Source: Bigstock

And that’s a shame because it means moving further and further away from defining everyone as a citizen, as opposed to an aggrieved minority, an angry white, an oppressed immigrant, a religious fanatic, a sputtering coast liberal, or a protesting millionaire football player. It’s a term designed to separate, not unite.

I have more hope for the country than that. I can’t imagine a second Donald Trump. Is anyone likely to run on “preserving the Trump Legacy”? Of course not, because he’s sui generis. Trump’s approval rating today is anywhere from 34 to 40 percent, depending on which poll you use, and what that means in real terms is 12 to 18 percent. I say that because—on the day after Nixon left office, at the nadir of his humiliation—he had an approval rating of 22 percent. You don’t go lower than 22. Twenty-two is zero.

So if I were a historian writing the chapter about the Trump presidency, I would call it the Trump Planck Length. The Planck length is the smallest unit of measurable time in the observable universe. But since that might be too abstruse for the tabloids, let’s call it the Trump Jiffy. A jiffy is the amount of time it takes light to travel one femtometer in a vacuum—and a femtometer is one-quadrillionth of a meter.

But if the high Brahmins of journalism and academia continue to use era, let’s at least narrow it down. We could have Paleozoic Trump (global warming ending in mass extinction) or Jurassic Trump (no one has called him a dinosaur yet), but there’s actually a period prior to the Paleozoic called the Precambrian. It was a primordial ooze with a few single-cell organisms floating around.

The Trump Precambrian Ooze—it doesn’t have the snap of the Trump Jiffy but I think I might like it better.