The New Yorker:

Razing the East Wing? Breaking Congress? An unscientific survey of the President’s most disruptive, significant, and truly surprising moves.

By Susan B. Glasser

In the past few days, as President Trump neared the three-hundred-day mark of his second term, he made what amounted to a royal progress through Asia, negotiating trade deals and basking in gilded palaces. In South Korea, he was presented with a replica of an ancient golden crown. “I’d like to wear it right now,” he said, only eleven days after millions of Americans had gathered to protest his assumption of near-monarchical powers, in hundreds of No Kings rallies around the country. The South Koreans sure knew their mark. During the trip, Trump also announced, via a social-media post, the resumption of nuclear tests for the first time in decades; unleashed another deadly strike on an alleged drug-running boat in what appears to be an undeclared war for regime change in Venezuela; threatened, during a political pep rally in front of the supposedly apolitical U.S. military, to send active-duty troops to American cities; and admitted that he “would love” to remain in office for a third termbefore reluctantly acknowledging the Constitution’s strict ban on it.

Back in Washington, meanwhile, the U.S. government remained shut down for a fourth straight week, the result of an impasse with congressional Democrats that Trump has seemingly done nothing to resolve—even as thousands of workers go without pay. It was, in other words, just another week in the Trump era. The new normal is forgetting yesterday’s scandals in order to make room in our overcrowded brains for tomorrow’s. Remember when Trump imposed punitive new tariffs on Canada because he got mad about a television ad? When he demanded that the Justice Department pay him more than two hundred million dollars in compensation for the costs he incurred from the Biden Administration’s decision to investigate him? When he circulated an A.I.-generated video of himself dumping poop on Americans protesting him? That was so last week. And last week, in the Trump era, might as well have been an eternity ago. The black hole in which our previous outrage resides is vast.

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