President Trump’s most significant, and ominous, achievement in his first year in office is the corruption of the Republic. I don’t mean that he has succeeded in destroying the checks and balances on which American freedom rests. I mean that he has so soiled the discourse that a kind of numbness has set in, an exhaustion of outrage that allows him to proceed with the unthinkable.

The greatest danger from a man so unerring in his detection of human weakness, so attuned to the thrill of cruelty, so aware of the manipulative powers of entertainment, so unrelenting in his disregard for truth, so contemptuous of ethics and culture, so attracted to blood and soil, was always that he would use the immense powers of his office to drag Americans down with him into the vortex.

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Trump has lowered expectations. He has inured people to the thread of violence and meanness lurking in almost every utterance; or worse, he has started to make them relish it. He has habituated Americans to buffoonery and lies. He calls himself a “genius.”

If so, his genius resides in the darkest realms of the human psyche.