1. It’s Friday, June 9, 2017.

2. It’s the 44th anniversary of Secretariat’s amazing Belmont Stakes victory that completed horse racing’s Triple Crown.

3. A year ago, Britain’s vote to leave the European Union – Brexit – was seen by some as a harbinger of what might happen in the US presidential election. I was in the group that ignored the sign – maybe the British were dumb enough to leave the EU, but Americans weren’t so stupid as to elect Trump president.

OK. That’s a big miss.

In addition to being utter foolishness, Brexit and Trump share two important attributes.

First, they both got by thanks to really idiotic rules. In the UK, letting a simple majority change a nation’s direction. In the US, the Electoral College that gave someone 3 million votes shy of his rival the world’s most important job.

Second, people under the age of 30 knew better. In Britain, they were overwhelmingly against leaving the EU. In this country, they supported Hillary Clinton by a nearly 20 percentage point margin.

Last night, the younger generation in the U.K. may have sent a message that things are about to change.

An election that was supposed to strengthen the Conservative majority ended up ending it. Theresa May will likely remain prime minister – the Conservatives did get the most seats in Parliament. But now they need the people in Northern Ireland who want to stay British to govern.

The Labor Party (sorry British friends, I’m American; no u), thought to be on the verge of a relevance-reducing wipeout, targeted younger voters with such issues as tackling student debt, increasing the minimum wage and minimizing the damage done by Brexit.

The party ended up gaining 29 seats, keeping May and the Conservatives from their sought-after mandate.

Turnout among younger voters, while still below that of their elders, was higher than in the past. There are indications that these folks saw what happened when they didn’t show up for the Brexit vote.

4. And that’s why this vote should be a more hopeful event for those of us who hate Trump than the Comey hearing.

Because Trumpism is absolutely not about doing anything for younger people.

From gutting public education to disregarding the student debt crisis. From denying climate change to denying easy access to birth control. From making health care unaffordable to making it harder to see the world.

Bernie Sanders, to his credit, saw this. He tapped into this sentiment last year, and the fact that Clinton really couldn’t do it quite as well cost her the election.

Maybe the parallels aren’t there. Maybe the Trumpistas are always going to turn out in bigger percentages than the sane people.

But if Brexit presaged Trump, perhaps Labor’s showing last night presaged younger voters realizing that there is a lot at stake in these elections.

Getting them to show up, starting later this month in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District and continuing through next year’s state and congressional elections, is the only way we’re going to get rid of Trump.

1. It’s Thursday, June 8, 2017.

2. It’s Jerry Stiller’s 90th birthday and Barbara Bush’s 92nd.

Two big stories – that we know of – on both sides of the Atlantic today. Real quick thoughts on both.

3. James Comey isn’t going to make anyone happy today.

I suspect my fellow Trump haters are a little disappointed with the prepared testimony. The fired FBI director says Trump wasn’t a subject of the investigation into whether members of his campaign and administration colluded with Russia to hack the 2016 election.

There was the hope that Comey’s testimony would be so ringingly condemning of Trump that all the members of the committee and anyone else in Washington would march to the White House with pitchforks. Get the tar and feathers.

That’s not gonna happen.

Trump and the Republicans are already pointing to the parts of the testimony that give Trump what he wanted all along – a public statement that he wasn’t under investigation.

But if they’re OK with that, they’ve also lost the opportunity to malign the other things to which Comey will testify. It’s a little silly to say he’s right about Trump not being investigated and wrong about Trump trying to get his crony Michael Flynn off the hook.

Trump obstructed justice. That’s a crime.

And that’s what the Democrats will pounce on all day. But, as long as the apparatus to pursue that is run by craven Republicans, it doesn’t mean a whole lot.

It will be interesting but, in the end, completely dispiriting. In other words, just another day in the Trump administration.

4. Across the Atlantic, Britain goes to the polls to elect a new Parliament.

You have to think Prime Minister Theresa May is kicking herself for calling this election three years early. She thought she might have a chance to boost the Conservative margin in the House of Commons and make it easier to get her agenda passed.

But polls show the race is close. Labor, which couldn’t get out of its own way a couple of months ago, could conceivably gain a plurality. Jeremy Corbyn, who seems to be the most unpopular party leader imaginable, could be asked to form a government.

There are a lot of complications in this election. The implementation of Brexit. The recent terror attacks in Manchester and London. The fate of the National Health Service, beloved by many Britons, particularly in light of the wrenching battle over the less-comprehensive Obamacare in the United States.

And last, but not least, Trump. May has a less contentious relationship with him than such leaders as Germany’s Angela Merkel, France’s Emmanuel Macron and Canada’s Justin Trudeau.

So, when people talk about what nations will lead the West in light of America’s apparent abdication, Britain doesn’t get mentioned.

The results might not be known until dawn tomorrow in the UK. It could be an interesting night.

1. It’s Wednesday, June 7, 2017.

It’s the 180th birthday of Adolf Hitler’s father and the 58th birthday of Mike Pence.

Facts are interesting.

2. It was hard to keep up last night with the maelstrom that is the 45th presidency of the United States.

But let’s give credit to the people trying to keep democracy functioning in this country – my former colleagues in American journalism.

This is just last night, in the order I saw them:

ABC News: The tensions between Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions are so bad that Sessions has offered to resign.

CNN – U.S. investigators believe that Russian hackers planted a fake story with Qatar’s state news agency that pissed off its neighbors in the Persian Gulf, leading to a break in diplomatic relations that Trump has applauded.

The New York Times: James Comey, who would later be fired as FBI Director, told Sessions that he didn’t want to be left alone with Trump. He didn’t tell Sessions that he thought Trump’s request that Comey drop his investigation of former national security adviser Michael Flynn was inappropriate – if not flat out illegal.

The Washington Post: Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats told associates that Trump asked him to intervene with Covey to get him to drop the investigation of Flynn.

Forbes (that’s a surprise) – Trump diverted money that his son’s foundation raised to fight pediatric cancer into his own company and foundation for whatever purposes he saw fit.

Those are five stories that, if they broke over the course of a month, would be detrimental to a presidency in sane times. Except that these stories broke in one night. Not even – over the course of about four or five hours.

And this putz is still president.

3. I mean, aren’t you tired?

Is there anyone in this country with functioning brain cells who isn’t exhausted from the constant scandal and meanness that this administration perpetrates on an hour-by-hour basis?

You have idiots running amuck in the Cabinet. You have Republicans in Congress complicit in the chaos because they’ve deemed that people who aren’t wealthy don’t deserve much in the way of government.

And you have a guy elected president who isn’t as advanced as any six-year-old. He simply doesn’t know right from wrong. He has no freakin’ idea how to run anything, much less the whole country.

This night-after-night-after-night of scandal, intrigue and mean-spiritedness is wearing this country down every single day.

The worst of this is yet to come. As longer Trump and his henchmen stay in power, the more dispirited this nation will get.

4. Christopher Wray must be a big fan of “Titanic.”

After serving as an assistant attorney general for President George W. Bush and the lawyer for New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, he’s found another sinking ship. He’s going to be nominated as FBI director for Trump.

I’m sure Wray is a dedicated public servant. But he seems determined to be on the wrong side of things. Big time.

5. Today’s terrorist attack on Tehran is appalling. If you’re not bothered by it, you really don’t care about terrorism.

I understand what Iran is and has done. But people have the right to walk the streets of any city in peace, and this attack is the work of cowards.

ISIS is claiming responsibility. Again. ISIS – under siege in what’s left of the land it seized in Iraq and Syria – would lay claim to milk souring if it thought people would believe them.

There apparently are skeptics in Iran about the claim. The attack, the first of its kind in the country, comes in the wake of Saudi Arabia’s move to isolate Qatar by leading four other nations to break off diplomatic relations. That move was applauded by Trump, who seems more determined to pick a fight with Iran than to, say, bring peace to the Middle East.

Because ISIS is closer to Iran than Britain, I’m a little less skeptical. Attacking Tehran could have been a diversionary tactic from the fighting in Mosul and Raqqa.

But Trump’s trip to the Mideast seems to have preceded a lot of not-so-cool things happening. It’s hard to believe this deadly attack in Tehran is the end of that.

1. It’s Tuesday, June 6, 2017.

2. It’s the 73rd anniversary of the Allied landing in Normandy, a day to think with reverence of the young men who hit those beaches and saved the world.

I first became aware of D-Day when my father took me to see the movie “The Longest Day” in 1963. I was nine and loved history, so I bugged my parents to take me to see this movie.

“The Longest Day” is probably now best remembered for its theme music. But in its day it was a big deal. The ads bragged about the large international all-star cast and the fact that it was filmed where the battle happened.

The film was released the year before. But back in those days, movies had much longer runs – this was obviously well before any of us thought we could watch a full-length film on a whim at home. That’s how the now-quaint concept of first-run movie houses came into being – most of them being in midtown Manhattan, around Times Square.

Most everything in Queens where we lived was a second or even a third run. In fact, what I seem to remember is that the theater where we saw “The Longest Day” was that it was a discount theater – I’m sure he paid less than $1 for both of us to see it.

It probably bothered him that “The Longest Day” was a one-film showing. My father was determined to only go to theaters that showed double features – another quaint concept. Most people today can’t sit through two movies in a theater – although they can watch four or five hours at a time of a TV show they’re binging at home.

3. Anyway, there’s no question that “The Longest Day” is the sanitized version of what happened 73 years ago. The more realistic version, the one with soldiers getting their heads blown off and bodies torn by bullets and shrapnel, is Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan.”

“The Longest Day” was more – and this seems like a pejorative when you think about the actual horror of the invasion – fun. There was a whole shtick with Robert Mitchum as a general who keeps the same cigar in his mouth throughout the entire invasion. There was some other thing with John Wayne getting carried off by his troops in heroic fashion. Guys in British accents said funny things.

I haven’t seen this movie since I don’t remember when. I think I found it on TV one night while dialing around and saw the conclusion, when Mitchum finally throws his cigar butt into the sand at the end of the day. I’d bet I wouldn’t find it nearly as entertaining or mesmerizing as I did watching it with my father more than a half-century ago in a Queens movie house.

“The Longest Day” probably didn’t intend to minimize or sanitize D-Day. Perhaps the wound was too raw in the early 1960s to explore what really happened – that seems to be the way with a lot of World War II. It’s the same with the Holocaust. It seems as those the first years after the war were spent minimizing the atrocity, with only the subsequent years revealing the true horror – Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” providing quite a reminder.

No, “The Longest Day” is just a big old-fashioned war movie. It might stir some to patriotism, but it doesn’t make much of a statement about it outside of cheering for the good guys.

And that’s the thing about the real D-Day. It seems we understand better – in 2017 – the courage it took for those soldiers to brave everything they faced than we did in 1963. A sea-sickening ride across the English Channel, the concentrated force of German armaments, a shooting gallery of a beach and scaling the Normandy embankments.

All to rid the world of the evil of Nazism.

4. Keep in mind one other thing.

There was no diversity in “The Longest Day.” You might think, for example – as I did – that African-Americans took no part in the invasion.

It’s not a racist thought, per se. Most Americans know that the military was segregated, so it seems logical that might not be any people of color there.

But it’s far from accurate.

The 320th Very Low Altitude barrage balloon battalion – an all-black unit – provided important protection for invading soldiers on Omaha Beach. 

The battalion – about 700 men strong, according to the Army’s own history – set up these balloons that were designed to force German warplanes to fly higher in the sky. The balloons were rigged so that if the Germans tried to fly into them, the planes would be destroyed – the battalion was actually credited with a kill when one plane did just that.

In order to set up the balloons, the men of the battalion had to get on the same beach where other soldiers were getting blown to bits by the Germans. They also had to find a way to get their equipment across the Channel without sinking.

Of course they found a way. They are, after all, Americans.

African-Americans, as a whole, fought with valor and distinction in the Second World War. When it ended, the effort of white supremacists to go back to the prewar Jim Crow society succeeded only briefly.

A lot of the reason for the success of the civil rights movement has to do with the fact that anyone with a fair mind had to recognize the courage of African-Americans in the war, and how hypocritical it was to condemn Nazism while embracing its cousin, segregation.

When older people think of the America that they conceived of as great, the reason we got the stupid election result we got, they see the America of “The Longest Day” – white men fighting for freedom and prevailing.

It’s their ignorance of who else fought for freedom that is at the heart of what ails our nation right now. African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans and Native Americans all contributed to what makes America great – including bleeding and dying on battlefields around the world for the cause of freedom.

Including Normandy. The men of the 320th VLA battalion were among the brave men who saved the world on a bloody beach 73 years ago today.

1. It’s Monday, June 5, 2017.

2. It’s the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Six-Day War between Israel and all its Arab neighbors.

Israel still occupies much of the territory it took in those six days. That remains a great lesson to countries that try to gang up on their neighbors, as the Arab states led by Egypt did in the days before the war.

3. There’s a reason London is a target for nihilists. Like New York and Paris, most people there are too busy living to think about dying. For failures in life, this is often too much to bear, so they try to get others to share their misery.

Most Londoners won’t cave in. That’s why there was such a backlash to The New York Times headline about how Saturday’s attack had the city “reeling.”

Reeling, their arse! Londoners, like New Yorkers and Parisians, don’t reel. They stand up. Yes, they mourn and they hurt. But they understand that what nihilists want is for them to be afraid. If they’re not afraid, the jackasses lose.

4. You know who doesn’t understand that? The idiot who somehow got into the Oval Office.

At a time when one the President of the United States’ biggest jobs is cheering on a city in pain, this cetriolo misinterprets the statements of the city’s mayor and whines about how the world isn’t serious about terrorism.

The way he is, by playing 18 holes at the country club he owns in Virginia. You and I paid for that round, incidentally.

The round of tweets – we’re giving up on the idea that this administration has any concept of decorum or standards – that followed Saturday night’s attack were an embarrassment to this country. They will stain this country’s history forever.

And yet, much of the vegetation that voted for Trump still thinks he’s making America great somehow. As if any president before this did anything as humiliating and detrimental to our cause.

5. While I’m in this frame of mind, let me complain about three of my former employers – The New York Times, The Associated Press and CNN.

Yesterday, in the middle of the afternoon, the alerts went off on my iPhone. The Times: “ISIS has claimed the London attack…” AP: “The head of the SITE intelligence group says the Islamic State group has claimed responsibility for the London attacks.” CNN at least has a little disclaimer, but still: “ISIS-linked media wing claims the terror group is responsible for the London attack, but offered nothing to back the claim.”

Really?

ISIS, if it knew what the hell was going on outside one of its caves in Syria, would claim responsibility for sour milk and jackknifed tractor-trailers on the New Jersey Turnpike if it thought someone might believe it.

Anyone who gives credence to an ISIS claim by publishing it without proof helps perpetrate the myth that these people represent anything other than being miserable and making others that way.

That these people are tangentially linked to Islam is really unfortunate and unfair to about 1.8 billion Muslims, most of whom seem satisfied with that general way of religious thinking.

The people who do crap like what happened in London, Manchester, Paris and going back to New York in 2001 are the unhappy fringe.

Unless there’s evidence – a video of these nihilists in a Syrian training camp, a name, a history, something! – that ISIS actually had anything to do with an incident, it is ridiculous for legitimate news organizations to flash their claims of responsibility.

Flashing that ISIS claimed responsibility for London was less informative than flashing that water is wet.

1. It’s Friday, June 2, 2017.

2. It’s the 160th birthday of Edward Elgar, who probably would be stunned at how many times his March No. 1 in D gets played this time of year.

He’d also be pissed he wasn’t born at a time when he could get some of royalty every time it’s played.

3. Had you heard of marocain before last night?

Neither had I.

But apparently 12-year-old Ananya Vinay of Fresno, California, had. In fact, she told the Washington Post that she knew every word she was asked to spell in winning the National Spelling Bee. 

After eliminating everyone else in the competition, she and 14-year-old Rohan Rajeev of Texas went toe-to-toe for 19 rounds.

They were spelling words that few people ever knew existed. Words that I can’t imagine they or just about anyone else will ever need to make a living in this world.

Except, of course, if you’re in the clothing trade and need to order a heavy cross-ribbed crepe fabric.

Marocain.

4. Here’s what Trump and the Republicans are betting: That the indignation you and anyone with even half a brain feel about his decision to pull out of the Paris accords will fade long before they face any consequences from it.

Because the fact is that while climate change is a big deal to a lot of people, it’s not a big enough deal to sway elections.

That’s just a fact.

Think about the last election.

What outrage was there that the question of climate change never came up during the presidential debates?

Trump was never forced to defend his mindless stance. That the abiding by the Paris agreement costs Americans jobs. That it makes U.S. sovereignty subservient to the world.

The fact that you and I and everyone we know and leaders from around the world are angry about this decision is interesting. And that’s about all.

Because the Trump plan goes this way: They take the heat for a little while – perhaps even a little beyond this weekend’s talk shows.

But even by the time Georgia’s 6th Congressional District completes its special election later this month, the furor will be forgotten.

And, by the time we get to Nov. 6, 2018, the day of the next full-scale Congressional election, Trump and the Republicans will have found some phony issue – hell, I wouldn’t be shocked if it was still the damn Kathy Griffin video or Hillary Clinton’s e-mails – to tar Democrats.

That’s their calculation. You – even the most ardent scientist combatting this problem – will forget what Trump did yesterday. Put this country on the wrong side of science and history. Embarrass us.

The track record is on Trump’s and the Republicans’ side. Eventually, nature won’t be, but they’ll have collected their chips and figured out a way to say that the problems were because we didn’t do enough of what they wanted.

Our mission: Prove them wrong.

1. It’s Thursday, June 1, 2017.

2. It’s the birthday of Brigham Young and Amy Schumer. Go figure.

3. For some reason, Mr. Met flipped one of his middle fingers at a fan during last night’s Met debacle at Citi Field. 

(Remember, it has to be one of his middle fingers since he only has four of them.)

It was, of course, recorded on video – it’s safe to assume nothing goes unnoticed by a camera in 2017.

It’s not clear if the person inside the costume was goaded into his gesture. It doesn’t matter. It’s not cool.

No, it’s not cool because kids shouldn’t see this sort of thing. If a kid is at Citi Field on a school night in May, he or she has seen and heard far worse than a mute mascot’s bird flip.

It’s not cool because this is a character portrayed for more than 50 years as kind, funny, proud and cheerful. He poses with people wearing shirts and hats from all the other teams – when the Yankees show up every year, their fans line up to take silly photos with the symbol of the team they’re opposing.

To Met fans, and even to fans who don’t like the Mets, Mr. Met is fun in a world that’s not always so open to fun. The Mets have said they’ll handle this matter internally, and that’s how it should be.

I wouldn’t normally too much of a thing about a Mr. Met obscene gesture incident. Comedians and social media are having their fun for the next day or two, and then it will just linger in the collective memory.

4. But there’s something that doesn’t feel isolated or trivial about this.

You know what I mean. Civility, kindness, joy seem to be missing in our lives right now. No one is going to know what prompted a mascot to rudeness, but whoever was in the costume was obviously in a state of mind to do that.

No one can figure out the collective mindsets of the people behind that stupid Kathy Griffin video that drew so much attention. Yes, Kathy Griffin is primarily responsible for it, and she certainly is big on self-promotion.

But somebody had to enable her to do that. There was some mindset that said this is OK – this is actually funny.

People – especially the ones who support him – will groan if you blame Trump for all this. He didn’t make Kathy Griffin hold up an image of his severed head.

5. But the vibe is in the air. And damned if Trump didn’t put it there.

The constant barrage of crazy and angry and self-dealing is wearing down people’s sense of right and wrong, people’s sense of what’s acceptable behavior, people’s sense of responsibility toward others.

It’s depressing. Is anyone really, truly happy in this country right now?

Don’t tell me the people who support Trump are. It takes a lot of energy and karma to rationalize the stupidity and the conflicts. Especially the ones with Russia – the Trump base is old enough to remember when their hero Ronald Reagan called out the then Soviet Union and believe he was the one who brought it down.

And this country is not moving toward anything resembling unity. Especially when there’s a White House determined to rule rather than govern – that believes it doesn’t need as much of the nation behind it as it needs only the people who got them there.

The Trumpian descent into the inferno is in some ways like Dante’s in “The Divine Comedy.” There are the less egregious sins – the Kathy Griffin thing.

And then there are the whoppers – depriving millions of health care, becoming a climate change outlaw, shunning our traditional allies, breaking up families with Gestapo-like immigration enforcement and consorting with demons.

But in “The Divine Comedy,” Virgil leads Dante out of hell, first toward purgatory and then, with his beloved Beatrice, into heaven.

6. So, yes, we need a Virgil.

We need someone who is going to help point us toward light and redemption, to end this gloom that threatens to crush our people and our aspirations.

The time is ripe for anyone who will stop putting up his or her middle finger and will start rallying people. Who will say what he or she stands for, and that it’s something we as a people – all of us – can attain together.

People talk about a resistance. But they’re not really doing anything about it. The person who is going to lead the United States out of the morass and back onto the path of moral leadership needs to be doing that full-time.

When you see someone resign or retire from Congress or a governor’s mansion and say they’re ready to spend all their time working on bringing the country together, when you see someone following a path similar to the one Martin Luther King Jr. followed to fight for civil rights in the 1960s, that’s when the current joylessness will end.

When Trump has to spend his Twitter time attacking someone other than Hillary Clinton because he or she is the real threat to his hegemony, we’ll start to feel better. And then the light will finally be in the distance.

1. It’s Wednesday, May 31, 2017.

2. It’s the 74th birthday of Joe Namath and the 52nd of Brooke Shields – two people you couldn’t imagine being 74 or 52.

3. The one thing you don’t want to do to an enemy is make him sympathetic. And when it comes to Trump, it’s really hard to do that.

But Kathy Griffin found a way.

I’ve never been a fan of what I guess is a woman whose efforts at self-promotion sometimes go to extremes. Even as a loyal CNNer, I can’t stand to watch her on New Year’s Eve with Anderson Cooper.

Yesterday, she stepped over the line with a video that involved an animated display of Trump’s severed head. She repeated the “blood coming out of wherever” line that Trump use to disgrace himself in his criticism of then-Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly.

By doing that, Griffin threw a lifeline to Trump. She gave his dwindling supporters something to rally around.

It was idiotic. It was not close to funny, which is how I feel about Kathy Griffin in general. I’m glad she apologized, but I suspect she’ll pay a price for doing something that stupid.

Dumb.

4. Now, if Trump was as smart as he and his flock believe, he would have milked the stupid Kathy Griffin thing for all it was worth.

He, indeed, tweeted this morning how upset his 11-year-old son was about the image, and that Griffin should be ashamed of herself.

The problem is he also covfefed.

Late last night, he tweeted “Despite the constant press covfefe”.

Trump probably meant coverage and was about to launch another of his diatribes about how the connection between his campaign/administration and Russia is fake news.

But it just proves the point that he has no self-control about seeking approval or just plain getting attention.

So covfefe, and not Kathy Griffin, became the news story this morning. And those questions about this guy’s fitness for this job – emotionally, physically and morally – are front and center for another day.

Dumb.
5. Unfortunately, no one had ever womansplained Rebecca Solnit to me.

Solnit is an essayist. She is credited with coming up with the concept of mansplaining – how men (and I might be guilty of this sometimes) often trying to explain things to women in a way that comes off as condescending.

Yesterday, Solnit’s commentary on Literary Hub site dealt with a man. The current president.

One reason to think he’ll never read it is that his name is only on the title. It’s not in the text at all.

Solnit’s argument is profound. Trump is a spoiled rich child who has never had to deal with the consequences of sharing the world with people who aren’t as fortunate. He’s been indulged and pandered to by people either in awe of his resources or who thought they could find a way to take advantage of him.

I think it’s a little too smart by a hair. Maybe it’s something I’m reading into it, but there’s a hint of sympathy for Trump, as if his life is some Greek or Shakespearean tragedy of which we are merely witnesses.

Trump, to me, is pure evil. The tragedy is what will befall most of the people of this country when our standard of living – hell, in a lot of instances, our ability to just live – is devastated.

But I applaud Solnit’s effort. Ranting by people like me and others doesn’t seem to be enough to stop the feeling that we’re skidding on an icy road into a giant propane tank. She’s trying a different tact. It’s worth a read.

1. It’s Tuesday, May 30, 2017.

2. On this day 134 years ago, fake news led to death. There was a rumor that the Brooklyn Bridge, opened just six days earlier, was about to collapse – the ensuing stampede killed 12 people.

The Brooklyn Bridge is still standing.

3. Despite Trump’s constant protestations, the scandal of his administration is hardly fake.

Today, his communications director is resigning. This administration is a little more than four months old and it’s already hemorrhaging senior staff.

That’s probably because no matter who holds the title of communications director, there’s only one communicator in this farce. The guy who tweets out fake fake news alarms at 7 a.m.

A real president – hell, a real man – would want to clear the crap away once and for all.

He would tell Congress and an independent prosecutor and, yes, respected news operations to bring it on. Take their best shot. Try to find what he or his son-in-law or the double-dealer he chose as his national security adviser or the bigot he named attorney general did wrong, because they did nothing wrong. There’s nothing to hide.

4. So the only conclusion anyone who can reason will draw is that there is something to hide. In fact, a lot more than something.

Trump can start with answering – intelligently, and not tweeting like a ranting fool – if his son-in-law met in December with a man whose bank has been linked to Russian intelligence and is subject to U.S. sanctions.

And if they did meet, why? What was discussed? How was what was discussed in the interest of the nation?

The New York Times quotes Trump spokeswoman, Hope Hicks – I wonder if she still has a job – as saying Kushner was acting in his capacity as a transition official. That implies that he wasn’t acting in the financial interest of his own or his father-in-law’s family. She also says Kushner will answer questions from congressional investigators.

That statement alone might have calmed the waters a little. But then Trump started tweeting this morning. Fake news, blah, blah. Russians laughing, blah, blah. Democrats embarrassed Hillary Clinton lost, blah, blah.

The insecurity of this guy who has been entrusted with the most important job in this country is scary and infuriating.

The tweets are the fake news. They’re the smoke screen Trump is using to hide what he and his confederates are doing to destroy this country.

Let’s not let him off the hook. To do otherwise would not be true to our values or our future.

1. It’s Monday, May 29, 2017.

2. It’s the 100th birthday of John F. Kennedy.

For those of us who lived through his brief presidency, it’s hard to imagine JFK as a centenarian. He epitomized America as a young country – at 46, he was even younger when he died when Barack Obama was when he was elected.

It’s because of that youth that he’s idolized. He symbolized what many of us think America should be – a country that’s a beacon of democracy and freedom, proud of itself, looking toward the future.

JFK is revered partly because he was murdered. But he’s also revered for the promise: the steps he took toward healing our nation’s racial divide, toward putting people on the moon, toward a more peaceful world.

They were big dreams. But dreaming big is what this country is supposed to be all about.

He was tough when he had to be – the Cuban missile crisis was a test he passed, thankfully. And he had his big failures – the Bay of Pigs and getting us more involved in Vietnam.

But no one questioned John F. Kennedy’s motivation and patriotism. And anyone who heard him speak – particularly what might be the best inauguration speech ever – doubted that he believed in the people of the United States in a way that’s sadly missing from the White House on his 100th birthday.

3. It’s Memorial Day.

For the families of those who lost loved ones in our nation’s battles, their loved ones are hard to imagine as older men and women. They will always see the sepia or fading color picture, with either a tight smile or a serious pose, and sharply creased uniform of the service to which they belong.

People who die young don’t age in the minds of the people who love them. Those who died in World War II and Vietnam are seen by their grandchildren as somehow younger than they are.

There might be some small comfort in that – that the ravages of age don’t take away their youth, don’t afflict them with the problems all of us endure as we get older.

But that comfort is totally overshadowed by the sense of what’s been lost. The chance to see a younger generation grow and succeed. The joys of graduations and weddings and children and trips to wonderful places.

That they sacrificed so that their children and the children of millions of others could enjoy the blessings of life seems cruel and unfair. But it is a price they paid bravely, with honor.

So today is the day to think of those young people, perhaps to grant them eternal youth along the thanks of a grateful nation. To see their smiles or their earnest stares – in portraits painted in the Revolution or photographed since the Civil War – and realize there is no America as we know it without them.

4. Memorial Day often seems restricted to those who remembering those die in uniform.

I think that’s a little shortsighted.

I absolutely don’t dismiss the sacrifice of those who fought for the United States. But I think fighting for the United States entails more than just enlisting in a military service.

So, on this Memorial Day, let’s remember the people who died stopping terrorists from crashing United Flight 93 into the Capitol or the White House. They weren’t active military personnel, just people who realized what was happening that horrible Sept. 11 and acted as patriots.

Let’s remember the more than 21,000 law enforcement officers who have died in the line of duty.

And, the most recent example, let’s remember bystanders who did anything but stand by – the two men killed last week trying to stop a white supremacist terrorist from harassing a Muslim woman on a Portland, Oregon, commuter train.

It should be Memorial Day for all of them and anyone who has sacrificed her or himself for this country. I sincerely believe the men and women who died in uniform would share that sentiment.