Donald Trump’s Georgia indictments mark a substantial change in American political culture

Open this photo in gallery:

Now, indictment ennui?

With former U.S. president Donald J. Trump indicted for the fourth time, the unprecedented has become commonplace, the startling has become ordinary, the shocking has lost its power to disrupt public discourse.

That, of course, is the circumstance that the serial arraignments present. The question is whether the country, never quite immunized to Trump Fatigue, may have grown fatigued at being shocked by Mr. Trump.

But beneath the eyes-glazed-over reaction to yet another indictment – this one with 41 felony charges targeted at 18 figures beyond Mr. Trump and set out in 98 vivid pages describing a “criminal enterprise” – the ground has shifted in American political culture.

The governing wisdom in this parlous period of American history – one in which a former president is portrayed as a mob boss and is being prosecuted under a Godfather-era legal approach designed to battle organized crime – may well come from a 20th century English novelist, Graham Greene. “It is a great danger for everyone,” he wrote in Our Man in Havana, published in 1958, “when what is shocking changes.”

Critics in the decades that followed publication of the novel often said that it foreshadowed the Cuban missile crisis that occurred four years later. But the truth of his one-sentence meditation on danger and change is clear today, six decades after Nikita Khrushchev removed the missiles from Cuba, only 145 kilometres from Florida.

In those long-ago days, when Mr. Trump was a student at the New York Military Academy, Americans thought the great threat to their national survival was Mr. Khrushchev. It was inconceivable – literally, beyond the capacity to be believed – that an elected president would pose a threat to the country’s most cherished values and traditions. Mr. Trump and his allies scoff at the notion, presented in his indictment earlier this month in Washington and again in the indictment from the state of Georgia unsealed Monday. But at their core, that is the implication of the charges – and the reaction, from Trump supporters and opponents alike, speaks to the great danger when what is shocking changes.

Shribman: Trump’s fourth indictment is perhaps the greatest challenge to America’s 236-year-old Constitution

Already the shock value of a presidential impeachment had been devalued; no president faced that for the 130 years between Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998. In the past quarter century, there have been three impeachments – Mr. Clinton’s and the two involving Mr. Trump. Richard Nixon resigned the presidency in 1974 to avoid both certain impeachment in the House of Representatives and conviction and removal from office in Senate votes.

Now the shock value of a past-president’s indictment – even one with strains of Mario Puzo, the Mafia crime writer – has been shorn of its shock value. That has been normalized much the way Mr. Trump’s comportment – his defiance of presidential customs, his employment of disparaging comments – have been normalized.

When Mr. Nixon was fighting off charges in the Watergate scandal after the resignation of vice-president Spiro Agnew, House speaker Carl Albert, a Democrat from Oklahoma, was next in line to become president. He made it clear that as a Democrat he should not succeed a GOP president in midterm, and said that if the job fell to him he would resign the presidency so a Republican could enter the White House.

That sort of capital comity did not exist in the Trump years – and in the past several days the former president issued a blistering attack on one of Mr. Albert’s successors as speaker, Nancy Pelosi, calling her “a Wicked Witch whose husbands [sic] journey from hell starts and finishes with her,” adding, “She is a sick & demented psycho who will someday live in HELL!”

The normalization of crudity is not confined to the presidency – and the presidency has not always been immune to it. Mr. Nixon’s private conversations, made public in printed transcripts during the Watergate ordeal, displayed a president willing to use ethnic slurs and profanity. Mr. Trump’s public remarks were once startling, but are now almost predictable.

It was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in an interview two months before he was elected president, who said, “The presidency is not merely an administrative office. That’s the least of it. It is more than an engineering job, efficient or inefficient. It is pre-eminently a place of moral leadership. All our great presidents were leaders of thought at times when certain historic ideas in the life of the nation had to be clarified.”

Today several historic ideas in the life of the nation have to be clarified, many of which are prompted by the Trump indictments.

Can a country tolerate an attempted heist of the presidency? Is the political culture of the country so acidic that a sitting administration would unfairly prosecute the leader of predecessor administration? Are the guard rails of American democracy strong enough to prevent either the disruption of elections or the persecution of political opponents?

And the question that grows out of all the previous questions, and of the phenomenon of the recent fundamental change in what is shocking: How can the gaping divide in the country’s political outlook be closed?

“To improve, to prosper, to unite, this country does not need Trump; it does need his supporters,” Brian Watson wrote in his Headed into the Abyss. It does not need Mr. Biden, either, though it needs his supporters, too.

The Republican presidential candidates need both, and they are ready to move beyond Mr. Trump’s legal problems.

“I don’t even remember how many indictments this has been. I can’t keep responding to every one of these dramas when we have real issues in our country,” former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley said in a recent interview on WMUR in New Hampshire, site of the first presidential primary. “I think we should be talking about China. We should be talking about the debt. We should be talking about transparency in our schools. We should be talking about crime. All of these things are so much more important. We shouldn’t be talking about whether a 77-year-old president is going to spend time in jail.”