Standing beside Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Trump told reporters that Italy, Germany, and France had all declined to stand with the United States when it mattered most, during American operations against Iran. "In a way, I was testing people," he said. Most of Europe failed the test. This is not a firebrand moment. It is a reckoning seventy years in the making.

Drive through almost any American town this month and you'll see it. Porches lined with red, white and blue. Pickup trucks flying flags off the tailgate. Front yards turned into little tributes to the country's 250th birthday. To most people, that's just called patriotism. But according to a run of recent news stories, a growing number of Americans now find that same sight unsettling.

A Presbyterian minister stood before her denomination's highest governing body this summer and argued the church should not be allowed to require its own clergy to be monogamous. She called it "bad polity." She said defining love that narrowly was a wall the Spirit had already moved past. Her side won.

Trump Accounts are now live. A thousand dollars, seeded directly by the federal government, deposited into a real investment account for every eligible newborn in America. Not a monthly welfare check. Not a coupon that expires at the end of the year. A genuine stake in the American economy, invested in a low-cost stock index fund, quietly compounding for nearly two decades before that child ever earns a paycheck or files a tax return of their own.