It is truly a confounding time to be alive, to be an American.
We are watching as a president of the United States openly lies, fabricates and exaggerates while two-fifths of the population cheers him for it.
He spurns our allies and embraces our adversaries and people shrug.
He, his congressional allies and his propaganda arm are waging open warfare on the Federal Bureau of Investigation in an effort to tarnish it before its inquiry into connections between the Trump campaign, family and associates and Russia can be made public.
He is a racist who disparages black and brown people, whether they be immigrants, Muslims, people from Haiti and Africa, Barack Obama, the mayor of San Juan or Maxine Waters. People equivocate about it and excuse it.
He is attacking the press in the most aggressive of terms so that what they reveal about him will be viewed with skepticism.
And somehow, many Americans, even those disgusted by what they see, have resigned themselves to this new reality.
In fact, Trump’s poll numbers had been inching up before he created a humanitarian disaster at the border by separating children from their parents.
I guess this is how empires begin to fall. It isn’t necessarily one dramatic moment, but the incessant monotony of assaults on normalcy that slowly shift the ground beneath you, reorienting what is proper and preferable, what is outrageous and what is acceptable.
Every day in the Trump era one could start a sentence with “never before …” and end it in astonishment and exclamation. But that has a cumulative effect of erosion. The constancy of the individual outrages reduces the psychic significance of the collective.
Trump is exhausting our mental capacity for indignation. This does not help Trump in the eyes of most Americans, to be sure. The Resistance remains strong and will likely have an impressive showing in the November elections.
But, along the margins, where both support for Trump and objections to him are soft, his tactics may have greater impact.
Not to mention the fact that those tactics keep his base riled and ready. Trump is like a drug dealer who has addicted his followers to fear and rage and keeps supplying it in constant doses. His supporters have become rage-junkies for whom he can do no wrong.
One of the things his supporters like is the very thing that others detest: His unapologetic, unabashed crusade to fight off all efforts at racial and ethnic inclusion. They may not articulate it as such, but that is the nature of Trump’s policies: Promising to build a wall, disparaging Mexicans, separating immigrant families, the Muslim ban, decreasing even legal migration, denigrating protesting football players.
Trump has vented an American racial anxiety, giving it power and a perch, giving it permission to be vocal and even violent.
Indeed, these are all parts of what fuels opposition to Trump.
Last week, an exasperated Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., lashed out at Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, saying, “Whatever you got, finish it the hell up, because this country is being torn apart.”
But that’s like blaming the doctor for your illness. The investigators aren’t tearing the country apart. They are trying to protect and save it.
Trump and his defense machine — including members of Congress — are tearing it apart.
Trump-addicted acolytes are tearing it apart.
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