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Trump Exhaustion Syndrome - The Atlantic
Among the greatest tricks Donald Trump ever pulled is convincing significant portions of the population that the slow erosion of their rights is not, actually, that big of a deal.
After all, do undocumented immigrants with purported gang tattoos truly deserve due process? Is it really so bad to urge citizens to turn on their neighbors and co-workers for saying something outrageous? And is it problematic to punish journalists for reporting facts that the government would rather keep hidden? (Yes, yes, and yes! come the emphatic cries of constitutional-law experts, civil-liberties advocates, and others who care about this sort of thing.)
A year into Trump’s second term, the emboldened president’s maximalist strategy—pushing every norm to its most elastic, and then a bit beyond, and from that new breaking point pushing yet again—conjures the boiling-frog theory, in which a frog placed in boiling water will immediately hop out, but a frog placed in cool water that is slowly heated will complacently boil to death. (And yes, I know that this amphibious metaphor for failing to notice incremental negative changes is apocryphal, but the lesson is still apt.)
Or, as the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon put it to me, the Overton window is moving so far, so quickly, that the more apt way to understand Trump’s strategy is: “Fuck the Overton window.”
Bannon continued: “He’s driving deep. Remember, our strategy—I say it every day—is maximalist, a maximalist strategy. You have to take it however deep you can take it and, quite frankly, until you meet resistance. And we haven’t met any resistance.”
After all, do undocumented immigrants with purported gang tattoos truly deserve due process? Is it really so bad to urge citizens to turn on their neighbors and co-workers for saying something outrageous? And is it problematic to punish journalists for reporting facts that the government would rather keep hidden? (Yes, yes, and yes! come the emphatic cries of constitutional-law experts, civil-liberties advocates, and others who care about this sort of thing.)
A year into Trump’s second term, the emboldened president’s maximalist strategy—pushing every norm to its most elastic, and then a bit beyond, and from that new breaking point pushing yet again—conjures the boiling-frog theory, in which a frog placed in boiling water will immediately hop out, but a frog placed in cool water that is slowly heated will complacently boil to death. (And yes, I know that this amphibious metaphor for failing to notice incremental negative changes is apocryphal, but the lesson is still apt.)
Or, as the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon put it to me, the Overton window is moving so far, so quickly, that the more apt way to understand Trump’s strategy is: “Fuck the Overton window.”
Bannon continued: “He’s driving deep. Remember, our strategy—I say it every day—is maximalist, a maximalist strategy. You have to take it however deep you can take it and, quite frankly, until you meet resistance. And we haven’t met any resistance.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/01/trump-first-year-democracy/685658/
Archived
https://archive.ph/FIvJb
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