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This, finally, is Trump’s victory. His own standards are so unrelievedly debased they have colonized everyone else’s. He has set the bar so low for himself that he has only to step over it to be hailed a success — and when he fails even then, he is declared to have stepped over it anyway.

Let him once stick to the script that was put in front of him, read at a funereal pace, mouth words he does not believe and has no intention of fulfilling (that call to “set aside our differences, to seek common ground,” was another highlight, when he had publicly insulted half the people present) and it seems we in the media cannot help ourselves: we have our own script, our own narrative, that calls for the event to be proclaimed, if not a turning point — no one believes that any more — then at least something vaguely reminiscent of past presidents. Why, didn’t he say it was “a New American Moment”? Who cares what it meant, or that it was lifted from a Hillary Clinton campaign speech? It had the words “new” and “American” in it.

Photo by Win McNamee/Pool via AP

We are hardly alone. Those conservative Republican congressmen, jumping to their feet to applaud a series of Trumpian pronunciamentos that bear no resemblance to conservatism, from a budget-busting $1.5 trillion infrastructure program to protectionist trade rhetoric to paid parental leave (to say nothing of cozying up to Russia and attacking the FBI, of which indeed nothing was said): they, too, are his enablers. So are those evangelicals who somehow look the other way at his moral failings, manifest and manifold as they are, of which the public humiliation of his latest wife is only a recent and relatively minor example — though forging Stormy Daniels’ signature on a statement denying all was an admittedly gallant touch.