Cheapening a Sacred Space
On Saturday, in front of the Memorial Wall at the Central Intelligence Agency, President Donald Trump delivered a speech. It was heartening that Trump—along with his vice president and his chief of staff—visited the Agency on his first day in office. After a tumultuous period in which the president-elect had disparaged the Agency as the people who blundered into the Iraq War and compared its employees to Nazis, it was good and right that the president went to mend fences. And had the president delivered his speech off camera, inside “the bubble” at Agency headquarters, the whole thing would likely have gone over very well.
Instead, the president turned the Memorial Wall into a political prop and delivered a campaign speech. The speech was offensive in
