Earlier this month, scrolling the TV channels, I happened upon a documentary about Dolly Parton and started watching. Before long I thought: "Boy, I needed this."

That evening came at the end of another week of wallowing in all things Donald Trump. It's my job and, I think, my civic duty. It's also soul-crushing, as news consumers around the world have learned in the past decade. To instead relax into an hour and 25 minutes of eye-candy video about Dolly — the personification of empathy, generosity and humility — was just the right restorative. I was a young Yankee girl when she became a Southern country music star. My fandom reflected the crossover appeal — across regions, genres, ages, genders, races and, yes, politics — that Dolly earned over six decades, uniquely. And, yes, I will always love her.

Dolly's death — we're all on a first-name basis with her, right? — hits Americans all the harder for coming at a time when that other faux-blond 80-year-old is (mis)leading our country and messing with our minds daily, spreading chaos instead of comfort.

On the day she died, President Donald Trump was doing the kind of nasty, selfish, bullying stuff that comes as naturally to him as kindness did to Dolly. For him, just another Tuesday. But for everyone else, a Tuesday suddenly without the Dolly antidote.

That morning, Trump — having reignited a trade war with Canada and demanded that the "clowns" among Canadian leaders "fall in line" — proceeded to further insult the good neighbor by unilaterally dubbing Lake Ontario as "Lake America." (I'm sure that nonsensical dictum will get as wide a pickup as did his previous renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the "Gulf of America" — a slap at our southern neighbor.)

Trump's Iran war continues as a costly quagmire, having gone from his predicted days or weeks to a seventh month this weekend. The USS Abraham Lincoln is finally on its way home after bad publicity from sailors and their families about conditions on board, despite the commander in chief heartlessly dismissing the record-long deployment as not long enough. The news on Tuesday, before the bulletin about Dolly, told of Trump's immigration agents seizing and detaining the father of one of the Lincoln's sailors.

"We have done everything through immigration to get his green card approved, and we are just waiting," Joshua Aviles wrote on Facebook. "This is just heartbreaking for me."

More heartbreaks are ahead, thanks to Trump — the kind of life-ruining, family-wrecking, needless tragedies that Dolly put to song early in her career, but in the MAGA era are real life, not ballads. This week the State Department is preparing to revoke visas of up to 200,000 people in the country seeking asylum, as Trump's occasionally deadly mass deportation campaign increasingly targets legal immigrants to meet its cruel quotas, fill detention centers or ship people to third countries including Eswatini (find that on a map), South Sudan, the Republic of Congo and other strife-torn places where deportees have been dropped, knowing no one.

Nonetheless, Trump publicly covets the Nobel Peace Prize, even accepting the one last year that had been awarded to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado. In contrast, humble Dolly turned down the Presidential Medal of Freedom three times. Fans, not Dolly herself, crowned her the queen of country, though she was too classy to ever put on royal airs. Only the class-less Trump fancies himself as royalty.

The wannabe king continues to rush his Versailles-like vanity projects without Congress' approval so that lawmakers and judges can't stop his fait accompli. On Friday, Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. allowed construction on Trump's White House ballroom to continue — a lower court had ordered it stopped — after the president's lawyers argued that the Trump temple is already 65% complete thanks to crews working 20 hours a day, every day, in defiance of ongoing litigation. In another court, Trump is threatening to tear down the Kennedy Center if the administration can't proceed with its planned two-year renovation.

Meanwhile, Trump's self-centered indifference to Americans' suffering — whether from high prices, tariffs, war, immigration crackdowns, healthcare cuts or something else — has driven his approval ratings to record lows. Yet even the president who has repeatedly denigrated the dead (the slain Rob Reiner, former FBI director Robert S. Mueller III, former Sen. John McCain, former Secretary of State Colin Powell) had the good political sense to issue a tribute to Dolly.

"There has never been anyone like her, and never will," Trump wrote on social media.

That's been a widely expressed sentiment. Both Dolly and Donald are American originals. But to say "there will never be another Dolly" is to do so with regret. To say the same about Trump is, for many Americans, to do so with hope for the country and Constitution.

She was a fairy tale version of the American dream, born in a one-room mountain cabin, ever humble and true to her roots yet serenaded after her death by royal troops playing "9 to 5" outside Buckingham Palace. He was born entitled and rich, yet embodies that old American saying "born on third base and thinks he hit a home run." Safe to say Trump won't be honored abroad with serenades on his passing, given how fully he has alienated allies.

Dolly's philanthropy was real and global; the Trump Foundation was fraudulent and forced to shut down. She was no dumb blond; about him you'll get an argument.

Dolly was famously apolitical, given her universal fan base, though she did speak often and supportively of women's rights and of LGBTQ+ people, especially transgender men and women whom Trump regularly denigrates. She called them "God's children." The New York Times obituary called her "quintessentially, a uniter of people." A biography of Trump is appropriately titled "The Divider."

A colleague of mine drives a car with a license plate reading "WWDD." For those needing translation, he's put a bumper sticker below: "What would Dolly do?"

Words to live by. If only Trump would.

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