Indiana Governor Mike Pence’s looming nomination for the vice presidency, and the whimpering failure of the #NeverTrump movement’s convention coup, consecrate the Republican Party’s decision to accept Donald Trump as their party’s standard bearer and make peace with the kind of politics he practices. Republicans won’t officially nominate Trump until Thursday, but they drafted the deal over the past two months, and finalized the language this past week.



In a news environment that’s saturated with fleeting outrages, false equivalences, and fluctuating poll numbers, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that Republicans aren’t just ratifying a new set of policy ideas and crudities. Trump has already awakened and sanctioned a kind of latent social disorder among his supporters, many of whom harbored racist sentiments silently or privately, but who now feel emboldened to act upon their views in public: in classrooms; at cash registers, and kiosks around the country.

It is difficult, but not totally impossible, to quantify this Trump effect, but if you simply listen to the experiences of people in the communities Trump has vilified, his influence over minority experience in American life is easy to characterize. It is ugly and nefarious. And Republicans have decided to normalize it.

News reports have chronicled a variety of incidents across the country over the months of Trump’s political juggernaut, some of which captured the public’s imagination briefly, only to be filed away as a datapoint in a survey that never seems to come to completion.

Perhaps the most famous incident occurred four months ago, at a high school basketball game in Indiana, when “a group of Andrean students produced signs and images of presidential candidate Donald Trump and began to chant ‘Build that wall,’ at the Bishop Noll team and fans, who are heavily Hispanic,” according to a statement from the dioceses that oversees both schools.