James' World 2

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The frantic pace of the Trump presidency makes days seem like weeks and weeks like months — if not years. Finding rhyme or reason amid President Trump’s erratic conduct is impossible. Even so, while 2026 has not brought calm, it has brought more clarity.

Twenty months into his second term, Mr. Trump has remade the presidency and changed what Americans will tolerate from their government and from one another. Yet that transformation, sweeping as it is, may prove less important than what Mr. Trump and his allies could not do. They failed at the most ambitious project that they brought to his second term: using the state to remake American society. That failure is a central fact of the past 20 months, and it is why the country is in a less dangerous place than it was a year ago.

When Mr. Trump took office for the second time, he arrived with several overlapping but distinct agendas. The one he cared most about would convert the executive branch to a form of government that scholars call patrimonialism, in which the state is run as the leader’s personal property and family concern. In a patrimonialist system, expert bureaucracies and neutral rules are replaced by — or subordinated to — the head of state’s will. Where they can, patrimonialists personalize and weaponize law enforcement, pardons, programs and grants, appointments, promotions and all the other aspects of state power.

Patrimonialism is manifest in Mr. Trump’s enrichment of himself and his family, reportedly by several billion dollars — and in his effort to extract almost $1.8 billion from taxpayers by means of a sham legal settlement. It is manifest, too, in his systematic repurposing of the executive branch to serve his personal and political interests.

He uses his Justice Department to wage personal vendettas and his pardons to indemnify his cronies. He has staffed the department’s senior ranks with his own criminal defense attorneys, and the F.B.I. with a fierce political loyalist whose chief qualification was a career spent attacking the investigators who had scrutinized Mr. Trump. And he has purged the government’s internal checks on corruption, including by firing inspectors general, career prosecutors, and F.B.I. agents whose offense was to follow the rules.

Mr. Trump uses faits accomplis, such as the demolition of the United States Agency for International Development, to elbow aside Congress and impose his will without regard for constitutional boundaries. With some help from the Supreme Court, he has concentrated federal power in the office of the presidency; and with his patrimonialist agenda, he has remade that office to serve not the Constitution but himself and his desires.

The re-norming of political standards is another area in which Mr. Trump has made a lasting imprint. By “re-norming,” we mean the deliberate degradation of what is considered acceptable in American public life.

Examples are far too many to enumerate, but recall just a few: Mr. Trump described his political opponents as “vermin” and said immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.” When Robert Mueller died in March, Mr. Trump posted that he was “glad he’s dead.” When Rob Reiner and his wife were murdered in their home, he blamed the killings on Mr. Reiner’s criticism of him. He courted and excused political violence — winking at threats against officials who crossed him, joking about the near-fatal attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, and praising and then pardoning Jan. 6 rioters. He revels in bullying, cruelty, and hate as no president ever has. Beneath it all is the normalization of lying on an industrial scale: tens of thousands of documented false claims as president, including false accusations against Americans and false representations to courts.

Many Americans are sick of wading through the sludge and understandably want to look away. That is what Mr. Trump is counting on. He wins not by persuading us that the conduct is acceptable, but by wearing us out until we no longer object. Each violation makes the next easier; each unpunished transgression resets the baseline. What is being broken is not this standard or that one; it’s the idea that standards apply. Thanks largely to Mr. Trump and his allies, the country today accepts political speech and behavior that only a few years ago would have been disqualifying, if not unthinkable. It is no longer clear what a president could say — about a dead man, about a murdered family, about women he has abused, about incitements to violence — that would cost him anything.

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Cleon Peterson

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