The normalization of Donald Trump.

Americans would doubtless prefer to think that nothing like that could happen in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. But the reactions of our own elites to the behavior of the Republican Party in general, and the Trump phenomenon in particular, have increasingly given the lie to such complacency. We have seen over the last eight years how journalists for prestige publications have assiduously normalized Donald Trump. Is it a case of rote journalistic convention that turns Trump’s demented ravings into something resembling the blandly acceptable “policy statements” of a typical gladhanding pol? Is the press merely operating in Pavlovian fashion, in the same manner they clean up grammar and usage according to the AP style manual?

Mike Lofgren in Salon.com