But if you step back and look at the whole picture of the Trump administration, both in the president’s own actions and in the policies being pursued on his behalf, you might reasonably conclude that the very idea of accountability is losing all meaning.

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It starts with Trump, of course — not only will he not be removed from office for his misdeeds, but impeachment didn’t have any appreciable effect on how the public sees him. Back in August, just before the Ukraine story broke, Trump’s approval averaged 42 percent. Today it’s at 44 percent — virtually no change. He’s still unpopular, the only president since the invention of polling never to have garnered the support of at least half the public. But that’s no more true now than it was before.

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Now let’s think about some of the policy moves we’ve learned about just recently. The Trump administration is proposing a rule change to the food stamp program that would deprive 3 million Americans of nutrition assistance, including making a million children who now receive free school lunches ineligible. Literally taking food out of the mouths of children.

The administration is also rolling out a massive change to the enormously popular Medicaid program, one that could result in coverage for millions being threatened. And they’re moving to permit drilling and mining on the sites of some of our most extraordinary natural treasures in the West, as though we’re experiencing some kind of desperate shortage of oil and gas that absolutely demands that we drill every last place we can.

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What does all that have to do with accountability? It’s an indication of the fact that this may be the most aggressively right-wing administration in our lifetimes, and it is operating without any apparent concern about political consequences.

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That wasn’t necessarily the strategy from the beginning. Trump’s administration has the character it does because many traditional Republicans refused to work for this president, leaving all those executive branch positions to be filled by either grifters or extremist ideologues.

As the latter group makes more and more progress toward its goals, we don’t see any evidence that anyone in the administration, not to mention its allies in Congress or the rest of the conservative world, sees any political risk in going too far on policy. In fact, they seem to have decided that there is no such thing as “too far.”

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It’s important to understand that most of the Republican agenda has always been highly unpopular, and no one understands this more than Republicans themselves. They know that the public doesn’t want more pollution, or the evisceration of the safety net, or outlawed abortion, or tax cuts for the wealthy and for corporations. So when they try to achieve those ends, they’ve usually done it with at least some care and within some limits. And they work hard to devise justifications for those decisions that they hope will defuse the opposition they might produce.

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Because if they didn’t, Republicans believed, they’d be punished for it come the next election. That’s the fundamental principle of democratic accountability.

Traditionally, parties have believed that accountability is a product not only of big, obvious things, like whether the economy is doing well or you started a disastrous war, but also of an accumulation of small things — a bad decision, a policy implemented poorly, a revelation of misbehavior and so on. Each one may be of limited consequence, but they pile up until the voters decide that they’ve had enough. So you always have to worry about whether what you’re doing might displease the electorate.

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But if you were looking at politics today, where would you find that kind of accountability?

It’s true that Trump’s personal repulsiveness imposes a penalty on him and his party; in ordinary circumstances a president presiding over unemployment below 4 percent would be cruising to an easy victory on the scale of Reagan’s in 1984 or Clinton’s in 1996, while November’s election looks for him to be a toss-up at best. But that penalty, and his uncertain prospects for reelection, haven’t developed over time because of his scandals or his extremist policies. They were there from the outset.

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From the beginning of his campaign for president, Trump promised a very personal kind of liberation. Embrace shamelessness and hate, he said, and you can be like me. You can stop being considerate of other people (a.k.a. being politically correct), whether it’s immigrants you’d like to punch or women you’d like to grab, and you’ll find your newfound freedom intoxicating.

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That much was obvious, but what we didn’t see at the time was that he could also liberate his party from nearly any constraints on how far they can go in pursuit of their policy goals. The public will barely notice, and even if they don’t like what they see, in an intensely polarized environment it won’t really matter in the next election.

Now imagine if the next Democratic president applied that lesson.