The New Yorker:

According to developmental guidelines provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the one-year mark is a milestone for the processes of rapid assimilation of information, growing dexterity, and a dawning awareness of the nature of the surrounding world. In short, of learning. Were we to apply this standard to Presidential Administrations, however, we would have to conclude that the incumbent is significantly behind the curve.

The surreal ritual of Donald Trump’s Inauguration as President of the United States, now one year behind us, was greeted by great swaths of anxiety, disdain, and, despite official pronouncements, a crowd smaller than its predecessors on the National Mall. To an extent that seemed comical at the time, and unbelievable in retrospect, the balming narrative about the coming Trump Presidency was that he would grow into the position—an argument that even Barack Obama, perhaps disingenuously, promoted. Yet there was no reason to believe that, after decades of bloviating and prevaricating, Donald Trump would become anything other than a more powerful version of who he’d always been. The optimists have, for the most part, been proved wrong, though the absence of a nuclear exchange in the first three hundred and sixty-five days of the Trump era likely beats the odds of the most pessimistic assessments of what he might have caused once in office. Most crucially, there is little to point to an increased willingness to listen or learn from his new surroundings.

The outset of this era was met by urgent demands that Trump and his excesses not be “normalized.” His defenders dismissed this concern as so much liberal hysteria, and tried to retrofit him into the political styles of various predecessors. Over the course of the year, we’ve split the difference. The bleating alarms and the blinking indicators of danger persist; we have not mistaken this for normalcy. Yet the sheer scale of Trump’s offenses has made these irregularities almost ambient. (Our eyes may have adjusted to the dark, but we don’t confuse it with daylight.) A partial reflection on the past year would include grand-scale insults to democracy (firing the F.B.I. director James Comey, and bragging about it to Russian diplomats in the Oval Office; serial attacks from the White House and its media surrogates on the integrity of the F.B.I. and of the special counsel Robert Mueller; the baseless accusation that President Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower; the creation of an Orwellian voter-integrity commission); destructive policy prerogatives (the exit from the Paris climate accords; multiple iterations of a travel ban directed at Muslims; a pledge at the United Nations to “totally destroy” North Korea if it threatened the United States); bizarre provocations (a random crusade against N.F.L. players and the Golden State Warriors; retweeting right-wing extremists in the wake of terrorist attacks in London; refusing to shake Angela Merkel’s hand); and a greatest-hits compilation of actions that, irrespective of the Presidential physician’s report, provoked worries about the mental state of the Commander-in-Chief (the suspicion that Barack Obama was not born in the United States; the not-normal fixation on the size of the Inauguration crowd and the Electoral College tallies; the Twitter brinksmanship with Kim Jong Un.)

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