Revolution blues
By 
Remember the first six months or so — they were crucial — of the first Trump presidency?
For a decade now, much of the American political class has been committed to the unconscious project of denying to itself that what is happening in this country is actually happening.
Remember, in that vein, “this is the day Donald Trump became president?” That day kept recurring during the early years of the first Trump presidency, whenever very serious people found the tiniest speck of evidence that Donald Trump, real estate scam artist, recurrent bankrupt, reality TV star, self-confessed grabber of unwilling women’s genitalia (note to historians in the far future, if any: this actually happened; it isn’t, in the style of the most outrageous stories about Caligula et al, something that his political enemies invented), and unparalleled publicity whore, was somehow “growing” into the office of the presidency.
Yes, many a pundit announced this over and over again, until after approximately the 77th time that Trump did something more outrageously stupid than any other president had ever done, on the day after yet another day on which he had supposedly really become president. Then they finally stopped. But it went on for a long time, and this is why:
Because what happened in this country, and what is now happening again, except far more egregiously this time because The Adults in the Room are all long gone, is so completely unbelievable.
From The Triumph of Stupidity.
It’s striking how this formerly ubiquitous media trope — that this self-evidently moronic and absurd and malevolent figure was going to more or less magically become someone completely different, simply because he had been given the most powerful and important job in the world — has been, as far as I can tell, completely absent during the first ten months of the second Trump presidency.
Instead, the frank insanity of it all has simply been normalized. This is what “the system” has produced, and since “the system” can never be questioned in any fundamental way, this is somehow all legitimate, or even good.
Because the alternative is almost literally not thinkable.