My wife and I are on Day 3 of a weeklong cruise, and the calm waters have put me in a meditative mind. Out at sea, at the slightest remove from domestic squabbling, I’m feeling a bit contemplative over the state of our political discourse, and I’m wondering whether I owe our edgelord-in-chief, Donald Trump, a word of thanks.

There was a time—not so very long ago—when a former president tacitly endorsing the abduction of the current president would be met with the kind of censure and opprobrium we used to reserve only for athletes protesting police brutality. As it is, after Trump posted an image of a bound-and-gagged President Joe Biden on his social media site, cable news reported on it, then discarded the story within a day.

Time was, a story like that would dominate the news cycle for a week and generally result in the offending candidate denying any knowledge of how such an image ended up on their feed before blaming, and then firing, an intern. It was Trump who re-educated the populace: never apologize, never retreat. It was Trump who erased “shame” from the political vocabulary.

To be sure, presidential elections have been dirty affairs since our first—when John Adams partisans flung mud at Thomas Jefferson by referring to “Dusky Sally,” his enslaved concubine, Sally Hemmings. One of Jefferson’s rhetorical foot soldiers memorably called Adams a “hideous hermaphroditical character.”

Backstabbing, lies, dirty tricks, and........

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