Very little of the Donald Trump's personal behavior since becoming president has been genuinely surprising. Of course the country got dragged into a day-long discussion about his dick looking like Toad from Mario. Of course he once held a press conference calling white supremacists "fine people." Of course he's openly called for the Justice Department to avoid prosecuting his political allies and spread nonsensical theories about the 2016 elections. Broadly speaking, people didn't like him when he won the presidency and they don't like him now. He was a narcissistic bullshit artist before he was president, and he hasn't changed his act now that he's in the White House.
But Donald Trump's press conference at the United Nations Wednesday afternoon was a sloppy mess—an unhinged spectacle of bad faith and malice that felt like a new low, even for him. He called the sexual assault allegations against his Supreme Court nominee a "con job" orchestrated by Democrats, he brushed off a question about what message that response sent to women, he claimed he rejected a meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (a claim that the Canadians denied), vaguely said—falsely—that "four or five" women were bribed to accuse him of sexual assault, and gave a non-answer when asked whether he planned to fire Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
For any other president, each of those statements would be stop-the-presses stories. But Trump makes noxious and false claims and exaggerations so often that they no longer seem shocking. If he had given a thoughtful answer about the Kavanaugh controversy or stood firmly behind Rosenstein—now that would have been news. Erratic and untrue and just plain nasty statements are par for the course at this point, even if some land harder than others.
After Trump became president, "this is not normal" became a kind of rallying cry, a tag appended onto story after story of Trump's lies and his administration's cruel policies. But the outrageous has a way of fading into the background when it happens over and over again. If the sidewalk in front of your house split open and spewed a hideous-smelling gray-green ooze, you would call the authorities for help and film it on your phone in awe and horror. If it did the same thing day after day, week after week, and no one could stop it, how long before you got used to it? Ah, that's the ooze again, you'd mutter over your morning coffee as you heard the familiar sound of asphalt rending.
In the aftermath of bizarre displays like Wednesday's press conference, it can be almost comforting to think of Trump as something akin to that ooze—an aberration visited upon us, a horrible event we're all living through, for now. That way, we don't have to consider that Trump said far worse things during the 2016 campaign and was elected anyway. That he ran as a vicious asshole, that people voted for him because they liked that, and that he's now governing as a vicious asshole.
Trump was petty and mean and incautious during his press conference—he's petty and mean and incautious on Twitter, too, and at his rallies, and everywhere else he goes. You might wish he weren't all those things at the UN, where he's most visibly the United States' representative to the world, but the worst thing about democracy is that we get the leaders we voted for. This is the president propped up and endorsed by the Republican Party and the right-wing media establishment; this is who they wanted in the White House and the UN and in the most sensitive meetings with world leaders. This is normal. Maybe someday it won't be.
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