration is shot through with corruption.