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This time, he did slow down.
Those who witnessed it described the pause as heavy, not casual. The kind of silence that isn’t emptiness, but weight. The kind that suggests the mind has slipped away from the surface—past the talking points and the reflexes—into something private. In Washington, that kind of moment is unusual not because leaders never feel it, but because the environment doesn’t reward it. Stillness looks like vulnerability. Vulnerability looks like weakness. Weakness gets punished.
But the most demanding roles in public life, whether people admit it or not, are loaded with isolation. There are thousands of people around you, yet very few who can relate to what you carry. The constant attention doesn’t remove loneliness; it reshapes it. The distance between a leader and everyone else grows wider with every decision that affects millions, with every controversy, with every security barrier that becomes routine. Even a former president remains trapped in a kind of permanent spotlight—an identity so large it consumes the person wearing it.
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