During dull moments at school, I admit, I not only drew soldiers shooting one another but also tanks, bombers, fighters, and even the occasional space ship with planet-destroying powers.

I'm not usually absolutely speechless.

Ronald Reagan believed in America as the shining city on the hill - Morning in America. But Donald Trump has a much different vision of American greatness, of nationalism - a much darker view, I think, of the world.

If a university announced that henceforth, it would be offering a three-year bachelor's degree, in one stroke it would cut the cost of a college education and provide a distinctive way of competing for students - as well as put the institution on the cutting edge of reform.

In many ways, anti-anti-Trumpism mirrors Donald Trump himself because, at its core there are no fixed values, no respect for constitutional government or ideas of personal character - only a free-floating nihilism cloaked in insult, mockery, and bombast.

On his first full day in office, Mr. Trump insisted that his inaugural crowd was the largest ever, a baseless boast that will likely set a pattern for his relationship both to the media and to the truth.

Conservatives spent an awful long time ignoring things: the birthers, the bigots, the xenophobes, the alternative-reality media. We had assumed that they were postcards from the fringe.

We would naturally prefer not to reckon with the worst of what people do or say on the margins, but we have to. Especially if it seems possible to trace a line from vicious rhetoric on a computer screen to violent action.

Denouncing Nazis is the easiest thing in the world: All it requires is a modicum of historical perspective and a working moral compass.