Basically, to the point I was making at the bottom of this page about Trump trying to bring Manafort back into his campaign, this is not at all a normal move. It's alarming and I believe if you went back to 2012 or anytime before that, trying to bring a felon and known Russian asset into the campaign for a guy running for president would have sunk a campaign. No campaign back then would have survived a move that dumb and I believe the media, I mean all the media back then, would have pointed out how dumb this was. 

However, from the 2016 campaign going forward, nothing seems to have an impact anymore. Part of the media gives out a pass for anything. I mean things happened during the 2016 campaign, for both candidates, that I believe would have wiped out candidates at any time in history before that. Now though, and most particularly with Trump because he has proven this in the most extreme cases, you can now literally do anything at all...anything...and it has no impact and I believe the fatigue from Trump doing so much insane and heinous stuff just causes this totally blase reaction. 

I remember the media really gave John Kerry a hard time because he yelled at a guy that crashed into him skiing. Really, that was a problem moment back then. Now you can talk about grabbing women by the pussy, get charged with 91 felonies, get caught cheating on your wife with a porn star right after she had a baby, pay her hush money and get caught doing that, ask people everybody knows were working with Russian spies and are convicted felons to work on your campaign AGAIN, be found liable for sexually assaulting a woman by a jury TWICE, steal top secret info and plan to sell it, call a guy that ran a child sex ring a good friend and party with him, be found guilty of fraud, defamation, tax evasion, incite an insurrection where people attack our capitol and beat police officers while threatening to hang your vice president, call the people that did this and were convicted for it "Great patriots", try to steal an election by bullying state officials to change the outcome and be caught on a recording doing so, talk about how you could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and you would not lose a vote, kiss the ass of a guy that started a war in Europe, praise racists and white nationalists, quote Hitler in your campaign speeches, get caught lying over and over and over, call the veterans that have served our nation suckers, and on and on and on...and somehow, this does not matter. 

You can do all this and more, and daily do all kinds of other heinous things and still be the leading candidate for a major political party. 

The 2016 presidential election was a game changer and not in a good way. Sure, we always had a faction of nuts and Nazis, but we used to have a media and society that called them out so that we moved past them. 2012 was our last normal election. The last time candidates had to try to show people that they were good and decent people that were loyal to this country and wanted to do good for it. 

Now, quite honestly, anything goes.