I feel it appropriate to recognize this moment in our great nation's intellectual and political history, in which a president of the US has felt the need to claim on Twitter that he is a mentally stable genius. We are passing from one era of political thought to another, and Trump's peculiar genius has given us the defining moment of that transition, as we go from Godwin’s Law to Trump's Law as the guiding principle of the new era.
The era of political and public policy thought we are leaving was dominated by the experience of WWII and the Third Reich. Hitler and his doings formed a limit, the extreme, of the evil that politics could lead to. Late in this post-war era, but very soon after the Internet released public political discussion from the restraints of editorial filtering, Godwin's Law was formulated to recognize the foundational place that Hitler had in our political thought. Mike Godwin observed that the longer any Usenet political discussion went on (with duration presumably driven by intensity and passion) , the higher the probability, approaching certainty, that one side or the other in the discussion would compare the other's position to Hitler's.
The more famous corollary to Godwin's Law, that the first side to compare the other to Hitler loses the argument, arises from the sacred (or damned) status that any such unattainable extreme acquires if it is also foundational. You refute yourself if you claim that whatever comparatively trivial political setback or tribulation your side suffers today is as bad as the Holocaust. You refute yourself if you claim the other side of any mundane disagreement is as bad as Hitler.
We've moved on from that era, for better or worse. You can now claim Nazi status for yourself, you don't have to wait for some bitter political enemy to trigger Godwin's Corollary to do that. It doesn't make you automatic electoral poison, or mean that people who call you a Nazi have refuted themselves. Of course you're a Nazi! It says so right on your T-shirt.
Partly it seems that people have forgotten, but largely it's that at least some no longer trivial segment of the electorate has decided that Lebensraum and racial purity, historical warts and all, aren't really such bad ideals after all. You can go there, espouse those ideas openly as ideals whose pursuit will Make America Great Again, and it's just another option in the cafeteria of the mundane political spectrum.
Godwin's Law and its corollary are dead, and Trump's success has made that clear. What follows is still up in the air.
The hopeful possibility is that Trump gets carted off to custodial care of one sort or another, prison or a nursing home, in the near future, and his tenure in office is just a passing blip. History will repeat the tragedy of the Third Reich as farce. Trump gets to Harding status in the public imagination within a decade.
In this happy, sitcom, world, Trump’s Law becomes, “If a sufferer from dementia with behavioral disturbance remains president long enough, the probability that he will claim to be a stable genius approaches, and will eventually reach, certainty.” The more widely applicable corollary will be that a person who publicly claims that he is a stable genius has just proven that he is mentally unstable and has a serious cognitive deficit.
The unfortunate possibility is that Trump, in his dementia with behavioral disturbance, stumbles us into some disaster we won't be able to forget. Who knows what form that disaster might take -- a nuclear exchange, default on US debt, etc., etc. The possibilities are endless when a mentally unstable person with deep cognitive deficits is president of the US.
In this world of tragedy, Trump defines the next era of political thought as profoundly as Hitler defined the last. Let's hope whatever lessons are gleaned from that tragedy will prove more durable than what we learned from Hitler.