What happens, though, when hatred renders so easily as a joke? And what happens, in particular, when the president of the United States uses his vast platform not only to celebrate violence, but also to suggest that violence is funny? As the writer Wajahat Ali noted at a recent panel at the Aspen Ideas Festival, co-sponsored by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic, “Trump, as the commander in chief, uses the pulpit and the platform of the office to tweet hate.” The president eschews the one-America logic that has guided the communications strategies of so many past presidencies—the language that aims to unify the nation in its measured appeals to the mass public—and uses his platform instead both to pick fights and to maintain the ones he has started. Trump has put the “bully” in “bully pulpit.”

It’s a significant shift—not merely because presidential angry-tweets have, in their reach, the potential to incite violence, and not merely because they are, as CNN put it in a statement about the WrestleMania video, notably “juvenile.” Tweets like that video, and the many others that have preceded it, also normalize hatred itself. They suggest a zero-sum world: a world of friends and enemies, a world of winners and losers, a world in which struggle is not the exception, but, by pugilistic necessity, the rule. The president, with each 140-character message, takes that old, optimistic bromide—there is more that connects us, as Americans, than divides us—and flips it. He suggests that division and tribalism and fear and hatred will guide America’s politics and its future.

What’s even more troubling: He might have reason to make that suggestion. Grainy video of a sucker-punching president neatly captures a shift that has transpired slowly and then mind-bogglingly quickly in recent years: Hatred has come into the mainstream. Fear and its common companion, animosity—directed toward immigrants, toward minorities, toward women, toward the news media—are becoming more and more normalized in our cultural conversations. They are living less and less at the margins of American life.

Hatred, of course, has always been part of that life. As Heidi Beirich, of the Southern Poverty Law Center, pointed out on the same panel, “the country was obviously white supremacist from its founding.” In recent years, however, Ali noted, hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan (the SPLC currently counts 54 such groups) existed for the most part at the outskirts of society. They hated, as is their constitutional right, but they were judged for it and ostracized for it by the broader body of American politics. Their ideas were, in the Overton sense, unthinkable. The window of acceptability was closed to them.

No longer, Ali suggested. The rise of social media has allowed hatred to be both concretized—sharable tracts, meme-able images, Pepe—and, then, amplified. Digital capabilities have meant, as well, that haters can find likeminded people, across the distance. Which has meant in turn that hatred has become empowered as never before. Recent months have seen acts of hate directed against transgender women, Jews, African Americans, Latinos, Muslims, Hindu Americans, Sikh Americans, and others. Acts of anti-semitism, a recent study from the Anti-Defamation League found, spiked 86 percent during the first months of 2017—an increase from what had already been a surge of such incidents the previous year.