And it’s a consolation to imagine that something like this could hurt Trump. If you find it hard to cope with what the United States has become, you might understandably retreat into nostalgic fantasy about Americans holding a politician’s sexually suggestive correspondence to the most infamous pervert in American history against him.…
Weak consolation. He quotes Andrew Egger:
In a way, Donald Trump and his allies have spent their entire political lives preparing for this moment. The whole miserable decade of “alternative facts,” of witch hunts, of flooding the zone with sh-t—it all amounted to a long, powerful education for his base. It’s a training in a certain kind of zen meditation, in which stories damaging to Trump pass from the eyes and ears directly out of the body without ever intersecting the brain. By now, the base has gotten in their 10,000 hours. They’ve become masters of the craft. They can perform all sorts of remarkable feats—the media-cope equivalent of lying on beds of nails while cinderblocks are smashed on their chests. These cinderblocks, they whisper serenely, are just a liberal plot. If I pay attention, the Democrats win.
This is just the way things are now. Catoggio:
Think of American government as a big neighborhood. The neighborhood has started to go to hell. Its residents are adjusting their expectations for it accordingly.…
This is why there’s been so little outcry about him pulling off the presidential equivalent of a bank heist, I think. If a business in a good neighborhood gets held up, everyone talks about it. But if a business in a bad neighborhood gets held up, it’s barely news. What can the locals realistically do except sigh and say, “Yeah, that happens now”?
The president is monetizing his office in broad daylight to the tune of billions per year? Yeah, that happens now.
No wonder, then, that Americans can’t get excited about Trump’s history with Epstein. If he were a person of good character committed to ethical government, it’d be earth-shaking to find him sending risqué letters to his child-molester pal. As it is, it’s like finding out that the leader of the local gang that runs the neighborhood is involved in a prostitution racket. You might not approve of it but you’re certainly not surprised.
That’s just how this neighborhood is nowadays.
It’s worth noting that in that last part he’s talking about why the centrist swing voters don’t seem to care much.
I’m convinced that this is the way things have been for decades before Trump, only it was slightly less obvious and less extreme. If the idea of reaping what you sow has any basis in politics, then we the voters are getting exactly, exactly, exactly what we’ve long deserved.