What must it be like, we wonder, to be an American child in the era of President Donald Trump?

Prior to this president, it was long understood that presidents, be they Democratic or Republican, should avoid rhetoric unfit for a family audience. That’s not to say they did not speak of serious matters, nor that they sometimes discussed that which a child could not understand. But it was accepted that part of the job involved serving as a role model for the nation’s young, acting and speaking in such a way that a parent could sit down with their kid and say, look, listen to what this leader has to say and even, this is what you could become. These, my son; these, my daughter, are our shared values.

That’s hardly the case now. American children are hearing a president who routinely uses language and attacks that many parents would not accept in their own homes.

Very few Iranian children have free access to the internet, which is just as well, given Trump’s terrifying declarations that he will destroy a “whole civilization,” as in their own, seemingly without recourse to any kind of distinction between a theocratic leadership intent on murdering its own people and the entirely innocent, which would include every Iranian child.

But American kids do. All too much access. And we wonder what the impact of the president’s habit of using coarse, personal attacks in public remarks is having on them for the long term. Not a good one, we fear.

Even Easter isn’t safe. “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran,” Trump said in an Easter Sunday post on Truth Social. “There will be nothing like it!!! Open the F‑‑‑in’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP”

All of this reached darkly comic proportions Monday when Trump found himself at a children’s activity station during the Easter Egg Roll on the South Lawn of the White House.

All the job entailed was showing interest in a few young lives for a few relaxed moments. You’d have thought he could have used the break from the war room.

But he couldn’t resist turning even this moment into an opportunity to get in a dig at his opponents, prattling on about President Joe Biden and his use of the autopen, with the kids stuck listening to his rant just to get an autograph. And thus one of the more wholesome and fun events in the White House calendar was besmirched by a man who simply cannot stop with the zero-sum partisan nonsense even when surrounded by impressionable young faces. They seem to have no impact on him.

It is increasingly difficult to point to moments where the presidency models the kind of conduct many parents would want their children to emulate.

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