America: Exhausted and weak

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.

Trump is succeeding in this. He is having his way, for all the investigative vigor of the free press he derides, for all the honor of the judiciary that has pushed back against his attempts to stain with bigotry the law of the land. Slowly but surely, the president is getting people to shrug.

The appalling becomes excusable, the heinous becomes debatable, the outrageous becomes comical, lies become fibs, spite becomes banal, and hymns to American might become cause for giddy chants of national greatness.

  NYT

I don't think we can lay the whole blame at Trump's little stomping feet, but he has certainly escalted the country's descent into Hell.

Trump itches to press that button. The thing about kicks is you have to keep upping their charge. “You’re fired” worked for a while. But nukes are a whole other level. Trump wants to see North Korea’s Kim Jong-un writhing like an irradiated butterfly on a pin.

[...]

[Trump's SOTU speech] equated the 128 countries — not “dozens,” as Trump said — that voted against his recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital with “enemies of America.” It hinted at a McCarthyite purge of any federal employee deemed to have failed the American people. It betrayed presidential rapture at reviving the Guantánamo Bay detention facility, the place where a fair trial went to die.

[...]

For NBC’s Savannah Guthrie, “It was optimistic; it was bright; it was conciliatory.” Frank Luntz, a respected Republican pollster, thought that only one word qualified: “Wow.” He tweeted that the speech was a “brilliant mix of numbers and stories, humility and aggressiveness, traditional conservatism and political populism.” Jake Tapper of CNN discerned “beautiful prose.” Even the Washington Post saw “A Call for Bipartisanship” (its initial Page One headline) lurking somewhere. Three in four American viewers approved of the speech, according to a CBS News poll.

[...]

“Where’s my Roy Cohn?” Trump is reported to have exclaimed in recent months, frustrated by what he sees as the failure of his attorney general to protect him from the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Cohn, Trump’s ruthless former lawyer, was Senator Joseph McCarthy’s top aide for the hysterical investigations into Communist activities in the 1950s. Where, in other words, is my attack dog ready to shred the special counsel Robert Mueller and the rule of law?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.