Here's what is actually disgraceful: The president of the United States is engaged in a one-sided smear effort against the man who, less than 18 months ago, he nominated to be the top law enforcement official in the country.

Consider:

There's more.

But let's take it out of the context of a president talking about his attorney general. If a boss treated an employee this way -- denigrating him publicly, saying he would never have hired him if he knew then what he now knows -- we would say that boss was acting deeply inappropriately. Heck, the person being berated might even file a complaint with the human resources department because of the boss's behavior.

Go back even further in your life. If a kid at school called your kid "beleaguered" or "very weak" or "disgraceful," you would call that kid a bully and maybe even ask the school to do something about it.

And yet we seem to tolerate this sort of behavior from the President of the United States -- a man who holds a position of massive authority and import, someone who influences the behavior of people whether or not he intends to.

This is not to say "woe to poor Jeff Sessions." The former Alabama senator was a prominent Trump surrogate during the course of the 2016 campaign and spent enough time around Trump to know what he was getting into when he accepted the attorney general job. He wanted the job more than he worried about working for Trump.

Plus: Sessions could always quit. He could have quit after all of the past Trump slights. He could quit today.

He didn't. Instead, Sessions said this: "As long as I am the attorney general, I will continue to discharge my duties with integrity and honor, and this department will continue to do its work in a fair and impartial manner according to the law and Constitution."

This isn't about Sessions, though. Not really. This is about Trump redefining -- downward -- the sort of behavior we are willing to accept (or ignore) from our leaders.

The President touts himself as the biggest, baddest boss in town. If that's true, and if he really believes Sessions is doing as poor a job as he seems to believe, via his tweets, then Trump should fire the attorney general. If not, he should let Sessions do his job without undermining him at every turn.

That is what an adult does. What Trump is doing is the opposite.

And yet, with the exception of a handful of Republicans who have come to Sessions' defense, there has been little hue and cry over this latest attack from Trump.

I get it. Trump has a remarkable knack for making news. But when his attacks on Sessions aren't big news anymore, it amounts to a tacit acceptance that that sort of behavior is normal now. It isn't. Or it shouldn't be.