It’s not every day that a former president of the United States faces criminal charges.

In the case of Donald Trump, that’s just about every month.

As one congressional staffer pointed out on Twitter, suppose X Trump is now prosecuted in every NL East city except Philadelphia, a curious observation that suggests we may be entering the first-if-tragedy-then-so-farce stage of Trump’s have reached legal trials.

To fill out the scorecard, the felonious former president rolled up a criminal record:

In New York, for allegedly forging business records to cover up his extramarital affairs.

In Miami, for sneaking off with super-secret White House documents and scattering them like confetti around his Mar-a-Lago estate.

In Washington, for trying to undo his 2020 election defeat and inciting a mob to launch a deadly attack on the US Capitol.

In Atlanta, for trying to arm Georgia officials with mighty guns to get the votes needed to reverse his loss in Peach State.

If going off with the Liberty Bell would have negated Joe Biden’s win in Pennsylvania, Trump would undoubtedly have stolen the national treasure and now face criminal charges in Philadelphia as well, completing his victory in baseball’s National League Eastern Division.

However, there is something worse than finding humor in the true misery of Trump’s misdeeds.

His apathy.

Trump’s superpower as a politician is his remarkable ability to survive a series of scandals, moral and ethical transgressions, and criminal allegations that would have killed mere mortals.

Part of it is speed. The mind hardly dwells on the wavering of one episode, an outrageous statement, a bald lie, a norm-breaking line no pre-Trump president had ever crossed, or another soon following.

Part of it is volume. In the entire history of the United States, no president or former president has ever been prosecuted. Forty-five chief executives: zero criminal charges. Trump: 91 from Monday’s Fulton County indictment.

The cumulative effect is numbing and politically damaging.

In the 1990s, New York scholar and former senator Patrick Moynihan coined the phrase “define deviance downwards” to describe how societies tend to accept unacceptable behavior once, thereby changing standards for what is considered proper behavior in the future. considered to be reduced. How strange now to think of what used to be a political scandal: a few stolen lines from a stupid speech, an extramarital affair, a youthful experiment with drugs.

Trump made his fortune and reputation by sticking his last name on all sorts of goods: ties, shirts, wine, bottled water, hotels, high-rises.

Evil and kitschy as many of those products may be, Trump’s bigger, dirtier legacy will be to lower our social and political standards to subterranean levels.

Astonishingly, about a third of Republican Party voters seem willing not only to condone Trump’s criminality and moral outrages, but to celebrate them.

He is the distant front-runner for the GOP nomination for now. More Republicans need the starch of Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, who responded to Trump’s latest indictment with a blistering statement.

“Georgia’s 2020 election was not stolen,” Kemp said on Tuesday. “For nearly three years now, no one with evidence of fraud has come forward under oath and proven nothing in a court of law… The future of our country is at stake in 2024 and that should be our focus.”

Most of Trump’s GOP rivals are too shy to hold him accountable

F

or his criminality and his relentless assaults on the country’s founding principles. They apparently hope like the competition in 2016 that Trump

will eventually fall under the weight of cumulative criminal charges.

We will see.

Almost as bad as acceptance is resignation.

Wyoming Republican Senator Cynthia Lummis, discussing the ex-president’s expanding criminal role, told the Huffington Post’s Igor Bobic that people have become numb to charges against Trump.

I think it shows politicians are lying and they know they are lying,” she said. “The liar knows that people know he is lying, and the people who are lied to know that they are being lied to. That is the political reality in 2023.”

And that’s exactly the danger: shrugging shoulders and treating the spectacularly abnormal as if it were normal.

It’s not just another day when a former president is indicted for the fourth time in nearly as many months.

It’s an abomination, an outrage, and a call to make sure Trump never comes close to wielding political power again.