​Karl Marx once wrote, “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”

If you will permit me a bit of literary license, Charlottesville was a tragedy; President Trump’s reprehensible responses to that event were a farce.

Nothing that President Trump has done since the Inauguration has so exposed that he has a cancer of the soul, something he is inflecting upon our nation. That he sits in the same White House that was once occupied by Abraham Lincoln is an indelible stain that we shall never expunge.

Even if the American people eventually remove Trump from office, we will never again be the same. As William Faulkner put it, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” ​