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Most of us are conditioned to regard these incidents as mere proof of Trump’s inability to control his impulses. But his urges are powerfully honed by decades of collusion with the scandal-mongers and gossip columnists who made him famous and helped him to create his brand. The outbursts and asides establish and maintain his alpha-male reputation in the eyes of his fans (though they might not quite put it like this) by not allowing anyone to “dictate his attitude or virtues to him.”

Trump’s flaunting of his own most shameful qualities deflects the damage that any revelation can do to him. When he displays his vices so openly, the drama of revelation leads only to a shrug of the shoulders: tell us something we didn’t know. His outbursts normalize the outrageous—habit, as Samuel Beckett has it, is a great deadener. Most subtly but most effectively, they play havoc with one of the things we think we know about politics: the game of distraction.
 
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