The president America needs is Czech, and the Constitution rules him out. He is also dead. Václav Havel, playwright and leader of those who opposed the Czechoslovakian communist regime--and went to prison for it--was elected the free nation's first president after the 1989 "velvet revolution," in which the regime just gave up. He served as president from 1989 to 2003, and died in 2011.
I came upon Havel's memoir "To the Castle and Back" in a thrift store. Fifty pages in, I thought, "Why can't we have a president like this?"
Havel actually thought about the world and what was right to do, and not just what would get him what he wanted. And one of those things was to tell the truth, which would be a great thing in an American president.
In his first major address as president of Czechoslovakia, Havel told the people, "I assume you did not propose me for this office so that I, too, would lie to you." As far as I can find, he didn't.
"Repeating this defiant truth made sense in itself, regardless of whether it was ever appreciated, or victorious, or repressed for the hundredth time," he said. He explained his writing an open letter to the head of the regime in 1975: "I simply wrote it in the belief that it might have, let's say, a certain 'socio-hygienic' significance. In general, I believe it always makes sense to tell the truth, in all circumstances."
He and his comrades also believed the truth would eventually triumph, though maybe long after they were gone. Even a totalitarian government couldn't forever suppress the truth, if people kept insisting on saying it. "Truth purges one of fear," he said a few months after the Velvet Revolution.
Our political system won't produce a man like him; our political system will eat alive anyone who insists on telling the truth all the time. But couldn't we have someone someone who'll try to tell the truth, someone willing to lose rather than lie? Someone we can trust?