This morning, President Donald Trump visited Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial museum on the edge of Jerusalem.

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And, when he left, he signed the guest book: “It is a great honor to be here with all of my friends — so amazing and will never forget!”

...Journalists and activists immediately took Trump to task. Yair Rosenberg of Tablet magazine wrote on Twitter that it was “basically just what teenagers write in each other’s high school yearbooks.”

...His advance team had reportedly initially scheduled him for a scant 15 minutes in the museum — and that’s including the time it would take for him to sign the guest book, lay a wreath, and deliver his remarks. (He ended up onsite for nearly 30 minutes.)

Barack Obama’s message reads:

I am grateful to Yad Vashem and all of those responsible for this remarkable institution. At a time of great peril and promise, war and strife, we are blessed to have such a powerful reminder of man’s potential for great evil, but also our capacity to rise up from tragedy and remake our world. Let our children come here, and know this history, so that they can add their voices to proclaim “never again.” And may we remember those who perished, not only as victims but also as individuals who hoped and loved and dreamed like us, and who have become symbols of the human spirit.

The Declaration of Independence sets forth a worldview that, back in the 18th century, served as the foundation of our new nation. This foundation was composed of the principle of human equality and the rights of self-determination implied by the famous phrase "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

Back then, this foundation was sufficient to support the society we hoped to build, one free of the economic monopolies, religious authoritarianism and military brutality embodied, respectively, in the English nobility, the Church of England and England's Redcoat soldiers. As large as these forces loomed over the colonists in the New World, these were forces still dwarfed by the Atlantic Ocean, the American wilderness and the sheer number of people they aimed to dominate.

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When we won our independence, we dismantled all the power platforms setting some human beings above others. Against the concentration of wealth and power of the classist aristocracy, we built the one-person, one-vote principle. Against the psychological oppression of religious authoritarianism, we constructed the doctrine of separation of church and state. And against the physical domination of mercenary armies, we instituted civilian control of the military.

But then we lost our way. After the Civil War, corporations stole the principle of equality and put it in the service of nonhuman monetary engines antagonistic to our democratic political process......

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