This isn’t an aberration, it’s a continuation. Trump has repeatedly done things that would have been disqualifying for any normal president: threatening allies, undermining institutions, abusing power, normalizing coercion. The reason this moment feels different to some people isn’t that the behavior changed, it’s that they’re finally among those bearing the downside. That normalization, enabled by years of “it doesn’t affect me” neutrality, is part of how we got here.

That's only part of it. It feels worse now because everything is visible. Information moves instantly. Evidence is public. Financial trails can be followed. Citizens now expect ethical behavior from their leaders as a baseline rather than a bonus. In earlier eras, people slept better largely because they didn’t know what was happening, not because leaders were more virtuous.

For decades now, elite self-dealing, institutional opacity, and captured power steadily eroded public trust. Trump did not arrive as a reformer. He arrived as a punishment mechanism. A stress test. Unfortunately, US elites are drawing the wrong lessons so far.

Watergate, Iran-Contra, Vietnam, and the Pentagon Papers were all exposed through mass media, and they triggered resignations, prosecutions, and electoral consequences. Nixon resigned for conduct far narrower than many of Trump’s actions. Reagan officials went to prison.

Trump didn’t reveal hidden corruption, he openly violated constraints that previous leaders still treated as binding. Calling him a “stress test” misstates causality. Stress tests expose weaknesses, they don’t require millions of people to excuse norm violations because the harm initially falls elsewhere. This wasn’t inevitability or opacity, it was a collective decision to lower standards.

What you’re describing is real, but it actually supports the opposite conclusion in my opinion. Watergate, Iran-Contra, Vietnam, and the Pentagon Papers were exposed because institutions, media, and elites still broadly agreed that certain lines existed. Nixon resigned because his own party, the courts, and the press treated those constraints as non-negotiable. Reagan officials went to prison because enforcement still mattered. Trump sits downstream of intervening decades of tolerated elite self-dealing, regulatory capture, and partisan blindness that have trained voters to believe that rules only ever apply selectively. When people see one side excuse its own violations for years, it lowers trust in the legitimacy of enforcement itself. Trump’s novelty is the abandoning of pretense. Calling him a symptom doesn’t excuse norm violations, but it does explain why so many people are willing to tolerate them. The collective decision to lower standards didn’t begin with Trump; it culminated in him. Stress tests don’t create weaknesses, they reveal where faith in the system has already eroded. That erosion happened long before 2016.

> Citizens now expect ethical behavior from their leaders as a baseline rather than a bonus.

Amongst the MAGA voters I know, ethical behavior is very much a “hope for” bonus than an expectation.

There is a lot of ends-justify-the-means rhetoric in that voter pool that I talk to.

There has always been an ends-justify-the-means element across the entire electorate and political class. It isn’t unique to MAGA, and it isn’t new.

All of the United States law and jurisprudence is a kludge of principle and practicality and naked self-interest. It’s an accretion of ideals layered onto compromises, expediencies, and power struggles. The Constitution itself is a bundle of moral claims stitched together with practical concessions to slave states, property interests, and elite fears of democracy.

To me, unfortunately, the mid-to-late twentieth century norm of relatively principled incorruptibility now looks less like a permanent achievement and more like a historical exception.

That period stood in contrast to much of American history before it, which was more openly transactional and tolerant of self-dealing. Think robber barons, Jacksonian patronage, open graft, speculative profiteering, outright theft of public funds, Tammany Hall. Against that backdrop, the period from roughly the 1940s to the early 1970s stands out.

What feels so unsettling today may just be a quiet reversion toward older historical norms. I'm sad to think that what once felt like progress was always just a transient anomaly.

It stopped people asking about the Epstein files.

... I don't think it stopped people from talking about it, though. That gambit has failed.