The clock started ticking on Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign last year, when prosecutors announced dozens of criminal charges against him. With each new allegation — mishandling classified documents, election fraud, racketeering — it became clear that Trump’s campaign for a second term would unfold in a time crunch. He was deeply unpopular, holed up at Mar-a-Lago, and venting on Truth Social because Twitter had banned him. Now, he was applying for a job that voters had already fired him from, and he had to somehow get it back before courts could rule against him.
Today, the safety of the Oval Office looks like Trump’s to lose. Joe Biden is polling worse than any modern president at this stage, weakened by doubts about his age and stewardship of the economy. Trump didn’t even bother to debate his challengers in the GOP primary and steamrollered them anyway en route to the nomination. He’s edging out Biden in national polling averages and leading him comfortably in swing states. And in March, a New York Times–Siena College poll suggested that voters have grown less certain that Trump committed federal offenses. As he scampers to the finish line, these changing attitudes toward what makes him deeply abnormal for a presidential candidate — his alleged crimes — are the latest sign of how normalized he’s become.
Critics have long worried that Trump’s behavior would come to be seen as normal, but they mostly meant his bigotry and lies. In a recent column, Thomas Edsall at the Times lamented how Trump “demonizes minorities and fans ethnic hostility,” yet “a substantial share of the American electorate remains willing to cast a ballot for him.” There was always something incomplete about this conceit. There’s no shortage of racists in the history of an office that includes a dozen slaveholders, and Trump got his start in Republican politics as a birther........