All due respect, Americans aren't dumb. We're anesthetized. Too many of us are just too exhausted by a flagrantly corrupt world to care about a little more corruption.
Nixon's corruption was such a shock to the system because until that point, Americans (to a far greater extent than today) trusted their leaders to do the right thing. Then came the Pentagon Papers, Iran Contra, Clinton's Oval Office BJs, the Iraq War, the Wall Street bailout...
And all the rest of it. We've grown accustomed to seeing corruption from the bottom up and from the top down. We've seen the rich getting richer and then complaining that they're not rich enough. Then Trump comes along. The only difference between him and so many others...
Is that he doesn't even pretend. He uses his blatant corruption as evidence of an anti-elite agenda. "Those fuckers take theirs, why shouldn't I take mine?" And somehow, inexplicably, people cheer him on. Maybe it's the recognition that the assholes have always run the show.
At least this asshole also makes no apologies for it or for his contempt for those of us who were naive to play by the rules. It's a "grab whatever you can" mentality (including, of course, pussies) because the rules are for suckers.
He'll probably get re-elected and if he has to cheat to do so, his cheating will only prove his point. The lesson isn't Americans don't understand Trump's corruption versus Nixon's. It's that Nixon would've gotten away with it if he'd just said, "Yeah I did it. Fuck you."
Think back over the last 50 years or so. The aberration isn't Trump. It was Obama.
