It Only Seems Unprecedented
Trump's indictment is a logical progression, not a conclusion.
The idea that something is “unprecedented” means a great deal to the media, but this meaning is fluid. So much of what Trump did as president was unprecedented, in its oafish and overt corruption and its relentlessly brutish presentation, that it overwhelmed the media’s capacity to respond to it. His gaudy preening bully-boy schtick is premised on smash-and-grab sadism, so even the faint possibility of any of his actions drawing kinda-sorta belated consequences for things he very clearly did arrives as a surprise.
A claustrophobic sense of impunity lingers as Trump drifts through the criminal justice system—well, not for threatening the Governor of Georgia to rig the 2020 election for him or even shuffling classified documents to Mar-a-Lago, but for paying hush money to a porn star. This is some dumb shit a person would do if and only if they believed their “fuck around” stage was eternal and they would never enter their “find out” era.
That Trump was elected president wasn’t ridiculous and implicating enough, but it superseded the lurid fact that if someone this ridiculous can be president, then the office—and the system it sits atop, and the political process that supports it—is much more ridiculous than any of the overdetermined journos covering it can comfortably admit. The #resistance clout goblins are tweeting “BENITO CHEETOLINI NEEDS TO FACE JUSTICE! RETWEET IF YOU AGREE!” Meanwhile, Fox News is basically saying: “Paying hush money is a normal thing that everyone does in America.” Yes, everyone has wrestled with their neighbor’s cousin and paid him $70 not to tell their wife.
To acknowledge the reality of this moment, the incapacity or outright collapse of America’s institutions, is a tacit acceptance that things really are this stupid and broken. The insistence upon understanding Trump as an aberration is not just a stubborn denial of how manifestly untenable this moment is, but it only leaves words like “unprecedented” and a mood of strained and tragicomic somberness.
If Trump somehow gets an ankle bracelet slapped onto his cankles, I want a photo of him taken after a few nights of being processed and deloused in a prison. He will look like a bog witch.
