In alluring synchronicity, this week has seen Trump mangling the task of consoling another human being for her loss in war - prompting blistering comparisons to the empathetic Abe Lincoln facing the same task - and George Saunders' winning the Man Booker Prize for "Lincoln In the Bardo." In it, he evokes a weary Lincoln struggling to accept the death of his son amidst war deaths on all sides; he ends "reduced, ruined, remade" by a "vigorous compassion" we need today.