The True Catastrophe of Trump, as seen from north of the border

Friends,

Some of the most useful insights into what’s happening to America are coming from political analysts outside the United States. Here’s a particularly lucid essay by Andrew Coyne that appeared in the December 5 edition of Canada’s The Globe and Mail.

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Donald Trump — and American democracy — is getting exponentially worse

Andrew Coyne

I wish I could say I told you so. A point I have tried to make over the last year or so is that Donald Trump can only get worse: that however corrupt or incompetent or dictatorial or treasonous or insane he may appear at any given moment, it will inevitably come to be seen as a relative golden age beside what is to come.

There is a reason for this. It is that he can only stir the media and establishment outrage on which both he and his supporters thrive if he behaves even worse than we are accustomed to him behaving. It is not enough to say or do some appalling thing, even if it would have ended the career of any previous politician. He does that, quite literally, several times a day. Rather, he must exceed expectations of his grotesquerie. His critics’ dilemma — how to sustain outrage in the face of the constant, numbing, normalizing stream of objectively outrageous conduct — is also, in a way, his.

I was right about this, up to a point. Certainly his behaviour has grown worse over time. It is far worse now than it was at the start of his term, which was worse than during the unspeakable campaign that preceded it, which was worse than anything we had seen from him before that, even his terrifying first presidency — which was itself worse than even his worst critics had anticipated.

What I had not anticipated was the second derivative. After a time, that is, people come to expect, not just bad behaviour, but steadily worsening behaviour. So to keep feeding his outrage addiction, Mr. Trump’s behaviour not only has to keep getting worse, but to do so at an ever accelerating rate. And, I suppose, the rate of acceleration must also increase, and the rate of acceleration of the rate of acceleration, and so on. We are in a kind of hyperinflation of presidential derangement, an exponential curve asymptotically approaching Nero.

Do you doubt it? Consider the evidence. On a most