This is not a good day for logic, reason, or the United States.  

Republicans are jumping on their first opportunity to normalize Trump.  You could see this coming after Trumps first, massive flip-flop in Syria.  It accelerated as other reversals followed in rapid succession: NATO, NAFTA, China, and the Ex-Im Bank.  The lying continues as the one, reliable, constant with Trump and his people: both Trump and Spicer are pretending that the flip-flops were really the rest of the world coming around to agree with Trump – course reversals possible only in some of the more bizarre non-Euclidean geometries.  

Republicans are highly motivated to normalize Trump.  Given an opening by his flip-flops, they easily can do so with praise, now, something Trump cannot pass up.  That might move him even further toward conventional Republican, plutocratic policies.  If they can bring Trump around, and changing his mind seems to be as easy as speaking to him in very simple words, it would consolidate their power to an extent devastating to the poor, the middle class, and representative democracy.  

The WaPo article above references a “former” aid who said “that the president is known to form initial opinions based on instinct but later to change his stance based on new information and the influence of his advisers.”  Boy is that comforting, especially if it becomes the likes of Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan who are whispering sweet nothings into his ear.

Never mind that “Trump promised his supporters — a coalition that included larger-than-expected numbers of non-college educated, working-class voters — that he would pursue populist policies that put the interests of American workers first.”  Republicans have led them around by the nose for decades.  They are not suddenly going to wake up and turn on Trump in any large numbers, especially while we still are arguing about whether they are worthy of our attention.  Republicans will have consolidated not only their control but the basest part of their base.

In a stunning display of incompetence, the TV and print “pundits” already are buying the line:  at long last, the messiah – ah, the pivot that is (both of which are equally applicable to Trump).  Even Fareed Zakaria, so often a sophisticated, well-reasoned, adult voice, has lost sight of reality.  In what I hope will go down as one of his worst and most regretted articles, he argues against judging Trump too hard, using the meme of a “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” stolen from the much more appropriate description of Republican reactions to Obama.  Zakaria is doubling down on the shocking foolishness of his Trump-just-became-presidential remark following the toothless missile attack in Syria.  He has some reasonable words about how various Republican factions seen Trump’s reversals, but, on the whole, he is accepting the unfathomable idiocy that Trump is growing into the presidency.  

Trump will prove them all wrong, of course, and, we can only hope, before he starts a war somewhere.  But this is not a good day for logic, reason, or our country, and, ironically, all of it brought on by Trump’s actual derangement: his total lack of the most basic principles, beliefs, or self-awareness.  

Fight normalization.

Fight it at every opportunity.