Masha Gessen writes:

Donald Trump has not single-handedly destroyed the American public sphere. It had been in decline for a while, with the horse-race culture of its political campaigns, the anti-intellectual posture of many of its politicians, and its media’s obsession with entertainment. But Trump has forced the deterioration to new lows. This is true of Trumpism in general: its elements—corruption, xenophobia, isolationism, disdain for the media, denigration of the government, and lack of transparency—are not new phenomena but are, rather, long-standing trends. But Trump represents a quantum shift, a leap into the abyss. And much of the descent has gone underdiscussed by public figures and undercovered by the media, which has been focussed on the investigation by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, to the exclusion of much else.

The Mueller investigation, as a media story and a conversation topic, has been irresistible largely because it promised a way to avoid thinking of Trump as an American development. The Russian-collusion story dangled the carrot of discovering that Trump was entirely foreign to U.S. politics, a puppet of a hostile power. It also held the appeal of a secret answer to our catastrophe, one that would make the unimaginable suddenly explicable.

The truth about Trump has been in plain view all along. The President has waged an attack on political institutions, the law, and culture, and has succeeded to an astonishing extent. We are no longer surprised, for example, that more than a month passes between White House press briefings, or that the President and his spokespeople lie openly and routinely. The assumption that the Administration should at least act as though it were accountable to the public has vanished, and we barely took notice. [Continue reading…]