Part of this, I’d guess, is because so many other indicators in the world are remarkably good right now. Economic growth is now ubiquitous in the developed world (including even Japan) for the first time in quite a while. In America, we are in a record eighth year of economic growth, bringing peak employment and finally a bump in earnings. Median household income is now the highest in history. The Dow is at 25,000. Medicine has effectively abolished most of the diseases which used to kill us in mass numbers. Illegal border crossings to the U.S. have fallen to record lows. More Americans have health insurance than at any point in history, and Trump has failed to kill Obamacare. Crime rates are at historic lows and keep declining in ways that simply baffle criminologists. Solar energy is finally competitive with fossil fuels. Global conflict continues its long centuries-old decline. ISIS has been destroyed in its own heartland. Anyone with a phone has access to more learning and knowledge than at any point in human history. More people live in democracies today than a dozen years ago. When natural disasters happen, they kill fewer people in a far more populous world. The last decade has seen the biggest decline in global poverty ever. And on and on. All this renders the collapse of the American presidency more tolerable.
And Trump’s very incompetence is also a calming factor. There is no wall, and almost certainly won’t be. There has been no deportation force and, given good news on border crossings, it appears we don’t need one. The president has not defied a court order, and the Mueller investigation into potential treason during the campaign remains active. We have seen no brutal “law and order” police crackdown — in fact, we have proof that we don’t need stop-and-frisk at all, and the number of unarmed African-Americans shot dead by the cops has been halved in two years. The Iran nuclear deal still stands; ditto NAFTA; so too the Paris climate accord — despite the U.S.’s symbolic withdrawal. The shift to renewable energy has not paused. We have not seen new tariffs on trade with China, beyond the limits of previous presidents. Obamacare is more popular than ever. Democrats lead Republicans in the generic congressional polls by double digits. Established media — like the New York Times and the Washington Post — are seeing huge gains in digital subscriptions. A Democrat won in Alabama. Terror attacks have not prompted massive overreaction, as many of us feared. It seems at times as if Trump is both ubiquitous and yet Trumpism is all but absent. If you squinted and judged only the substantive change since last January, Trump’s tangible record is indistinguishable from any other mainstream Republican’s.
Take three stories of the past week. Despite the commander-in-chief’s incendiary tweet, transgender troops are currently being openly enrolled in the military for the first time. Bluff called. The much-touted voter fraud commission has been shut down by the president himself. Reality finally defeated paranoia. California now has legal weed, and Jeff Sessions’s response has been to defer enforcement of federal law to U.S. Attorneys in the legal pot states. On paper, this looks ominous. But in reality, I cannot imagine U.S. Attorneys in California actually deciding to go to war with a multimillion-dollar industry backed by a clear majority of voters, and serious pushback is already coming from Republicans in legal weed states. Another de facto retreat. In an era in which fentanyl is killing tens of thousands, a fixation on cannabis seems close to insane, when it isn’t completely irrelevant.
Trump’s First Year Was a Disaster. Here’s Why I Have Hope.
. How tragic and terrifying. 
