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I’m not much for talking about how great America is, but Trump and his supporters do it all the time so let’s confront them about what greatness really means.

We need to start with the fundamental quality of good character, which is integrity.

To have personal integrity means you tell yourself the truth about yourself. It means you examine why you say what you say to other people.

Personal integrity is the ultimate “checks and balances” in your life that is the “stuff” of good character.

Lie to yourself and you lack good character. Tell the truth to yourself and you have it. In this way it is the critical factor in telling the truth to anyone else.

People who lie, mislead, whose word cannot be trusted, are people who lack personal integrity and, therefore, lack good character.

Tragically for our nation we have a President who is one of them. He lacks personal integrity, good character, and, thus, never tells the truth, ever.

I don’t know if Trump is a pathological liar or not, but I do know he is a liar, and so does every American who keeps up with the news.

This is where we find ourselves as a country, having a President who cannot be trusted to tell the truth to the nation because he doesn’t tell the truth to himself.

It’s unimaginable, but we have a President whose word is, quite simply, no good.

We’ve never faced this before as a country.

We have had politicians who spin stories to make themselves look good and their opponents bad, and still do. We’ve had presidents who have betrayed our trust.

But by comparison Trump’s lack of personal integrity is in a class by itself.

He lies when he doesn’t need to. He lies when a comment from him is completely unnecessary. He even lies when the truth would serve him better.

As a result, he creates constant chaos. That’s what people who cannot tell the truth do. They keep people around them upset, confused, angry, frustrated, and suspicious of everything they say or want to do.

Personal integrity and the good character it produces are core to every relationship, every business transaction, every hiring decision, every voting decision, to everything, and when it is absent, nothing good can come of it.

That is the state of our nation because of Donald Trump. There is nowhere to go with him.

When a nation has a leader who lies at the drop of a hat, governing becomes impossible. That is the state of the union under Donald Trump.

Perhaps the biggest irony we have seen in recent memory is the fact that one of the primary groups of people who seem not to care that we have a President without personal integrity are evangelical Christians.

Not only do they support Donald Trump, but they have destroyed their own reputation in the process. And just like Trump, no one should believe anything they say about anything.

They have earned our distrust just as he has.

Indeed, we have a President who is weakening the values on which our nation was founded and a group of Christians who are undermining the message of Christianity because they support that President. It is a stunning example of moral contradiction.

Trump, of course, deserves to be removed from office, but Senate Republicans who lack personal integrity just as Trump does will never allow that to happen.

That leaves us with no choice but to endure another year and a half of a presidency that has shown us why personal integrity and good character still matter.

What we can look forward to, though, is that by overwhelmingly defeating him in 2020 we will show that we have learned a lesson we will never again forget.

That just might actually make America great again for the first time.