It may or may not be true that Elizabeth Taylor’s seventh husband introduced himself at their wedding as the man who “knew what was expected of him but just didn’t know how to make it interesting”, but the quip certainly captured a quintessential American phenomenon: the rapidly diminishing value of novelty.
This is a country in which you can become dulled to absolutely anything with enough exposure to it. The downward-sloping curve of boredom that plots time on the X-axis and shock on the Y-axis is steep. Something that just recently seemed like a meteorite that was going to wipe civilisation from the face of the earth will, with enough familiarity, soon feel like a light rain shower that won’t even force us to bring in the washing.
So, it seems, with presidential indictments. Less than six months ago, the total number of criminal charges brought against men who had served as president of the United States in the entire 234-year history of the country was zero. Today, it stands at 96.
Back in April, news that Donald Trump was facing criminal indictment in a wood-panelled courtroom was reported with due recognition of the unprecedented nature of the moment. A nation watched as the man who only two years earlier had had the unsteady finger of his curiously small hand on the nuclear button stood before a stern state judge and pleaded not guilty to fraud charges, crimes that could, if found guilty, put him in prison for the rest of his life.
Four months later, Trump indictments are as routine as a round-up of the late baseball scores. Fraud? Yawn. Obstruction of justice? Meh. Racketeering? Please. Tell me something interesting.
I’m exaggerating, slightly. The judicial protagonists and their friends in the media are certainly doing their best to keep hype alive. Each new set of indictments – this week we had the fourth since April – includes at least some element of novelty.
Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton county, Georgia, home to the state capital, Atlanta, managed this by making her case all about Rico. Rico is not the name of one of Trump’s sketchier-looking casino managers, but a criminal legal acronym that means “racketeering-influenced and corrupt organisations”. It is a favourite charge used by prosecutors against the machinations of mob bosses, as reporters excitedly reminded us this week. In Trump’s case it is alleged that he and a vast cadre of co-conspirators, 18 in all, colluded like a Mafia family to switch votes in the state to him from Joe Biden in 2020.
Willis’s prosecution follows that of Alvin Bragg, her state counterpart in New York county who charged Trump with financial fraud relating to payments to a porn star, and Jack Smith, the special federal prosecutor who alleges both that Trump illegally mishandled classified documents after he left office and that he led a scheme to subvert the nation’s 2020 election results.
I don’t know if any of the 96 charges will stick. As I’ve argued before, some are stronger than others, and the man’s moral culpability for the outrage of January 6 and its implications are beyond challenge. But there’s good reason to wonder whether the attempt to use the criminal law against him for political misbehaviour is wise, or indeed, if it will pass muster with juries.
I can say with some confidence that the more cases brought against him by zealous prosecutors, the more his supporters cry “witch-hunt” and the more even those who don’t support him start to lose their capacity to be shocked or even troubled by the behaviour.
When he first emerged on the political scene, the American media spent a long time publicly worrying about the “normalisation of Donald Trump”. They wanted people to treat him not like a (slightly more colourful) regular politician but as a unique aberration. But the more they strived to emphasise his demonic qualities, the less effect it had on large parts of the country – especially when, as they inevitably did, they overreached in the demonisation of the man.
So now, in a tragic and dangerous irony, we have something close to the normalisation of everything abnormal. We have normalised all sorts of abnormality by inuring Americans to the shock of anything at all.
We have certainly normalised a situation in which a former president is a constitutional scofflaw and a putative felon, and then normalised the fact that that putative felon leads a major political party and may well be elected president.
We have also normalised a situation in which prosecutors with ambitions and agendas pursue political objectives, in which the justice department uses the criminal law against political opponents, while falling over itself to avoid pursuing the son of the president.
We have for that matter normalised a situation in which an octogenarian incumbent president stumbles and mumbles his way through his job, his fragilities and growing inaptitude for the job apparently construed as routine.
And of course this all comes in a climate in which we have normalised the idea that men can be women; that speech we don’t like is violence; that discrimination is equal treatment; that freedom is tyranny and that justice is a crime.
This is an extraordinarily perilous moment in America. It is not simply that partisan tempers are running high, stoked by ambitious and mendacious demagogues. It is that the normalisation of everything has blurred, if not eliminated, the clear boundaries of morality and prudence. Through hyperbole and falsehood, repeated ad nauseam, unprincipled politicians, activists and media have dulled people’s sensibilities and diminished their ability to judge anyone or anything other than the enemies they can identify.
If everything is normal then nothing is beyond the pale.
The Times
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