To a human being prone to normal emotions like shame and remorse, his sheer brazenness is powerful evidence that he sincerely believes he’s done nothing wrong—which in turn is evidence that he really might not have done anything wrong. That’s the essence of his messaging strategy around January 6, one of the most successful propaganda campaigns in U.S. history. Through herculean amounts of shamelessness and gaslighting, never apologizing or betraying any sense of regret, the president and his toadies in right-wing media successfully persuaded millions of swing voters that America’s first-ever coup attempt was either no big deal or some sort of frame-up.
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I don’t blame Democrats for not leaning into moral outrage this week, though. Why bother? It doesn’t work. Americans don’t share it, or don’t share it enough. The campaign was a referendum on whether the shame of having a president with a coup plot, two impeachments, and four indictments to his record would bother swing voters enough to prefer a lackluster normie Democrat instead. We got our answer.
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I’m convinced that Americans will end up holding Trump to a lower standard morally, ethically, and civically in his second term than they have other presidents, and not just because his infectious shamelessness has numbed them to his outrages.
It’s because, unlike in his first term, they knew what they were signing up for. You cannot watch January 6 happen, vote for him four years later, and then huff indignantly when he starts his own crypto Ponzi scheme or cuts off security for a critic who’s under credible threat of being murdered by terrorists. Even if you feel a pang of vestigial embarrassment or disgust about it, you can’t complain without looking like a preposterous rube. Trump is being Trump. What on earth did you expect?
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So, certainly, the cowardice they showed this week by not emphatically denouncing the pardons is reprehensible. But on the other hand: What on earth did you expect?
Our problem is not Republicans in Congress or even the Republican in the White House. Our problem, as ever, is the millions of boiled frogs who’ve concluded that shamelessness is a political virtue, not a vice. Blame them for what’s happened, and for what’s to come.