It is quaint to think about the things that used to damage presidential campaigns.
In 1972, Ed Muskie's campaign was destroyed when he briefly cried in public. Someone had said something nasty about his wife. Plus, he had just seen Beaches for the first time. Three tears in a snowy parking lot in Manchester, and Muskie, then the front-runner, was toast. Soggy toast.
In 1968 Republican front-runner George Romney saw his campaign immediately implode when he said that he had been "brainwashed" about the Viet Nam war. In 1972 George McGovern picked Thomas Eagleton to be his VEEP. It was revealed that Eagleton had been treated for depression earlier in his life and within hours Eagleton was off the ticket, and McGovern was relegated to losing more states than were actually in the union at the time.
George W. Bush almost lost the 2000 election when it was revealed that he had a DUI years earlier. But my personal favorite is when Jimmy Carter nearly blew the 1976 election by admitting in an interview that he had, at some points in his life, "lusted after other women". To me this is crazy. The only men who don't lust after other women are gay. Either that, or they are married to my delightful wife. Love you honey! Perhaps it would have made more sense if Carter had said that specifically the woman he lusted after was Eva Braun.
Donald Trump changed all that.
Now, you can not only lust after other women, you can brag about assaulting them, pay off porn stars to cover up affairs and be found by a jury to have raped someone, and you you are stll running up the score in the New Hampshire primary.
You can also express emotion more freely now. Especially if that emotion is unhinged rage at immigrants, political opponents, various racial groups, democracy. You can now not only appoint people who had a mental health issue, you can BE someone with many mental health issues. Lots of them, untreated and on full display.
One issue that I can't help but feeling would be disqualifying in the bygone years is expressly calling for civil war. You know, the kind where Americans violently attack other Americans with the intent to kill them in order to advance a political agenda that would be too difficult, or time consuming, or inconvenient to obtain through more democratic means. It's hard to imagine...Oh, I don't know...President Ford, saying "Do you know how we really whip inflation? Let's slaughter a bunch of hippies" and still be a viable candidate for reelection.
But former President Trump is no squish. He knows which side of the "let's get Americans killing each other" divide he is on, and he doesn't hide it. In fact, he expresses his views on this repeatedly, and just did so again.
Trump first dipped his toe (which is attached to his bone-spurred feet) into the pro-civil war pool on and before January 6th. He incited a violent mob to come to Washington ("it's going to be wild!"), told the secret service to let them keep their guns ("they aren't here to shoot me") and sent them to the capitol to "fight like hell". He watched on TV for three hours as they stormed the capitol, beat up cops and stopped the counting of the electoral votes. When Kevin McCarthy called to say that the insurrectionists might kill everyone, Trump said "Well, I guess they care more about the election than you do Kevin".
But as seemingly unforgivable as that was, he just did it again. Texas has put up razor wire to stop and ensnare "illegal aliens" trying to enter their state from Mexico.The Biden administration objected for, let's just say a whole cornucopia of reasons, and started ripping the barbed wire down. Troops from Texas blocked the federal agents form doing this and even stopped them from rescuing migrants drowning in the Rio Grande river.
This dispute went to the Supreme Court which, surprisingly given the court's composition, sided with Biden. Now Texas is threatening to disregard the Supreme Court's ruling and have a literal, violent confrontation with the feds. Trump has now called for "all states willing to deploy" troops to send them to Texas and fight alongside the Texas troops against the federal agents.
To be clear, this is a call for state units to confront federal units with guns which shoot bullets out of them. And if these bullets hit federal troops, it will hurt, and might inspire them to fire back. This is what a civil war looks like. Americans shooting Americans. The Texas border could be the Fort Sumter of 2024. And this will all be fine with the gleeful demagogue from Mar-a-Lago.
As surreal and outrageous as all of this is, it's not the worst of it. To me, the worst part is the extent to which this has been normalized. Trump's exhortations to internecine violence did not get the Huge banner headlines it deserved. Headlines like "TRUMP URGEST STATES TO FIGHT FEDERAL GOVERNMENT", or "INSANE FUCK CALLS FOR CIVIL WAR!!" In some newspapers the story was covered on page 3 or 8. Others didn't carry it at all.
Everyone knows the parable about putting the frog in the water and slowly heating it. Well, our water is now vigorously boiling, and the media, and many American voters are treating outright batshittery as normal. It's hard to imagine what Trump COULD say that a consensus of our fellow citizens would actually view as disqualifying for again making him the leader of the free world and giving him the nuclear codes. Plus, Trump also probably DID actually lust after Eva Braun.
