When the White House Is a Safe Space

I think a lot about the Dean Scream. The barbaric yawp that became a meme—and that because of its very yawpiness, the lore goes, helped to end a presidential candidacy—was such a recent thing, and yet in another way such a faraway thing: a final testament to the now-quaint idea that a campaign for the highest office in the land, conducted under the auspices of long-honed norms of the campaign trail, could be undone in an instant by a single, over-eager shout.

We are no longer so stringent. The days in which power that is sought might be denied for such a small mistake have been fading for a long time; if you were filling out the official forms, though, you could pretty accurately stipulate their time of death to be the moment in November of 2016 when candidate Donald Trump, bragging about sexual assault—Tic-Tacs, , —was nonetheless