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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Americans are locked into our traditions.

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

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.

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).

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.

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.

President Barack Obama read to a certain portion of white America as an unending attack on white Christian identity, centrality and cultural relevance. In their minds, he was seeking to end their right to bear arms and the right of conservatives to speak freely.

The evidence of our divided racial self was all over the Obama presidency from the beginning: from the shouts of 'you lie' from the well of Congress as he spoke to a joint session, to the unprecedented spectacle of American conservatives rooting against their own country being awarded the Olympic Games.

No president can force shuttered mills to reopen, or companies who've left in search of cheaper labor to relocate to the United States (or those who have come back to choose expensive humans over cheaper robots).

Donald Trump is many things - a tantrum-throwing man-child and a wannabe strongman pining for his very own banana republic among them - but perhaps most of all he is a giant, melon-colored distraction from what is happening to our country under his watch.

There are few instances when American history offers us two clear sides of a moral line.

If politics were a high school movie, Republicans would be the jocks and mean girls locking hapless freshmen inside their lockers and threatening to call in their rich parents if the teachers complain - plus the broke kids who are always willing to strong-arm homework for them from the nerds.

The abuse of congressional power for pure partisan gain has become a specialty of the GOP.

If Obama was fundamentally different from prior presidents, Trump seems to violate every tenet of what Americans have long sought as our national image.

For millions of Americans who happen to be black or brown, that core bond of trust with the government that governs closest to you, is too often broken.

In the 1950s, the black men and women and their white allies who fought for civil rights and basic human dignity could look to the federal government. If the racist sheriff and his troops beat them with batons or sprayed them and their children with water cannons, the attorney general would act.