A man and his oath
“It is not the oath that makes us believe the man, but the man the oath.” ~ Aeschylus On Friday Donald Trump will take the oath of office to become the 45 th president of the United States, bringing unmitigated joy to some and plunging others into deep despair. Judging by social media, these two reactions exhaust the range of possibilities: there are only lovers and haters. In reality, many find themselves somewhere in between. I feel something like a man who has experienced a narrow brush with death, relieved that the republic avoided the almost certainly fatal wound of a Clinton presidency, and cautiously optimistic that the wound that is Trump, though serious, is curable. As I told my family on election night, “The good news is that Clinton is not president; the bad news is that Trump is .” It turns out that the most beatable Democrat lost to the most beatable Republican. To be fair, I only had two objections to Clinton:...