Worthwhile article pointing out the numerous ways that Trump's outrageousness serves to insulate him from any rational or normal standard of accountability:
"In a normal election cycle, a candidate making an offhand racist remark about a sitting US senator would be a big news story.
In a normal election cycle, a candidate making an offhanded lie about the state of his personal finances would be a big news story.
To be totally honest, even in a normal election cycle a candidate exhibiting total confusion about the mechanics and merits of monetary policy probably wouldn’t be that big of a news story but it would at least get some attention.
Seriously. Stop. Take a breath. Now imagine if Mitt Romney had run exactly Mitt Romney’s campaign but then suddenly in mid-September went on television and called Elizabeth Warren Pocahontas for no reason. It would have been huge.
This year, basically nothing. Trump being kinda racist is a dog-bites-man story. After all, just yesterday Donald Trump Jr. shared a white nationalist meme on Instagram. Trump lies all the time, so that’s not a big deal. In fact, he lies frequently about the essential core of his foreign policy, and his business dealings pose such obvious and flagrant conflicts of interest and ethics problems that lying about his stock holdings doesn’t seem like a big deal. And of course Trump doesn’t understand what he’s saying when it comes to monetary policy — monetary policy is complicated and obscure and Trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about on any other issue either.
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The whole thing makes me nostalgic for the days when I would complain that political coverage was too focused on candidate gaffes rather than policy ideas. Trump has no policy ideas, so there’s really nothing to focus on. You could spend all day trying to explain why various utterances don’t really make sense, but if he’s putting advisers out on television to denounce an entirely fake trade agreement with China, pointing out that he’s also getting the finer points wrong hardly seems worth our time. The best we can hope for is that Trump’s actual gaffes do get covered.
But the truly scary thing is that Trump is redefining the concept of a gaffe out of existence. It turns out that if you just boldly repeat something often enough, it goes away as a story. We’ve become numb, as a society, to what Trump is doing. In the process we’ve normalized casual racism, intense personal insults as an approach to politics, and completely decentered the idea that elected officials should grapple with difficult policy questions. Half the crazy things Trump says or does barely merit a mention on Twitter, much less the front-page coverage they would have merited in previous campaigns.
More than anything else, the numbness that Trump creates frightens me.
We have a learned a lot this year about what you can get away with in politics if you are brazen enough. The answer is that you can get away with a lot. Whatever happens in November, that revelation won’t go away."
"In a normal election cycle, a candidate making an offhand racist remark about a sitting US senator would be a big news story.
In a normal election cycle, a candidate making an offhanded lie about the state of his personal finances would be a big news story.
To be totally honest, even in a normal election cycle a candidate exhibiting total confusion about the mechanics and merits of monetary policy probably wouldn’t be that big of a news story but it would at least get some attention.
Seriously. Stop. Take a breath. Now imagine if Mitt Romney had run exactly Mitt Romney’s campaign but then suddenly in mid-September went on television and called Elizabeth Warren Pocahontas for no reason. It would have been huge.
This year, basically nothing. Trump being kinda racist is a dog-bites-man story. After all, just yesterday Donald Trump Jr. shared a white nationalist meme on Instagram. Trump lies all the time, so that’s not a big deal. In fact, he lies frequently about the essential core of his foreign policy, and his business dealings pose such obvious and flagrant conflicts of interest and ethics problems that lying about his stock holdings doesn’t seem like a big deal. And of course Trump doesn’t understand what he’s saying when it comes to monetary policy — monetary policy is complicated and obscure and Trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about on any other issue either.
...
The whole thing makes me nostalgic for the days when I would complain that political coverage was too focused on candidate gaffes rather than policy ideas. Trump has no policy ideas, so there’s really nothing to focus on. You could spend all day trying to explain why various utterances don’t really make sense, but if he’s putting advisers out on television to denounce an entirely fake trade agreement with China, pointing out that he’s also getting the finer points wrong hardly seems worth our time. The best we can hope for is that Trump’s actual gaffes do get covered.
But the truly scary thing is that Trump is redefining the concept of a gaffe out of existence. It turns out that if you just boldly repeat something often enough, it goes away as a story. We’ve become numb, as a society, to what Trump is doing. In the process we’ve normalized casual racism, intense personal insults as an approach to politics, and completely decentered the idea that elected officials should grapple with difficult policy questions. Half the crazy things Trump says or does barely merit a mention on Twitter, much less the front-page coverage they would have merited in previous campaigns.
More than anything else, the numbness that Trump creates frightens me.
We have a learned a lot this year about what you can get away with in politics if you are brazen enough. The answer is that you can get away with a lot. Whatever happens in November, that revelation won’t go away."
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