Ryan Lizza tells us about frog-boiling, as #TrumpRussia scandal fatigue may have set in.
Our tolerance for all of Trump’s outrageous contradictions is indistinguishable from the normal operations of kleptocratic capitalism.
We knew this when Trump the grabber was nominated, we knew it when there was even a hint of Russian involvement because of the new bad guys depicted in modern organized crime cinema.
We know this now that a deliberate destabilizing of US democracy from outside the borders has been abetted at the highest levels of our own government.
As all of these general denials have collapsed, the White House has retreated to making more tailored denials. First, there was no contact at all. When numerous contacts were revealed, the White House shifted to arguing there was no coördination (or “collusion”). Now that clear coördination between WikiLeaks and the Trump campaign has been uncovered, the new line is that it wasn’t illegal.
Trump and his Republican allies are betting that each disclosure, on its own, can seem innocuous or defensible, as the public becomes confused by the complicated timeline and tedious details.
The Trump camp’s original broad denials start to be forgotten, and the bar for what is considered truly inappropriate coördination gets higher. It can take a long time before anyone realizes that the frog is dead.
Here’s a very simple example … much like the GOP persistence in trying to kill the ACA, the so-called Tax Reform bill might actually crater the economy as some of us predicted during the 2016 campaign that Agent Orange would as president.