About 48 hours ago, I argued that Donald Trump wouldn’t be undone by the criminal cases swarming about him. Since then, two mighty bilge buckets have taken a tumble, one in the form of Paul Manafort, onetime Trump campaign manager, and the other in the form of Michael Cohen, longtime Trump lawyer and errand boy. Both were nailed for assorted financial felonies—Manafort in a courtroom with a jury, Cohen in a deal with prosecutors—but Cohen’s case is the more damaging to Trump, as it included a plea of guilty to a felony violation of campaign-finance law. Specifically, Cohen fronted his own money in order to pay off a couple of women (one of whom was adult-film actress Stormy Daniels) who were threatening to go public with salacious stories about the Donald. The odds that Donald Trump was ignorant of this little scheme are about as high as the odds of Trump having adhered to his marital vows—that is to say, low. And now Cohen’s lawyer, Lanny Davis, is going to television and teasing the offer of damaging Russia-related testimony on the horizon.

Is it therefore time to re-assess Trump’s odds of political survival, or is it time for obstinacy? Why, the latter. But it’s not really my obstinacy. If you’re a Democrat, you can easily get carried away by the banners in The New York Times. However, if you look over at news and opinion sites of the right (Fox, The Wall Street Journal, Breitbart), you’ll see that most of the reactions have been dismay combined with either a change of subject or a questioning of the legitimacy of the entire investigation into Trump to begin with. (For some Trump fans, to be sure, Tuesday caused some illusions to crumble, particularly within the Insanity Chess caucus that’s convinced Robert Mueller is in quiet cahoots with Trump against the Deep State. But this is not an important player.) For a president to be in serious trouble, his own team has to weaken visibly and suffer defections. This hasn’t yet happened. As bad as the news for Trump has been this week, the battle lines so far haven’t visibly shifted. The question is why.

The obvious answer is that we’re polarized, and that’s the biggie, but let’s not overlook the other factors at play. One change is simply that our standards for public figures have been lowered. Noting comparisons to Watergate, Free Beacon writer Alex Griswold countered in a tweet that back then “politicians were capable of shame.” It’s probably more accurate to say that all of us were capable, or more capable, of shame back then. A sex scandal was likelier to cause people to retreat into hiding, not sign contracts for television shows. Shame still exists, but it’s in lesser form, and we’re now ashamed of different things. A racial slur wouldn’t necessarily end a political career decades ago, but it would today. Furthermore, breaking the law to cover up sexual impropriety, and weathering the ensuing storm, was ground broken by Bill Clinton. It doesn’t mean that every politician can do the same (they can’t), that Clinton was treated fairly (he wasn’t), or that Trump’s behavior wasn’t scuzzy (it was). But it does mean that there’s a major precedent for brazening it out.

Another reason people, particularly Republicans, remain unmoved is that most of the crimes revealed so far have been both unsurprising and far afield. When Manafort was indicted for financial crimes, only a masterful actor could muster a convincing gasp. Even by swamp standards, this was an especially boggy creature. Cohen was never going to have Tom Hanks play him in a movie, either. This was the type of guy who’d already become known for telling a journalist to “tread lightly” or “what I’m going to do to you is going to be fucking disgusting.” (Would the journalist’s sheets suffer the same fate as the hapless Obama bed in Moscow?) What would change the equation would be crimes tied to the central purpose of the inquiry to begin with: Russian collusion. (That Davis is now hinting at Russia revelations on television while asking for GoFundMe donations for his client suggests more about Davis’s cynicism than anything else.) As for paying off blackmailers through a shell entity, there’s too much dissent on whether that even counts as a meaningful crime (see onetime Clinton associate Mark Penn in The Hill for an example of the argument against prosecutors) to shift allegiances on the matter.