The Trump Administration wants us to think that corruption is normal

HEATHER DELANEY REESE
JUN 26, 2026

snipping to mid article for the crux of her point … follow link for the full article)

It was a direct attempt to redefine what Americans should and should not consider presidential misconduct.

And that’s the part he didn’t realize he was admitting. Because if Watergate would barely make the news today, then what he’s really saying is that the scandals surrounding Donald Trump have become so much larger, so much more constant, and so all-consuming that the crime which once brought down a president would now barely interrupt the news cycle. Nixon’s corruption didn’t become smaller. Our tolerance for presidential corruption became much larger because Donald Trump keeps pushing the boundaries of what Americans are expected to accept.
What the Vice President said was an accidental confession about just how dramatically the standards of American democracy have eroded.

And it goes deeper than just that one moment. Because what J.D. Vance said wasn’t an isolated slip. It reflects a broader strategy this administration has been pursuing for months. They are choosing their words carefully, not to elevate our politics, but to lower the standards of what Americans are expected to tolerate. If you can normalize the language, you can normalize the behavior that follows.

On May 11, Donald Trump sat in the Oval Office during a maternal health event and unveiled what he has now turned into his favorite new word for the Democratic Party: “Dumbocrats.” He said, “We have their name, the Dumbocrats, because they’re dumb. They’re dumb people.” He has used that word repeatedly in the weeks since, at the G7 Summit, on Truth Social, and at rallies. Last Saturday, he even ran a poll asking his followers whether they preferred the spelling “Dumocrat” or “Dumbocrat,” workshopping the insult and crowdsourcing it to make sure it sticks. It is easy to look at that and dismiss it as another childish Trump moment. But this is the President of the United States manufacturing demeaning language for an entire political party, and anyone who aligns with their resistance against him. This is language that millions of his supporters will adopt and repeat, language designed to strip the opposition of legitimacy before voters go to the polls in November.

Then on Wednesday night, the language escalated. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy stood on a stage on the National Mall at Trump’s Great American State Fair, warming up the crowd for the president, and praised the military bands before saying, “Way better than those libtards that canceled on us. So much better. Thank you guys. President Trump will make you famous.” A sitting cabinet secretary used a derogatory slur aimed at political opponents at a government-adjacent event on the National Mall. When HuffPost asked him to clarify his remarks, Duffy did not apologize and did not walk it back. So far, there have been no consequences. The test worked, and they will just keep building upon it.
And while the administration was testing what language Americans would tolerate, it was also testing what actions Americans would accept. The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has been a disaster for the president. A project that exceeded the original estimate by millions and was rushed to completion ahead of the nation’s 250th anniversary. When the renovation immediately failed, with algae blooming across the surface and the new blue paint peeling from the bottom, the administration did not take responsibility for the botched project that it had commissioned, overseen, and accelerated. Instead, Donald Trump is continuing to claim, without evidence, that vandals had slashed the pool’s lining and poured chemicals into the water. So far, five people have been arrested for vandalism. Five more were issued federal citations. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro then went on television to warn the public that anyone who damages or even “impacts” the Reflecting Pool could face criminal prosecution. National Guard members were deployed to the site, approaching visitors to remind them not to touch the water, or they could be arrested. The administration rushed a project, the project failed because of their own incompetence, and instead of admitting the failure, they arrested people who touched the pool.

This is how authoritarian normalization works, and it never happens all at once. You test the language first. You see if anyone stops you. Nobody does. You escalate the language. A cabinet secretary says “libtards” on a government stage. Nobody stops you. You test the action. You arrest citizens for touching the evidence of your own failure. Nobody stops you. And then you rehabilitate historical corruption itself. A vice president sitting in a presidential library, and tells America that the scandal that once brought down a president wouldn’t even last in the news cycle very long. Each one of these, taken on its own, can be dismissed as a gaffe, a joke, an overreaction, another Trump thing. But taken together, they are rehearsals. They are an administration testing the limits of what Americans will tolerate, and every test that passes without consequence gives permission for the next one.

We are now less than five months from the midterm elections. Every one of these tests is calibrated toward November. The language is designed to dehumanize the opposition before voters go to the polls. The arrests are designed to intimidate. And the Nixon rehabilitation is designed to tell Americans that the corruption they’ve already witnessed doesn’t matter, has never mattered, and should never have been grounds for accountability in the first place. The message Vance delivered today from that cream-colored chair, whether he understood it or not, was simple: stop expecting consequences.

more at link
https://heatherdelaneyreese.substack.com/p/the-trump-administration-wants-us



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