No matter how LOW the bar is set, the sleazy pig manages to slime his way under it.

 I try to be a reasonable person. I try to be someone who looks out on the world with trusting eyes. Over the decades, I’ve built up certain expectations about how the world works and how people behave. I rely on those expectations as I do my job, analyzing events and anticipating what will happen next.

And yet I’ve found that Donald Trump has confounded me at every turn. I’ve found that I’m not cynical enough to correctly anticipate what he is capable of.

I have consistently underestimated his depravity. I was shocked at how thuggishly Trump behaved in that first debate with Joe Biden in 2020. As the Jan. 6 committee hearings progressed, I was stunned to find out just how aggressively Trump had worked to overthrow the election. And then, just last week, in reading his federal indictment, I was once again taken aback to learn how flagrantly he had breached national security.

Donald Trump, by his mere presence, is an assault on this worldview. Trump is a tyrant. When a tyrant has power, there is no rule of law, there is no governing order. There is only the whim of the tyrant. There is only his inordinate desire to have more than his fair share of everything.

Under political tyranny external laws become arbitrary.

The categories we use to evaluate the world lose their meaning — cruelty and kindness, integrity and corruption, honesty and dishonesty, generosity and selfishness. High-minded values begin to seem credulous and absurd, irrelevant to the situation at hand. Trump’s mere presence spreads his counter-gospel: People are basically selfish; raw power runs the world. All that matters is winning and losing, and the ‘man without morals’ will do anything to win, including trashing his party and wrecking our country.