Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump acknowledges photographers after speaking at a campaign rally in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Thursday, February 11, 2016.
Credit: AP / Gerald Herbert

Recently, sorting through a pile of old children’s books, I came across a volume, That Makes Me Mad!, which brought back memories. Written by Steve Kroll, a long-dead friend, it focused on the eternally frustrating everyday adventures of Nina, a little girl whose life regularly meets commonplace roadblocks, at which point she always says… well, you can guess from the title! Vivid parental memories of another age instantly flooded back—of my daughter (now reading such books to her own son) sitting beside me at age 5 and hitting that repeated line with such mind-blowing, ear-crushing gusto that you knew it spoke to the everyday frustrations of her life, to what made her mad.

Three decades later, in an almost unimaginably different […]