The Monarch of Mar-a-Lago

Trump is now at the zenith of his power. The moment he’s sworn in on January 20, he’s just the plain, old president of the United States.

In Washington Irving’s short story “Rip Van Winkle” (1819), the feckless, henpecked Rip fell into a magical slumber in pre-Revolutionary America, awakening 20 years later—after American independence—to find his Catskills village transformed.

The “quiet little Dutch inn of yore” had been replaced by “The Union Hotel.” Where a tree used to stand, there was…