Could Trump be the progressive leader Obama never managed to be?

Washington, D.C. is a police state even in good times. Unique in the land of the free, only there do you find officers casually toting assault rifles outside of Union Station as though Amtrak has just staged a coup within, or vast swaths of road abruptly shut down because the secretary of agriculture has decided he wants a deep tissue massage on the other side of town. And during presidential inaugurations, the tight security becomes Orwellian. Even without the deluge of visitors that Barack Obama attracted in 2009 (only to discover that being witnesses to history meant watching it on a Jumbotron two miles away), there will still be enough hassles during Donald Trump’s swearing-in to make it best observed on our incoming president’s most natural medium: television.

All this—the security, the round-the-clock TV coverage—is fitting for the American presidency. Most executives of first-world nations are either glorified figureheads or elected leaders; the president is an elevated version of both, the godhead of our civic religion and the undisputed field marshal of federal policy.