For those who need the tag, this is an op-ed, not a news piece.
Once in a while, as I peruse the morning headlines, I can't help but ask myself: What would I have thought if I'd seen these stories 10 years ago? I'm always shaken by what it looks like from that perspective. It's not as if shocking events hadn't taken place in the decade before that. The 9/11 attacks came as a total shock and the financial crisis of 2008 was as close as I'd ever come to experiencing cataclysmic economic dislocation. But those, at least, were on par with historical world events like Pearl Harbor and the Great Depression, so there was a sense that they were not entirely unprecedented.
On Thursday I read headlines that former President Donald Trump was turning himself in to be arrested for the fourth time, two of those arrests stemming from his attempt to overturn the election in 2020, another for stealing classified documents and yet another for illegally paying hush money to a porn star with whom he'd had an affair. Other headlines tell me that the first Republican presidential primary debate was held without the frontrunner in attendance — that frontrunner being Donald Trump, the man with the four felony indictments. Today that seems like just another day in American politics. In 2013, I would have laughed at the sheer absurdity of the entire premise. But ever since Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016, nothing has ever been normal in American politics — and it's getting weirder every day.
American politics have been pretty boring most of my life (I'm 50). Shit got weird with the "hanging chads" but we moved on fairly well. Newt Gingrich and crew were pretty nasty but nothing crazy. Then shit went off the rails with the Tea Party and MAGA.
That's an understatement! People think that Jan 6 was the only coup attempt in the United States since the Business Plot in 1933, but nope: not only should the Brooks Brothers riot count as a coup attempt, it was a successful one!
You...didn't see how Gingrich and company led to Bush and the 2008 financial crash that then led to the Tea Party which is currently rebranded as MAGA?
I didn't say we weren't in a slow moving train wreck, but it was all very boring. You know, a definitive lack of insurrection and treason.
Ah, in the context of the lack of insurrection, yes. I'm not sure about the lack of treason, given the way Bush & Company blatantly lied to send us to war in Iraq. But I guess one man's treason is another man's free speech, right?