How Trump makes extreme things look normal

I can't believe that's a real sentence.
Okay. Focus.
Oh my god, I'm trapped in a nightmare.
All right. Last one.
How do you feel watching this?
Same reaction?
No?
You feel numb, don't you?
If you've been watching the news for the past 12 months,
your reaction to that last clip was probably, "meh.”
There's a term for what you're experiencing.
It's called the Overton Window.
It's a concept in political science that says there is this
window of ideas the public is willing to accept.
Everything inside the window is normal and expected.
Everything outside the window is radical, ridiculous, or unthinkable.
And the theory goes that if you want to move the window,
if you want to change what people think of as acceptable,
you shouldn't start here.
You should start here, at the extreme.
Because forcing people to consider an unthinkable idea,
even if they reject it, makes all less-radical ideas
seem more acceptable by comparison.
It shifts the window in that direction.
So if you want to make people more accepting of gay relationships,
you should start by arguing for gay marriage.
You'll lose at first, but you'll start to make things like
domestic partnerships seem more plausible.
Then civil unions start to seem normal too.
Pretty soon, what started off as an unthinkable idea
seems very thinkable.
Even boring.
The point of the Overton Window is that people
don't have to accept a ridiculous idea, they just have to get used to it,
have to hear enough to start comparing other ideas to it.
And that might be the scariest part of Trump's first year in office.
Not how abnormal he is,
but how normal he makes everything else look by comparison.
This is not normal.
This is not normal.
This is not normal.
This is not normal.
But it keeps happening.
In just the past six months, we've had to talk about the president
sympathizing with white supremacists,
retweeting anti-Muslim propaganda from a hate group,
calling a world leader short and fat
while threatening nuclear war on Twitter.
I'm not!
Any of these stories would have been unthinkable
under Obama or even Bush.
But now they're things we have to seriously talk about.
That means getting used to a lot of new realities over here,
in Trumpland.
And that's shifted the Overton Window
in some really terrifying ways.
Sounds so ominous.
The Overton Window.
The Overton Window.
The most obvious is that we now just
expect to be bullshitted.
At the start of Trump's term,
we were shocked at the White House lying
about the size of Trump's inauguration crowd.
It undermines the credibility of the entire
White House Press Office on day one.
Don't be so overly dramatic.
But now?
The president in no way has ever encouraged violence.
I don't think it's appropriate to lie from the podium
or any other place.
I wouldn't say it was a lie.
That's a pretty bold accusation.
Yeah, she's a liar.
What else is new?
That's especially true for news coverage.
There's Kellyanne Conway,
Will the president do anything?
What do you mean, “Will he do anything?”
CNN's army of Trump parrots,
Breitbart trolls,
Alex Jones getting a major interview on national television.
Do you think of yourself as a journalist?
I have some journalists that work for me.
Normally these people would be relegated
to the dark corners of the internet.
But thanks to Trump, news networks feel compelled
to put them on TV, to put them in the mainstream.
Alex Jones isn't going away.
He has millions of listeners and the ear of our current president.
God damn it, Megyn Kelly.
But what's scarier is what's happening over here —
the stuff that feels kind of boring under Trump.
One of the weird side effects of this presidency
is that big Trump debates are rarely just
between Democrats and Republicans.
They're often between Trump supporters
and anti-Trump conservatives —
conservatives who think Trump has gone too far.
I will note this is a two-Republican panel.
These debates are really attractive to news outlets.
It's interesting when somebody bucks their party.
And so you've seen anti-Trump conservatives take up
more and more space in political debates.
You can see that trend really clearly in the makeup
of CNN's panels, which now almost always
feature anti-Trump conservatives.
People like Iraq War architect Bill Kristol,
who represented the far right in the Obama years,
You supported Sarah Palin.
She's not a big business, big corporation type.
But now plays the part of the middle ground.
He's a jackass.
I'm just going to say it.
The middle ground!
No, no.
You can find examples of middle-grounding everywhere.
After years of race baiting and toeing the conservative line on Fox,
Megan Kelly now has her own show on NBC.
Bear with me, please.
MSNBC, which normally leans left,
has added two conservative hosts in Trump's first year,
both who made names for themselves
by being critical of Trump during the campaign.
The New York Times hired conservative columnist Bret Stephens,
a guy who's called anti-Semitism a "disease of the Arab mind"
and who doubts the reality of climate change.
When announcing their decision to hire Stephens,
The New York Times explicitly cited his opposition
to Trump during the campaign.
The problem isn't that these are conservative voices.
Because we're comparing them to Trump trolls,
they end up representing the middle
or even the left
of public debates.
Your side, the left wing of America, lost this election.
The Overton Window has moved.
The Overton Window.
I regret making this joke already.
The result is news coverage with
dramatically lowered expectations,
where success for Republicans doesn't mean governing well,
it just means not being Trump.
Trump delivers a normal-sounding speech
and suddenly he's presidential.
I thought the tone was spot on.
He owned that room.
Trump nominates Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court
and Washington breathes a sigh of relief.
The nomination and confirmation of Neil Gorsuch
remains an enormously significant win.
The bar is so low that there's no real room
to have a serious policy debate about anything.
It was nice to be sitting in that chamber again.
And going, “Oh, okay.
Republicans like this.
Democrats hate this.”
It was almost normal last night.
And you can see it especially in the coverage
of the Republican tax reform bill.
By any measure,
the bill in the Senate was a disaster for democracy.
Republicans agreed to pass the bill before it was even written.
It was covered in sloppy handwritten amendments.
They're sending around their edits as we speak.
Can you tell me what that word is?
And it passed in the dead of night on a party-line vote,
including a $250 billion error.
That should be a nightmare
that haunts Republicans into the midterms.
But the next morning, Trump was tweeting about Michael Flynn.
And what should have been a stain on the GOP
was reframed as a big accomplishment
that Trump's tweeting was distracting from.
Despite the big win, Russian election meddling
shadows the Trump administration.
What should be a celebratory weekend here at the White House,
instead all the attention is focused on Mike Flynn.
Stuff like the tax reform bill seems small when
Trump is making conspiracy theories and threatening nuclear war.
But at some point, Trump won't be president anymore.
And when that happens,
we're going to have to reckon with a media environment
that's been trained to view traditional conservatives as a huge relief.
As the new middle ground.
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How Trump makes extreme things look normal

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