When I was a child, I believed the US President was just an a**hole…

now that I’m older, I know it’s not so cut and dry…

“If you don’t know better, you can’t do better.” That was the general governing logic of life that an uncle of mine gave me just before learning that I was, at the age of six, headed to the National Air and Space Museum for a “youth in space” educational program in the summer just before me entering the first grade. It’s advice that, when contemplating whether or not America is indeed a garbage fire because Donald Trump is an asshole, has me thinking back to when the first grade was only a few months away.

I was six years old when Ronald Reagan defeated Walter Mondale in the 1984 United States Presidential election. Throughout the summer of that year, I distinctly remember seeing Reagan’s infamously idyllic “It’s morning again in America” ads on Sunday mornings while eating breakfast before heading to church. My mother, a divorced single mother of one, a DC government-employed accountant with a used car and renting a slightly ramshackle apartment, who…