“I’m the least racist person you will ever interview,” President Trump told a gaggle of reporters earlier this month. Trump was responding to reports that he had dismissed all 54 countries of Africa as “shitholes” and wondered why the U.S. didn’t prioritize immigrants from places like Norway. Previously, the president reportedly insisted Nigerians who come here would never "go back to their huts in Africa,” and suggested Haitian immigrants “all have AIDS.” Trump began his political career with a loud and completely evidence-free campaign to prove Barack Obama, America's first black president, was born in Kenya. He also repeatedly suggested that Obama, who was editor of the Harvard Law Review, could not have gotten into Ivy League schools legitimately. On the morning Trump formally declared his intent to run for President, he characterized Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals.



In the 1970s, Trump and his father were sued by the Justice Department for housing discrimination against black New Yorkers. In 1989, he took out a full-page newspaper ad calling for the death penalty for a group of black and brown 14-, 15-, and 16-year-olds convicted in the Central Park Jogger rape case, and continued to advocate for it 14 years later when their wrongful conviction was overturned. During the 2016 campaign, Trump spread disgusting propaganda about black-on-white crime and lied about the flow of illegal immigrants across the southern border. Before his inauguration in January, Trump attacked John Lewis, who marched for civil rights alongside Martin Luther King, Jr.—and was nearly beaten to death by an Alabama state trooper at Selma—as "all talk” and “no action." Trump once said a federal judge could not preside over his case fairly because the judge’s parents were Mexican.

Getty Images

Yet the incident in January marked at least the third time Trump has publicly deemed himself “the least racist person” alive. This is a ludicrous thing for anyone to say. Gandhi wouldn’t say it. The whitewashed version of Martin Luther King, Jr. that some remember wouldn’t say it. It is simply shameless, and there is no better word to describe this president or the political era that he has ushered in.

As we embark on a second year of this presidency, more and more of our public officials now feel they can say anything, even when they previously said the opposite, or when we can readily see their falsehoods. More and more of our country's leaders are steadfastly, almost impressively, impervious to shame.

"Shame is a particularly useful tool in enforcing social norms," says Jennifer Jacquet, a professor at New York University and the author of Is Shame Necessary? New Uses for an Old Tool. "You may risk being arrested by the police for indecent exposure if you appear naked in Washington Square Park, but you certainly risk a lot of shame. That's the thing that the crowd is still allowed to do. I'm not allowed to put you in prison, or throw rocks at you, but the vigilantism, the power of the audience—the crowd—still exists in this role of public opprobrium."

Getty Images

In recent months, there have been signs that shame hasn't utterly vanished from our politics. At the end of 2017, Al Franken and John Conyers, two Democratic members of Congress, were pressured to resign amid sexual harassment allegations. So, too, was Republican Tim Murphy. If anything, though, the larger #MeToo movement is about the establishment of new norms around gender equality and abuse of power. It also doesn’t seem to apply to everyone. The nauseating Blake Farenthold of Texas remains a United States congressman despite using $84,000 in taxpayer money to settle a sexual harassment claim. Yesterday, Farenthold backed off his pledge to pay the money back. There's also our president, who has been accused of misconduct by 19 different women. Trump shamelessly called out Franken and continues to insist that the women he himself has been accused by are liars.

Shame may or may not have had an effect on Sean Spicer. The former White House press secretary apologized this week for the “embarrassment” he caused himself and his family while serving in the West Wing. Spicer lied incessantly and rewrote the history of the Holocaust from the White House podium with his infamous "Even Hitler" rant. But nothing compares to his first ever press conference, when he kicked off the Trump presidency with the ludicrous claim his boss had attracted the largest inauguration crowd in history—"period"—and that photos to the contrary were somehow doctored or misleading.

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

As the title of Jacquet's book suggests, shame is an ancient social tool. It's a punishment for violating social norms that don't quite amount to breaking the law. If you suggested those who march alongside Nazis in the street can be "very fine people" at an office holiday party, your coworkers would probably back away slowly—and file a complaint with HR. Clearly, however, shame has lost a step, at least at the highest levels of our politics.



"Inherently, politics involves exaggeration," says John Geer, a Political Science professor at Vanderbilt University. "But usually those exaggerations had some basis in fact. You were spinning the results, you were spinning the data. But it had some basis—not necessarily a lot—in reality. Right now, the big problem is that the claims people are making are often just inconsistent with what we know. They are lies—or the whole idea of alternative facts."

Getty Images

Trump’s particular attitude towards reality is not restricted to his views on people of color. He’s also "the least anti-Semitic person you've ever seen in your life." You should know that "nobody loves the Bible more,” even if his favorite passage is “Two Corinthians.” There’s nobody that “respects women more,” although he does attack the appearance of any woman, like Megyn Kelly or Mika Brzezinski, who challenges him.

Trump attacked John McCain, a senator from his own party who spent five-and-a-half years in a North Vietnamese prison camp, as a loser who got captured. Trump spent those same years getting draft deferments and called avoiding sexually transmitted disease in ‘70s New York his "personal Vietnam." He peddled the insane conspiracy theory that Ted Cruz's father was involved in the JFK assassination. He flouted the norm of presidential candidates releasing their tax returns, historically a gesture of transparency meant to show they will not bring conflicts of interest into office. Trump tapped his family, many of whom bring their own conflicts, to be among his most senior advisers. Many of those he appointed to leadership roles essentially made a career out of trying to destroy the agencies they now run.

But above all, Trump continues to disseminate false information at a breathtaking, surely unprecedented clip—then screams that any reporter or news outlet that challenges him is spreading Fake News. By his 355th day in office, The Washington Post assessed that the president had made 2,000 false or misleading claims. Remember when The Wall was going to cost $12 billion and Mexico was going to pay for it? Now the president is asking for $25 billion in American taxpayer cash.

Getty Images

Trump quite clearly does not believe in the concept of truth in the public discourse. He believes anything he says is true so long as enough of his supporters believe it. This has allowed him to trample the norms of our democratic politics with almost complete impunity. As president, he has outlasted any and all attempts by his peers or the public to shame him.

"We've kind of seen a sea change here on shame and shamelessness," says Kevin Kruse, a professor of history at Princeton University. "I'm giving my lecture course this semester, and I did McCarthyism. I played the famous clip of Joseph Welch: 'Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last.' It took the air out of McCarthy. I don't think it would work today. Now, with the charges that everything is fake news, there's no sense that if you're caught in a lie, the public will turn on you. In a new era dominated by cries that everything is fake news, there can be no truth. And without truth, there can be no shame."

Trump's shamelessness has filtered down into society, much like the apocryphal story about John F. Kennedy eschewing the tradition of top hats. "You have these people in society called 'norm entrepreneurs,'" Jacquet says. "The leadership sets the tone for the country." One of Trump's longest-serving aides, Kellyanne Conway, coined that infamous term, "alternative facts," to unwittingly describe the White House's approach to the truth. She illustrated it at every opportunity, which included cooking up a non-existent terror attack called "the Bowling Green Massacre” to justify the president’s Definitely Not a Muslim Ban. When called out on it, Conway claimed to have misspoken that one time—until it emerged she had peddled the would-be tragedy on other occasions. Conway also once made the astounding claim that a proposed $880 billion Medicaid cut did not constitute a cut to Medicaid.

Getty Images

In August, Dave Chappelle marveled at the fact he never knew that things like "government ethics" weren't enforced through legal measures, but through norms. It's easy to see why we've all had to take notice. The Environmental Protection Agency chief's calendar is filled almost completely with meetings with his real constituents: oil, gas, and chemical companies. That man, Scott Pruitt, installed a $25,000 top-secret phone booth for...protecting the environment?

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke grew up in a tiny Montana town where two-person companies just happen to get no-bid federal contracts. Chief of Staff John Kelly, lauded by some Beltway media types as the paragon of virtue in this administration, smeared a sitting congresswoman from the White House podium. During the campaign, Trump and his surrogates spent day after day blasting Hillary Clinton’s use of private email as an unforgivable breach of national security. After he took office, at least six of his White House advisers used private email for official business.

Getty Images

The signs of shame's collapse as a social force are everywhere. One congressman peddling conspiracy theories literally ran down a staircase in the Capitol to escape CNN, yelling "Fake News!" as he fled. CNN’s longtime Trumpist-in-Residence, Jeffrey Lord, once called Trump “the Martin Luther King of healthcare” on national television. He returned to the airwaves twice more that day to defend the statement. The network later severed ties with him over his use of a Nazi slogan, which Lord maintains was a joke.

In Alabama in December, there appeared to be a notable example of shame’s resilience in the ultimate defeat of Roy Moore, the Alabama Senate candidate accused by nine different women of sexual misconduct, many of whom were under 18 at the time of the alleged incidents. Moore enjoyed the support of the Republican National Committee, and came within two points of winning. His supporters defended him by referencing the Bible, and his pastor friend suggested he sought out teen girls when he was in his 30s because they were “pure.” But Moore did not win—a victory for shame and decency. Except Republican turnout was actually about normal, and Moore primarily lost because of extraordinary turnout among black voters in favor of Doug Jones, his opponent. Was it really shame that doomed Moore?

Getty Images

Elsewhere in the Republican party, Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy went on Jimmy Kimmel's show and coined The Jimmy Kimmel Test™, Cassidy's humane-sounding criteria for any prospective Obamacare repeal-and-replace bill that he then trumpeted across nearly a half-dozen cable news shows. When it came to write his Repeal and Go Fuck Yourself bill with Lindsey Graham, however, Cassidy included little of what he pledged to do. It was as if he thought all the video clips and the news stories and the tweets documenting what he'd earlier said just wouldn't matter—that in a way, they didn't really exist.

"Cassidy thought, Attention is so fractured that the people who I need in order to stay in office won't even know about this," Jacquet says of the healthcare bait-and-switch. "While you and I know Cassidy was caught—and Jimmy Kimmel did a big exposé using his platform and power of shaming—maybe that did not reach his constituents."

Getty Images

This idea hints at the structural problems abetting shame's decline, and the rise of post-truth politics that seems to go hand-in-hand. One reason attention is "fractured" is that the media landscape has become fractured and fragmented, itself. The Washington Post might have had 30 sources corroborating the stories of the first four women who accused Roy Moore. But it's "The Liberal Washington Post," and enough Alabamians dismissed it—automatically favoring the stories peddled by Fox News, or talk radio, or their pastors—that Moore nearly won the election.

"Without truth, there can be no shame."

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's blockade of Merrick Garland, whom President Obama nominated to the Supreme Court with nearly a year left in his term, was an unprecedented assault on the Senate's political norms based on a stretch, to say the least, of the so-called "Biden Rule."



That was the culmination of a similarly unprecedented campaign of obstruction from McConnell, particularly when it came to federal judicial nominees: Obama handed over 103 court vacancies to Trump, twice the number handed to him by George W. Bush. More Obama appointees were blocked using the filibuster than under all previous presidents combined. That was part of a larger campaign by McConnell, and Eric Kantor and John Boehner in the House, to block any and all Obama initiatives in the interest of pure power politics. It's the same political instinct that led Republicans to feel empowered to wage campaigns of voter suppression throughout the country—campaigns that very well could have had an impact in the Alabama race, and in the 2016 election.

Getty Images

However, Trump's assaults on decorum and common decency didn't emerge from thin air. Congressman Joe Wilson of South Carolina infamously yelled, "You lie!", twice, at Barack Obama, the sitting President of the United States, as he addressed a joint session of Congress. Wilson, though he did apologize, scarcely faced any real consequences—either for his disrespectful behavior, or for being completely wrong.

"He was rebuked in the House on a party-line vote," Kruse says. "No Republicans voted to rebuke him. And then he went out and fundraised off it. He made like a million dollars off that comment. So something that should have sent him cowering in shame was something he bragged about, he made money off of. It was politically profitable for him."

Getty Images

There's little doubt that Donald Trump learned from both McConnell's procedural shamelessness, and Wilson's shameless public attacks on the first black president. He also quickly learned a few things from how his own behavior was received. When Trump launched his birther campaign, Republican leaders by and large failed to condemn it. A number of sitting congressmen welcomed it with open arms.

"No one [in the Republican Party] resisted or spoke up against the campaign that he was running in that regard," Jacquet says, "which did in some fundamental ways roll out the carpet for his arrival." Just as important, mainstream news outlets proved incapable of denting the movement despite debunking Trump's fact-free claims and pillorying his outrageous behavior. Trump was developing a base of support that only listened to him, because he played all the right notes on an instrument dating back to America's founding.

There could be no Donald Trump without an environment ready to receive him. The Republican Party and the conservative movement that provides its energy fostered this environment over the decades, developing its own information ecosystem that gradually became an impenetrable vortex—an alternate reality. Republicans became transfixed on white identity politics and resentment of a changing America over all else, including the concept of truth itself. And they began to rig the machine of our democracy, keeping The Wrong People away from the polls and herding them into districts where their votes only went so far anyway. The Democratic Party had its issues during the primaries, when the party establishment was ultimately exposed as having favored Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders. But there simply is no liberal infovortex that rivals the conservative machine.

Getty Images

“It happens across the political spectrum, but if you look at the particular communities Trump tapped into, they've [conservatives] got an even greater level of epistemic closure than we might see in other places,” Kruse observes. “Fox News or Breitbart or the alt-right media out there are really living in their own universe.” You can’t truly equate Breitbart with The Washington Post, or see them as counterweights. Only a fan of Breitbart would.

Trump has simply made the pre-existing qualities more garish and extreme. It is difficult to get the full measure of the damage he has done to the body politic as it still unfolds, though surely the fact Roy Moore was even remotely competitive in a statewide election to a national office is its own thermometer.

"Has Donald Trump and this administration not only weakened the social norms, but also the power of shame itself?" Jacquet asks, without a sure answer. "They have shown such a clear way that you can skirt the traditional shaming channels in our society." She offered that my interest in this article showed we're still aware that some norms are being violated. But does it matter when the president has convinced half the country they shouldn't care?

"If there's something that my research has shown," Jacquet adds, "it's that it's easier to destroy a norm than to restore it." Geer agrees that the challenge is immense: "We need somebody who can rise above this partisan fray. And I don't know who that is, because it's hard to get the nomination without being heavily partisan. And third parties don't work in this country."

You can't rebuild the norms of political behavior if the country exists in two entirely disconnected spheres of existence. To reconnect them would require huge structural changes to how information is disseminated in society, or a uniquely charismatic leader whose message carries over both sides of the fence. Or maybe it may just take us hitting rock bottom before we all agree that something in how we’re processing the world, and holding our leaders accountable, has to change. If Donald Trump isn't rock bottom, then what is?