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The presidency of Donald Trump has been one long and largely successful exercise in defining expectations down, or rather in defining them into the ground. Trump is not just deficient with respect to virtually every quality one could reasonably expect of a president or a man: he is its opposite.

Do you expect a president to be honest? He lies, publicly, verifiably, on the record, many times a day, hundreds of times a month, thousands of times since he became president. And so to all the rest. Do you expect he should be competent? Knowledgeable? Decent? Non-corrupt? Trump defines the opposite pole to all of those and more.

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But because he does not visibly seem to care that he is all these things, or that others know that he is all these things, and because of the sheer breadth and volume of his offences against the norms of personal and presidential conduct, he escapes all accountability. It is not that he does not suffer the sort of consequences that any other president would suffer for any one of these misdeeds, let alone all of them; he does not suffer any consequences. His supporters don’t care; his critics have given up; everyone else has stopped paying attention.