Donald Trump’s rendez-vous with reality may be fast approaching
The least of the crimes Donald Trump committed as president were the actual crimes. The law stands at the far end of the range of norms and conventions that presidents – and adults – are expected to obey. What set Donald Trump apart was his unwillingness to be bound by any of them: not civility, not decency, not precedent or custom or even rational considerations of self-interest.
Or rather, it was his open disdain for these basic standards of civilized life, his conspicuous and absolute lack of shame, that did the most harm; he did not simply violate them himself but by his example encouraged others to do the same. And of all the norms he worked so hard to undermine, it was his utter disregard for the truth – for facts, for– that was the most corrosive. It is not too much to say that he and his co-conspirators succeeded in detaching a good chunk of the population from reality. That’s not a crime. It’s worse.
And yet the two are converging: the law is coming to the aid of the facts. Recent weeks have seen the trials of two men who did much to prepare the way for Mr. Trump, by means of a calculated assault, not just on reality, but by the sheer volume of disinformation they put out, on our ability to perceive reality.
Steve Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former adviser, no doubt thought he could make a political circus out of his trial for contempt of Congress . The court had other ideas, trying and convicting himThe libel trial of Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist and broadcaster who had accused the parents of the victims in the Sandy Hook school shooting of fabricating the deaths of their children, was an even more significant event. Again and again during the trial, Mr.
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