The President of the United States watches the Fake News MSNBC in the hopes someone will praise him like one of those big, strong, crying men we always hear about at his rallies. Ideally, the TV people will call him, "Mr. Trump." But then, when he is insufficiently praised, he takes to the Tweet Machine to attack the people from the TV screen. This would be unhealthy behavior for any adult, much less an adult with a 13-year-old child, and much, much less the guy in whom we have seen fit to vest the powers of the American presidency. We have mostly accepted this, however, as normal.

We have also accepted the complete collapse of shame as a social force, and Donald Trump, American president is once again a shining example. You might remember that the president has very publicly cheated on every wife he's ever had, and even paid off some of his mistresses—whom he still somehow insists are lying about it all—to stay quiet about their (non?)-affairs. (These allegations are separate from those of the many women who have accused him of sexual assault or misconduct, the kind of behavior he bragged about on tape.) Anyway, here's the president's response to news that he has another primary opponent for the Republican presidential nomination:

When the former Governor of the Great State of South Carolina, @MarkSanford, was reported missing, only to then say he was away hiking on the Appalachian Trail, then was found in Argentina with his Flaming Dancer friend, it sounded like his political career was over. It was,.......but then he ran for Congress and won, only to lose his re-elect after I Tweeted my endorsement, on Election Day, for his opponent. But now take heart, he is back, and running for President of the United States. The Three Stooges, all badly failed candidates, will give it a go!

It's easy to get distracted here by the "Flaming Dancer" presidential quip, which CNN's Daniel Dale diagnosed as a kind of onion of stupidity: the world's most powerful man very likely meant to write Flamingo Dancer, although the actual term is Flamenco Dancer, and also there is zero reason to believe Mark Sanford's mistress was a Flamenco Dancer—unless, of course, your joke is that any woman from Argentina is a Flamenco Dancer.

Mark Sanford apparently still thinks conservative voters care about The National Debt. NBC NewsWire Getty Images

Every day gets dumber, folks, but there's a more intriguing question prompted by this Official Message from the President. It's not whether hypocrisy is dead—it is—but whether we will ever again care about marital infidelities in a political context. Surely there's no reasonable argument anymore that the American electorate truly cares whether a politician cheats on his or her spouse. It was a rollicking national scandal when Sanford (hilariously) admitted he had not actually been hiking the Appalachian Trail, but we've since made a quintessential cheater the president. This is not a particularly important criterion, apparently, for a national leader, and maybe that's with good reason. Why did we ever care what politicians did in their personal lives? It indicates they lie to their spouses, sure, but lying is no disqualifier for office, either. Is Trump a paragon of Family Values? Please. Nobody cares about any of this.

No, it was only ever a bludgeon to be used against one's opponents, and that's how it will continue to be. Trump showed as much with his gobsmackingly hypocritical tweet. The details don't actually matter, it's about the performance of bludgeoning The Enemies. It's a spectacle, and an empty one at that. This is the essential nihilism now flowing through American national politics—if not the politics of the western world at large—and threatening to drown us all in the rising tide of weaponized nonsense.

Certainly, Sanford's campaign will soon be drowned. After all, the guy launched his bid on the notion that Real Conservatives care about The National Debt. Talk about delusion, and something worthy of mockery. Until these Never Trumpers come to grips with the fact that the movement has for decades been built on escalating appeals to white identity and cultural resentment—that, say, the Tea Party was not actually about Fiscal Responsibility—the party will long be controlled by Trump and the imitators who will inevitably follow. They sure as hell won't let democracy get in the way. Trump is savaging the Constitution's separation of powers at the top, Republican state legislatures are stripping governors' offices of their powers when they lose them to Democrats, and some of the state parties are set to cancel their primaries for The Leader's benefit.

But maybe Sanford—and, for that matter, Bill Weld—will get an MSNBC contributor gig out of all this.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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