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US Vice President Kamala Harris conducts a bilateral meeting with Mexico President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador via video link from her Ceremonial Office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on May 7, 2021 in Washington, DC. Harris is heading the White House’s efforts to partner with Mexico and other Northern Triangle countries to work on the current migration crisis. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images It wasn’t long ago that Democrats embraced an unequivocally pro-immigrant stance. The party once defined its immigration platform in opposition to the policies of former President Donald Trump’s first term: separating families detained at the border, a travel ban on Muslim-majority countries, and efforts to gut the asylum system among them. In 2020, President Joe Biden ran on a message of undoing the cruelties of his predecessor, and in his first week in office, he signed a flurry of executive actions doing just that. Much has changed in the four years since. In the final weeks of the 2024 campaign, the rhetoric coming from Kamala Harris and most Democrats is decidedly different. There’s a greater focus on border security and less emphasis on immigrants’ rights and contributions to the country.  This pivot didn’t come from nowhere. Border crossings reached record highs at the end of 2023, fueling a Republican narrative of chaos that Americans appear to have embraced. Though crossings have come down significantly throughout 2024, more Americans still want to see immigration levels decrease than at any point since the early 2000s, just after the 9/11 terror attacks. Polls show most voters support stricter border security measures; a growing share wants mass deportations. This is the political reality Democrats have had to confront ahead of the presidential election: Broadly, Americans hold anti-immigration views. It doesn’t really matter that Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, was known as a champion for immigrant rights in the Senate and during her 2020 presidential bid. In a race against Trump, who has upped the ante on his dehumanizing rhetoric about immigrants in the final stretch of the campaign, she can’t afford to look weak on the border if she wants to win. That’s especially true given immigration is an issue that has only become more salient among the independent voters she’s courting in key states. “Before you can fix a policy, first you must get elected,” said Chuck Rocha, a Democratic strategist and former senior adviser on Sen. Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign who designed Sanders’s Latino vote outreach strategy. “[Republicans] have bullied Democrats for years on this issue, and I think it smart for the Harris campaign to not back down and take them on.” Assuming Harris wins, what’s next for Democrats and liberals on immigration? The progressive left that was once so vocally pro-immigration has largely supported Harris despite her sprint to the center. That’s because progressives know full well that a Trump administration would be worse. But if Trump and his xenophobic agenda are defeated, that could make room for a leftist offensive on immigration. What would that look like, and will we see it during a Harris administration? How a new politics of immigration emerged Democrats’ 2020 platform didn’t even mention border security. Instead, it focused on expanding legal immigration pathways and rolling back the US’s immigration detention regime. Four years after former President Barack Obama was dubbed the “deporter in chief,” it seemed as though Trump had pushed Democrats to embrace a newfound moral case for increasing immigration. But amid a challenging new reality on the border and resulting political pressure, Biden advanced immigration policies that his Republican predecessor devised himself or would have at least approved of: He kept Trump’s Title 42 policy in place for more than two years, allowing him to turn away swaths of immigrants at the border under the guise of protecting public health during the Covid-19 pandemic, despite the fact that public health experts saw no evidence that it was an effective means of curbing the virus. He instituted his version of Trump’s asylum transit ban. That rule allows immigration enforcement officials to turn away migrants for a number of reasons: if they do not have valid travel and identification documents, if they’ve traveled through another country without applying for asylum, if they don’t show up at a port of entry at an appointed time, and more. He issued a proclamation barring asylum seekers who cross the border without permission from applying for protections in the US when migrant crossings exceed a daily average of 2,500 in a week. Harris played a role in executing this strategy, and immigration was part of her portfolio as vice president from the early months of Biden’s presidency. She was tasked with addressing the root causes of migration in a diplomatic role that primarily involved directing private-sector investment to Central America.  During a visit to Guatemala in June 2021, she delivered a controversial message to migrants: “Don’t come” to the US. When border crossings later spiked, she came under fire from Republicans as Biden’s failed “border czar,” a frame that the Biden administration sought to rebut.  In February, Biden tried to make concrete progress on immigration by endorsing a bipartisan bill that included border security measures that Democrats wouldn’t have dreamed of supporting a few years prior, including a new authority to quickly expel migrants arriving on the southern border at times of high demand. In exchange, Democrats would have gotten something they wanted: closing gaps in the legal immigration system that have left everyone from the children of high-skilled foreign workers to Afghan refugees in limbo.  At first, Republicans coalesced around the bill and it seemed as though it would pass — that is, until Trump began to lobby against it, reportedly stating he wanted to keep the border a live issue in the presidential election.  To be sure, Biden’s approach hasn’t been entirely focused on border security. It’s worth noting that Biden has also advanced one of the biggest efforts in over a decade to legalize undocumented immigrants. Under the new program, which is now on hold due to a legal challenge, approximately 500,000 spouses of US citizens and 50,000 of their stepchildren could be eligible to apply for permanent residence and get a green card without having to leave the US. But such moves are the exception. The Biden era has generally seen Democrats move closer to Trump on immigration rather than further away. As the Democratic nominee, Harris has had to navigate that new normal. What would a Harris presidency mean for the politics of immigration? Democrats outlined their immigration platform before Biden decided not to seek reelection, but Harris still needs to detail how she would approach the issue.  She has indicated in public appearances that her strategy will be two-pronged, focused on securing the border and developing earned pathways to citizenship, including for Dreamers in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which provides legal protections to migrants who came to the US without authorization as children.  She has repeatedly argued that Trump is simultaneously not tough enough and not compassionate enough on immigration, whereas she seems intent on presenting herself as striking that balance.  That’s been clear in her rhetoric, but what exactly that balance looks like in practice promises to be the subject of an intra-movement struggle, one that pits pro-immigrant activists against the party’s relative border hawks. Harris’s rhetoric during the campaign has suggested a tougher-on-immigration approach.  For instance, when speaking at her only debate with Trump about the border bill that Democrats tried to pass in February, she cast the failed bill — and Trump’s advocacy against it — as evidence that the former president isn’t serious about finding a way to improve the situation at the US-Mexico border: “He preferred to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem,” Harris said. During a Univision town hall earlier this month, Harris again criticized Trump for tanking the bill. However, this time, it was in response to a question from a voter whose mother died before she could become a US citizen. Harris argued that the bill could have created “a comprehensive earned pathway to citizenship for hard-working people” like the voter’s mother.  That’s not an entirely accurate portrayal of the bill. It would have expanded existing pathways to citizenship with the addition of 250,000 family- and employment-based visas and opened up a path to permanent status for Afghans who came to the US after American forces withdrew from Afghanistan, but it was hardly comprehensive in its approach.  Still, the interaction showed Harris trying to soften her tone, if not the border policies she supports. “Depending on what venue she’s talking in, she frames the immigration issue a bit differently,” said Douglas Rivlin, a spokesperson for the immigrant advocacy group America’s Voice. “On Univision, her humanity came through in a way.” Some progressives, however, see reason to believe that Harris would be more pro-immigrant as a president than she has been as a campaigner. Rocha noted that the Harris campaign has hired immigrant activists, including Alida Garcia, who led immigration advocacy at the immigration and criminal justice reform advocacy group FWD.us, and Julie Chávez Rodriguez, the granddaughter of Latino civil rights activist and labor leader César Chávez. And that could suggest that her campaign is thinking about how to advance a pro-immigrant agenda within the current political environment. Progressives also seem to believe that while they may not endorse all of Harris’s immigration policies, they can still find ways to work together, as they used to when she was a senator.  Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, recounted that Harris co-sponsored the first bill she ever introduced, a response to Trump’s travel ban. It sought to ensure that people had access to legal counsel in detention when they first arrived in the US. “She cares about the dignity and humanity of people who come to this country,” Jayapal told Vox. “While I have disagreed with some of the immigration positions she has taken, I know that she will be a partner with us on this issue, rather than use immigrants as a political football the way Republicans and Donald Trump have.” Jayapal’s comments are a reminder of why the pro-immigrant left has given Harris scope to operate against Trump, whose rhetoric about immigrants, from his debunked comments about Haitians eating pets to his claims that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of America, has recently reached a new low. But the question is whether — and for how long — progressives’ goodwill toward Harris will last if Trump is defeated. Concretely, immigration battles under a Harris administration would likely play out on some of the same issues where the left criticized Biden, including his restrictions on asylum seekers at the border and the February border bill that Harris has held up as a model for Democrats going forward. Activists still want many of the same reforms Harris supported in 2020, such as swapping out deterrence-based policies for policies expanding safe pathways to come to the US and improving access to asylum. However, the impulses that drive support for Trump’s immigration policies aren’t likely to just fade away, even if the man himself recedes from public life. So, a President Harris would likely still face demand from the American public to prioritize border security. That may not leave much room for her to adopt the mantle of the left’s priorities on immigration.  Advocates seem to acknowledge that reality as well as the practical challenges of passing immigration reform in a divided Congress or issuing executive actions on immigration that could be challenged in court. “The American people are pretty clear about what they want to have happen on immigration. They want the balanced approach that Harris and the Democrats are for,” Rivlin said.  Advocates are holding out hope that Harris can use her bully pulpit to change the tone of the conversation about immigration in America, as she started to do at the Univision town hall. In Rivlin’s view, “That’s one of the most important things that needs to happen on immigration.”

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No psychiatric treatment has attracted quite as much cash and hype as psychedelics have in the past decade. Articles about the drugs’ surprising results—including large improvements on depression scores and inducing smokers to quit after just a few doses—earned positive coverage from countless journalists (present company included). Organizations researching psychedelics raised millions of dollars, and clinicians promoted their potential to be a “new paradigm” in mental-health care. Michael Pollan’s 2018 psychedelics book, How to Change Your Mind, became a best seller and a Netflix documentary. Psychedelics were made out to be a safe solution for society’s most challenging mental-health problems.But the bubble has started to burst: It’s been a bad year for fans of psychedelics.A few months ago, two articles appeared, one in The New York Times and another in Business Insider, that portrayed major figures in psychedelics research as evangelists whose enthusiasm for the drugs compromised the integrity of their findings. In August, the FDA rejected the first application for therapy assisted by MDMA, the drug commonly known as ecstasy, saying that it “could not be approved based on data submitted to date,” according to the company that brought the application, Lykos. And five people, including two doctors, were recently charged in the death of the Friends actor Matthew Perry, who was found unconscious in his pool after he took large doses of the psychedelic ketamine. (Three of the five have reached plea agreements; the other two pleaded not guilty.)These incidents, though unrelated, point to a problem for psychedelic research: Many of the studies underpinning these substances’ healing powers are weak, marred by a true-believer mentality among its researchers and an underreporting of adverse side effects, which threatens to undermine an otherwise bright frontier in mental-health treatment.[Read: Psychedelics open your brain. You might not like what falls in.]Psychedelics are by nature challenging to research because most of them are illegal, and because blinding subjects as to whether they’ve taken the drug itself or a placebo is difficult. (Sugar pills generally do not make you hallucinate.) For years, scientific funding in the space was minimal, and many foundational psychedelic studies have sample sizes of just a few dozen participants.The field also draws eccentric types who, rather than conducting research with clinical disinterest, tend to want psychedelics to be accepted by society. “There’s been really this cultlike utopian vision that’s been driving things,” Matthew W. Johnson, himself a prominent psychedelic researcher at Sheppard Pratt, a mental-health hospital in Baltimore, told me.Johnson, who has published many studies on psilocybin, the active compound in magic mushrooms, recently left his lab at Johns Hopkins after a dispute with Roland Griffiths, a senior researcher with whom he worked closely. Griffiths, who died last year, said in talks that psychedelics might be “critical to the survival of the human species.” He also behaved like a “spiritual leader,” according to a complaint by Johnson obtained by The New York Times, ran “his psychedelic studies more like a ‘new-age’ retreat center,” and recommended spiritual literature and meditation classes to study participants. Johnson argued that Griffiths’s emphasis on the metaphysical risked steering study participants toward his desired outcomes.Albert Garcia-Romeu, the current associate director of the Hopkins psychedelics lab, disputes this description of Griffiths and the lab in general. “I never saw him behave like a ‘spiritual leader,’ or running the lab like a ‘new-age retreat center,’ whatever that means,” Garcia-Romeu told me. He noted that researchers have long used psychedelics to explore spiritual experiences but that “there was no imposition of any particular beliefs going on.”Still, Griffiths isn’t the only one who zealously promoted psychedelics. Take Rick Doblin, the founder of an organization called the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS. He, too, is prone to grandiose thinking, saying he believed psychedelics could be “an antidote to evil” or might lead to a more “spiritualized humanity.” Doblin also encouraged marijuana use at work, arguing that there are “smokable tasks,” which some people “do better while under the influence of marijuana, such as working on complicated spreadsheets.” (Betty Aldworth, the director of education at MAPS, told me that Doblin was “adamant about the science being valid and proving out the answers to these questions through clinical trials.” Doblin did not reply to a request for comment.)Neşe Devenot, a Johns Hopkins writing instructor and a former MAPS volunteer, told me that many people in the psychedelics field let their political and spiritual beliefs “influenc[e] the type of data that is being collected. The researchers should have more clinical equipoise and not be so assured of what works.”Inside Lykos, a MAPS spinoff, many staffers were sold on the presumed benefits of MDMA, according to Stat News. One trial participant said her Lykos therapists told her she was “helping make history” and was “part of a movement.” The company failed to collect data on some of the side effects of MDMA, such as euphoria, that might have revealed the drug’s potential for abuse, Stat reported. (In a statement to Stat News, the company stood by its studies, saying that they were conducted with appropriate checks and balances and that the company did add data on positive side effects to some protocols.)Last month, The Wall Street Journal reported that several participants in the Lykos studies said they felt pressured to report only good outcomes. Three of them said that their thoughts of suicide worsened after they took the MDMA, but that these deteriorations weren’t captured by the study results. (In response to the Journal, Lykos said it reported any significant increases in suicidality to the FDA.)The FDA is reportedly now looking into Lykos’s data, and the journal Psychopharmacology retracted three papers stemming from MAPS’ early MDMA trials because of “protocol violations amounting to unethical conduct.” (MAPS’ Aldworth says the studies should have been revised instead of retracted. Lykos did not respond to a request for comment.)The underreporting of adverse events and overhyping of tepid data appear to be widespread in psychedelic research. One review concluded that in many studies of psychedelics, adverse events “were not systematically assessed” and are therefore probably underreported.And although esketamine (a ketamine-like nasal spray) was approved by the FDA in 2019, one 2021 review noted that there is “a paucity of data concerning long-term safety” of ketamine and esketamine, and a 2023 review found that esketamine’s negative side effects have been systematically underreported in journal articles. Some researchers overstate ketamine’s benefits and underplay its risks, according to a recent review article.Many people taking ketamine for mental-health issues use the drug repeatedly for weeks or months, but little long-term safety data on the drug exist, says Boris Heifets, an anesthesiology and psychiatry professor at Stanford. For some, the drug’s dissociative effects can become addictive—Matthew Perry was injecting the drug six to eight times a day, prosecutors said, and he spent $55,000 on it in the month before he died. “You’re giving a drug that most definitely has abuse potential, and you’re giving it out online, without supervision, to anybody who can convince you they’re depressed,” Heifets told me. “It’s honestly a little fucked up.”[Read: A new chapter in the science of psychedelic microdosing]In a recent study conducted by Heifets, surgeons administered ketamine or a saline placebo to patients who were undergoing surgical anesthesia. Unlike patients in many psychedelic studies, these were truly blinded: They were unconscious, so those who got ketamine didn’t have a ketamine trip. It turned out that about half of both groups, ketamine and placebo, felt less depressed afterward. And those who felt less depressed assumed they had gotten ketamine.In other words, ketamine did work, a little. But so did the placebo. Heifets attributes this effect to the extensive care and attention that all the study participants received before the procedure. The researchers told them that their mental health is important, and listened to them talk about their problems—in some cases, for hours. They told them that ketamine might make them feel better. To Heifets, this shows that rather than jumping to ketamine, doctors would do well to connect depressed people with caring, attentive therapists as a first step. (But “good luck finding one,” he acknowledged.)These scientific shortcomings don’t seem to be dampening the enthusiasm about psychedelics. Hundreds of ketamine clinics across the country purport to treat conditions as varied as anxiety and chronic pain, and online services will send ketamine to people’s homes. An initiative to legalize psychedelics will be on the ballot in Massachusetts in November. Veterans’ groups and others are clamoring for the legalization of psychedelic therapies. This is understandable, because these drugs do show promise, especially for treating depression, PTSD, and certain types of addiction. The alternatives—bouncing between SSRIs or scrambling to find an in-network therapist—are bleak, and they fail plenty of desperate people. No new PTSD treatments have been approved in two decades. Some people truly have been cured of their ailments with short, monitored courses of psychedelics.But the intense interest in psychedelics makes it only more important that the science behind them is as rigorous as possible, untainted by the personal views of researchers. Suggesting that people should get off proven medications in order to try MDMA or psilocybin is dangerous unless those drugs are backed by airtight evidence. And when dealing with psychologically vulnerable people, researchers would do well to align expectations with the reality of what psychedelics can actually accomplish.

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Former President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, with moderator and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, at a town hall in Oaks, Pennsylvania, on October 14, 2024. | Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images Here is a short and incomplete list of things that former President Donald Trump has done this week: Sunday: Trump says the US military should be deployed against “the enemy within” on Election Day. It’s unclear who exactly he’s talking about, but he does refer to Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) as an example of a domestic enemy later in the interview. Monday: Trump stops a town hall to conduct a 40-minute impromptu dance party, where he plays songs like “YMCA” and “Hallelujah” on stage with an obviously confused South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R). Tuesday: When asked during a Bloomberg interview about his policy toward Google, Trump responds with an extended riff on an election lawsuit in Virginia. When prompted to actually answer the question, Trump launches into a rant about critical stories appearing on Google News, said he’d called “the head of Google” to complain, and then threatened to “do something” to the company in response. Also Tuesday: Trump warns that “hydrogen is the new car,” and tells a story about a man who died in a hydrogen car explosion near a tree and could not be identified by his wife. Hydrogen-fueled cars are in fact a 10-year-old technology with a small and declining global market share. There is no evidence that they can explode like the Hindenburg, as a car with hydrogen fuel cells is not the same thing as a dirigible inflated with hydrogen gas. Wednesday: Asked about the “enemy within” comments from Sunday, Trump doubles down — saying Democrats like Schiff are indeed such an enemy, that they are “Marxists” and “fascists” who are “so evil” and “dangerous for our country.” Throughout these events, Trump has come off as (alternately) a buffoon and a would-be dictator. One minute, you’re laughing at his campy dance moves and Hindenburg car rants, the next you’re worrying that he really might try to send troops after American citizens. Yet the two Trumps, the clown and the menace, are intimately tied together: The absurdity helps normalize his dangerousness. For his biggest supporters, the schtick helps generate a sense of joy in transgression. For non-MAGA Republicans, it helps them feel comfortable ignoring what makes Trump extraordinary in favor of traditional grubby partisanship. For many of Trump’s opponents, it makes him seem like something we don’t have to worry about all the time — even when we really do. His absurdity works to make a horrifying reality our reality, something assimilable into the mental frames that we use to get through the day. I don’t think Trump does this by design. He’s not an evil genius, planning out moves 10 steps in advance. This is just who he is as a person; what you see on stage is what you get. But that persona arose from a gut-level understanding of human behavior, one that has allowed Trump to build extraordinary political and business careers on a foundation of lying to everyone around him and pushing the boundaries of “normal” to the breaking point. Without his buffoonery, none of this works — you get unpopular figures like Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sen. JD Vance, who have all of Trump’s cruelty but none of his charm. Put differently: the dancing is a kind of alchemy that takes his terrifying ideas, like deploying the military against “the enemy within,” and turns them into just another day in American politics. The clown prince of America In late 2016, the Atlantic published a campaign trail dispatch by Salena Zito, a conservative reporter, exploring Trump’s appeal to his voters. The piece was forgettable save one line, a description of Trump’s relationship to his fans that has been quoted endlessly for the past eight years: “The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.” In context, Zito was talking about Trump lying about unemployment among young Black men. At the time, he claimed that the unemployment rate was about three times what it actually was — a figure he arrived at in part by counting full-time students as “unemployed.” Zito acknowledged that this is false in a literal sense, but believes the press is wrong to dismiss him over it. She believed Trump’s fans understand the inflated numbers to be emblematic of some larger truth, caring less about facticity than the general picture he paints of a broken America. In the years since, “seriously not literally” has become a punchline among political journalists. Time after time, Trump and his fans have proven that they take his outlandish pronouncements literally. When he said the 2020 election was stolen and demanded Vice President Mike Pence unlawfully attempt to overturn it, he meant it — and his most hardcore supporters staged a riot to try to turn his vision into reality. If there’s a group of Trump supporters whom Zito’s phrase actually describes, it’s not the superfans, but the squishes. Republicans who blanched at January 6, but loved the tax cuts and court appointments that preceded it, are among the most likely to dismiss the idea that Trump should be taken at his word. For these Republicans, his authoritarianism pronouncements are just part of the Trump show — a kind of brand-burnishing performance on par with silly pronouncements like “hydrogen is the new car.” With his most extraordinary ideas safely slotted into the clown box, they can return to treating him seriously as a “normal” Republican candidate for president: assessing his policies against Harris’s and naturally finding hers wanting. The bitter dilemma of choosing between a Democrat and democracy can be wished away. As infuriating as this attitude is, it does have a little bit of grounding in truth. The truth is that all of us, to one degree or another, take Trump “seriously but not literally.” We do it because actually confronting what a second Trump presidency would mean is tough even for his most ardent critics to wrap their heads around. At various points during the campaign, Trump and his team have suggested putting millions of detained immigrants in camps, replacing the civil service with Trump cronies, deploying the military to repress dissenters, setting up special prosecutors to investigate Democrats, imposing 1,000 percent across-the-board tariffs, putting the Federal Reserve under political control, withdrawing from NATO, and unconstitutionally running for a third term in office. If we took all of that literally, really integrated the reality of what these steps would mean into our daily behavior, it would be hard to live life normally. The specter of out-and-out authoritarianism, a crashing economy, and an international system shorn of the alliances that keep the global peace sounds apocalyptic. Actually trying to envision the enormity of this world is psychologically taxing; trying to live as if this were indeed an imminent possibility invariably leads to a life monomaniacally devoted to trying to stop it. For most people, that’s neither desirable nor possible. And Trump’s fog of distortion creates a mental space where one can reasonably tell oneself it’s not necessary. He lies and exaggerates so much that it’s hard to tell which of his policy ideas demand being taken literally. You can make educated guesses — it’s achingly clear he’ll try to fight the 2024 election result if he loses — but that’s really the best any of us can do. Trump demands to be taken literally, but taking everything he does seriously is both psychologically difficult and analytically mistaken. So it makes sense that we all do at least a little bit of “seriously, but not literally”: it helps manage the fear and uncertainty inherent to a second Trump presidency. The buffoonery helps with that.  Laughing at Trump makes it easier to see him as something other than the boogeyman. I mean, look at him! He’s swaying on stage to “Ave Maria,” babbling about Pavarotti, making Kristi Noem sweat. Who couldn’t appreciate that?  We laugh not only because he’s funny (which he objectively is), but because then we don’t have to confront the reality of what he truly represents — at least, for a minute. The problem, though, is that Trump is a fundamentally serious thing. He’s not just doing a traveling stand-up show; he’s running for president of the United States. He wants to be in charge of the most powerful nation in human history, for his fingers to be on a nuclear button that could annihilate the planet.  It would be bad enough if someone who wanted this kind of power were just a clown. That he’s a clown with a proven track record of doing insanely dangerous things makes the laughter feel a bit hollow. Former President Barack Obama — who I’m convinced understands Trump better than almost anyone — recently gave a speech that distilled the problem down to its core. After describing some of Trump’s recent lies about hurricanes, Obama asked, “When did that become okay?” He expands: If your coworkers acted like that, they wouldn’t be your coworkers very long. If you’re in business and somebody you’re doing business with just outright lies and manipulates you, you stop doing business with them. Even if you had a family member who acted like that, you might still love them, but you’d tell them you got a problem and you wouldn’t put them in charge of anything. And yet, when Donald Trump lies, cheats, or shows utter disregard for our Constitution, when he calls POWs “losers” or fellow citizens “vermin,” people make excuses for it.  And that’s just it. This shouldn’t be okay, but enough people have accepted it that it is by default okay. The buffoonery helps us cope with the normalizing of the abnormal, the fact that the old rules for politics that kept things safe are being blown up at a faster and faster rate. When the prospect of a second Trump presidency feels too real, there’s always the comfort of laughing at him.

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