People sometimes talk about the thoughtfulness of the Lincoln-Douglas debates or the writings of the Founders and reflect on how far we’ve fallen.

I’ve been thinking about George W Bush in the same way. At the time, he was considered notoriously gaffe prone. Look how hilarious the Letterman audience in 2008 found him temporarily mixing up Iraq and Iran before correcting himself! Ha ha! What a doofus.

The gap between Bush and Trump is greater than that between Bush and the American Founders. You can understand what Bush was saying. He had a temporary slip of the tongue involving two countries that sound alike. Compare to Trump doing the “weave” talking about Arnold Palmer’s manhood and seals having psychological breakdowns and eating dogs and cats and whatever other nonsense that happens to pop into his head.

Trump has degraded standards in speech so much that we can’t even imagine what the world was like 15 years ago. It’s like this with everything about Trump. His lies, corruption, incivility, etc are so off the charts that there’s no comparison to anyone else in American history. The transformation and lowering of standards are so extreme that we can hardly remember what things were like before.