"I think about young people who will come to understand what a president is and does under Trump and it makes me dizzy and sick and sad."

Tweets Ana Marie Cox.

Now, let's try to figure out why Ana Marie Cox feels "dizzy and sick and sad" thinking about young people coming to understand "what a president is and does" in the context of a Trump presidency. She's not saying Trump makes her dizzy and sick and sad. She's imagining these other people, those who haven't had the opportunity to have their minds develop during the Obama presidency (or one of the other, earlier presidencies). The minds formed in the Trump era will be impoverished, warped, distorted in this vital area:  understanding what a President is and does.

A young mind that developed during the Obama era might form the basic understanding that when a person is elected President, he is viewed as having won and, because of that, he is given respect and admiration and support as he endeavors to meet the responsibilities of the office.

But if Trump is the first person you observe becoming President, your idea of what it means is quite different. After the long fight to get to the election, a new fight began. The seeming winner somehow didn't count as the winner, and he was given no respect, and, as he attempted to step into the responsibilities of the office, he was continually battered and treated like a horrible clownish imposter.

An older person might think: It's terrible that a man like Trump has come to take the great position of President. A very young person might think: A President is that thing that Trump is.

Another way to look at it is: What's the best frame of mind for citizens to have about their leaders? What's the optimum level of reverence or disdain? I suspect that we were too reverent toward Obama and now we — some of us — are too rebellious toward Trump. There are dangers in excessive reverence and excessive rebellion, and who knows exactly where on that continuum any given American will be during one presidency or another?

You enter the historical timeline when you happen to be born, and you begin to follow politics some time thereafter. I came to understand what a president is and does when a man became President not by election but a shocking assassination. He spoke weirdly of "the great society" and "escalated" a war that young men were forced into the military to fight. My generation grew up hating that man. And then we got Nixon. I could get dizzy and sick and sad thinking about what happened to the minds of young people back then.

But I think the reason that Ana Marie Cox can get so dizzy and sick and sad over what's happening to the minds of young people now is that there was a superficial, irrational good feeling about Obama. And gee, wasn't that nice for the young kids?