What’s jarring here is that Trump’s wildly polarizing rhetoric put the nation through a nightmarish campaign. He took raw wounds of race, class and gender and tore at them until they bled. He created the equivalent of a national panic attack. America is a strong country, but it’s a fragile one, too. Trump says he wants to put it back together, but the job will be harder because of the damage he did himself.
We’re watching a new season of the Trump reality-TV show — the one in which he realizes that the job he wanted is much bigger than he imagined and that he needs to heal wounds, rather than keep them festering. The job is bigger than the man, even this one, with his oversize ego.
What should he do? Trump put it just right in his comments to the Times: “We want to bring the country together, because the country is very, very divided.” If he means that, he needs to be a wise, careful steward — two qualities we’d all love to see more of from our next president.
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