Why is anyone apologizing? For what?. Americans were disgusted with their politicians, corrupted by party and principle, who couldn't present likeable candidates. A hundred million didn't vote because they felt disenfranchised to the point of staying home or holding their noses. Never in their history had rationality been so eroded, truth so disrespected in a face-off between the Establishment's deep blue sea and a radical beholden to no one, not even the GOP. They voted barely for the professed Washington wrecker because it was the national sentiment in the first place.

Who should apologize to whom? Republicans and Democrats knew their system was broken. They wanted Congress to work, their representatives to act in their interests instead of their own. They knew the braggart's claims of solving the country's problems with a snap of the fingers were impossible. The Rust Belt jobs can't come back, 11 million can't be deported, women's reproductive rights won't be taken away for ages. Climate change isn't a Chinese hoax. Americans generally weren't motivated by racism but that's how it came out with a deeply flawed and dangerous man at the helm.

I wish I could share the optimism expressed here. An optimist by nature, on good days I see this peculiar upheaval leading to an America where responsible management becomes more important than the manipulation of the electorate's affairs. An electorate that tipped the applecart isn't likely to accept an unpredictable president overplaying his hand. Americans are a great people, inspirational to the world, but their leaders not so in the richest country where money accounts for everything.