What a president says matters. On Monday, President Trump denounced the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacists as “repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.” It was a belated but important response to last weekend's violence in Charlottesville, Va. 

When leaders show moral courage, it gives vital momentum to the humane and uplifting. And as Patrik Jonsson adds in our first story today, America is at a delicate point in its racial conversation. The times are demanding citizens and politicians to bring out each other's best selves.

Yet it is also vital that we not make any president a king. The Founders would likely have been appalled at how much we obsess over our presidents today. True power and self-government, they realized, lie with the people. The Washington the Founders built merely reflects that.

We saw the power of grace, patience, and faith in good – expressed by the people – move empires during the US civil rights movement and the “truth-struggle” of Mohandas Gandhi. But it was also present in Charlottesville this weekend. “There has to be a spirit which allows you to see past what your eyes see in front of you and what your ears hear, and to understand how hope forms in your heart,” an African-American pastor, whose church held nonviolence training sessions this weekend, told the BBC Saturday night. “As our people used to say, trouble don’t last always.”

That sentiment and the conviction behind it is far more potent than any single person.