July 23, 2018 09:23 AM UTC

This is Not Normal

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• by: Colorado Pols

As multiple media outlets are reporting today, President Trump is staring into the abyss and finding that it looks a lot like his bathroom mirror. From CNN:

President Donald Trump is lashing out in all directions as the fallout from his summit with Vladimir Putin becomes ever more toxic, the Russia investigation grinds on with no end in sight, and his frustration boils over on a lack of progress on North Korea.

The tensions reached a new level Sunday night when the President issued an all-caps threat against Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, who had warned the US that war with Tehran would be the “mother of all wars.” Trump tweeted that Iran would “suffer consequences the likes of which few throughout history have ever suffered before” if its government again threatened the US, immediately ratcheting up tensions.

Exacerbating a sense of a White House under siege is the President’s full-out assault on his former lawyer Michael Cohen, who recorded a conversation with Trump about a payment to a former Playboy model who alleges she had an affair with the former real estate tycoon before he entered politics.

The controversies raging around the Oval Office underline how the President is increasingly taking control of his own defense and is willing to dictate high-risk political and legal strategies. But his incessant and often false attacks on special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation also give the impression of someone who fears its ultimate conclusions and is unsettled that his fate may be out of his hands.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 23, 2018

It’s not really possible to argue with any modicum of truth that any of this is okay, but where do we go from here? As E.J. Dionne, Jr. writes for the Washington Post:

The vindication of those who saw Trump for who he is (a majority of the 2016 electorate, it’s worth noting) provides little satisfaction because of the peril his presidency poses.

But we can learn from this experience. Trump’s long-standing Republican apologists have lost all credibility. The party needs to be rebuilt, and that task should fall to the handful of GOP dissenters who resolutely refuse to peddle Trump’s propaganda.

We should never again take seriously all those who tell us that paying attention to what a politician says and does blinds us to some deeper (and nonexistent) wisdom he is supposedly conveying.

And we should develop a permanent immunity to a fake and manipulative populism that casts upholding standards and defending decency as the preoccupations of rarefied social and intellectual circles.

This is not normal. This cannot be normal.