In a less degenerate era, the president’s remarks over the Labor Day weekend might have prompted an earnest conversation about impeachment. “Two long running, Obama era, investigations of two very popular Republican Congressmen were brought to a well publicized charge, just ahead of the Mid-Terms, by the Jeff Sessions Justice Department,” Donald Trump tweeted on Monday, criticizing the U.S. attorney general for not burying evidence of alleged criminal corruption by two of his close political allies, Representatives Chris Collins of New York and Duncan Hunter of California, both of whom were recently indicted. “Two easy wins now in doubt,” he added. “Good job Jeff.”

This is perhaps the closest Trump has come to explicitly arguing for a two-tiered justice system: one for his political enemies, like Hillary Clinton, and one for friends who prove their loyalty. “The president’s tweet is a naked admission that he thinks law enforcement by his Justice Department should serve his political goals,” Washington defense attorney William Jeffress, who worked on the Valerie Plame leak case, told me. “That is the opposite of what thinking people of both parties have believed strongly for decades, and if the president is allowed to succeed it would undermine federal law enforcement like nothing else in our lifetimes.”

Instead, Washington has responded with a resounding shrug. While Republican Senator Ben Sasse issued a fiery statement accusing the president of turning the United States into “some banana republic,” his was a lone voice of indignation among his colleagues. “The president is entitled his opinion,” Senator John Kennedy said during an interview with CNN on Tuesday. “I don’t see it either in the statute or constitution that I have oversight of the president’s tweets.”

Trump, after all, has repeatedly proven that he can transgress the acceptable bounds of American politics without any pushback from Republican leadership. In an e-mail Tuesday morning, G.O.P. strategist and vocal Trump critic Rick Wilson offered a world-weary summation of how the party has come to accommodate Trump. “What this reads like is an overt attempt to once again subvert the rule of law,” Wilson wrote. “It is so far outside the bounds of presidential decorum that . . . oh, fuck it . . . who am I kidding?”

The collective silence following Trump’s efforts to weaponize the Justice Department is all the more disturbing because it highlights how far Trump has gotten toward achieving his goal. The last time Trump ordered one of the nation’s top law-enforcement agents, F.B.I. director James Comey, to lay off one of his supporters, special counsel Robert Mueller was appointed to investigate. Today, after months of berating Sessions for a similar lack of loyalty, Washington’s outrage seems exhausted.

Of course, much has happened since last July, when Trump first said he would never have appointed Sessions had he known that the attorney general was going to recuse himself from the Russia probe. Republicans have grown accustomed to the president’s constant attacks on the Justice Department, which Trump has urged to prosecute Clinton, Comey, and other critics of his administration.

Perhaps more important, Democrats know that Trump’s comeuppance will have to wait until after November, when they are likely to retake the House. Trump has grown increasingly comfortable exerting his influence over the attorney general and the F.B.I., eroding the constitutional firewall between the White House and the Justice Department. In the meantime, Mueller continues to his quiet, diligent investigation into whether Trump obstructed justice. “Icarus didn’t know how close was too close to the sun until it was too late—and neither do the rest of us” noted G.O.P. strategist Terry Sullivan, who ran Senator Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign, invoking the ancient Greek tale of a man destroyed by hubris. “We’ll have to wait to see him falling from the sky before we know.”