When Deviance Becomes Procedure

 

Donald Trump’s most consequential legacy may not ultimately be a tariff, a tax bill, an immigration policy, a war, or even a particular abuse of presidential power. It may be something far more corrosive: he has taught America to become accustomed to behavior that, in another era, would have been considered extraordinary, disqualifying, unethical, or simply unthinkable.

The proper term for what is happening is the normalization of deviance.

Sociologist Diane Vaughan developed the concept while studying the 1986 Challenger disaster. Engineers had observed problems with the shuttle’s solid-rocket-booster O-rings before the fatal launch. Because previous missions survived despite those warning signs, departures from what should have been considered safe gradually became tolerated. What had originally been abnormal became acceptable. What was acceptable became routine. Eventually the organization stopped recognizing the danger at all. NASA’s own historical analysis describes this as a process in which behavior once regarded as deviant or anomalous becomes incrementally redefined as normal.

The terrifying lesson of Challenger was not simply that people ignored a warning. It was that they became accustomed to ignoring warnings.

America is experiencing something remarkably similar in its political life.

Consider January 6. Whatever one believes about the prosecutions surrounding the Capitol attack, the country once operated under a rather uncomplicated principle: physically attacking police officers while attempting to disrupt the constitutional transfer of presidential power was not patriotic political activity. Yet on his first day back in office, Trump granted clemency to more than 1,500 January 6 defendants, including people convicted of violently attacking police officers. The political message traveled far beyond those individual pardons. Conduct once condemned across much of the political spectrum was incorporated into a heroic narrative.

The abnormal had moved another few inches toward normal.

Then came the institutional guardrails. Inspectors general exist specifically because presidents and cabinet secretaries should not be the sole judges of their own conduct. Trump abruptly removed inspectors general across major departments. A federal judge later concluded that the firings likely violated statutory requirements for advance notice and individualized justification, although she declined to reinstate the officials because the president could remove them again by following the required procedures.

Again, notice the pattern. Oversight becomes obstruction. Independence becomes disloyalty. Loyalty to the president gradually replaces loyalty to the institution.

The Justice Department provides an even more troubling example because Americans have spent generations insisting, sometimes imperfectly but importantly, that criminal prosecution must never become an ordinary weapon of presidential vengeance. Yet Trump’s Justice Department has pursued investigations involving prominent political adversaries including Letitia James and Adam Schiff, while Trump allies were placed in significant prosecutorial positions. Courts have subsequently ruled multiple such appointments unlawful. Just this month, an appeals court upheld a ruling blocking subpoenas connected to the investigation of James because the Trump-aligned prosecutor who issued them had been unlawfully appointed. Another appeals court ruled days earlier that Nevada’s top federal prosecutor had likewise been improperly installed through a maneuver circumventing normal appointment procedures.

Each individual dispute can be litigated. Each investigation can be defended. Each appointment can be explained by lawyers. Normalization does not require everyone to admit wrongdoing. Quite the opposite. It flourishes through endless rationalization.

Trump’s campaign against major law firms illustrates the same institutional transformation. Executive orders targeted firms associated with people or causes he opposed. Four firms successfully challenged those orders in court, while nine others reached agreements involving nearly $1 billion in promised pro bono work on causes favored by the administration. The administration maintains that its actions were lawful and justified; litigation continues.

Stop for a moment and consider how strange the underlying proposition has become. The president of the United States can attack private law firms because of whom they represented, and instead of the country recoiling instinctively from presidential retaliation against lawyers, we debate the finer points of executive authority.

That is normalization.

Then we arrive at money.

Modern presidents have traditionally gone to elaborate lengths to separate public power from private financial interests, not because every possible conflict constituted a crime, but because the presidency depends upon citizens believing that governmental decisions are made for the country rather than the president’s bank account.

Trump has shattered that expectation.

His family’s cryptocurrency ventures have produced enormous wealth while his administration simultaneously oversees cryptocurrency policy. Reuters reported on August 19 that Trump-family crypto ventures generated more than $1.4 billion in gains during 2025, while a Reuters/Ipsos poll found 63 percent of Americans believed Trump and his family had improperly profited from cryptocurrency ventures since his return to office. Sixty-nine percent believed his private business interests influenced presidential policy. The White House rejects those allegations and says Trump’s assets are independently managed and that no conflicts exist.

The crucial question is larger than whether someone can someday prove a particular quid pro quo. Why should Americans have to wonder?

A president should avoid creating circumstances in which citizens must calculate whether a presidential decision benefits the United States, his family, his cryptocurrency holdings, his real-estate interests, his investors, or some combination of them.

Instead, conflict itself has been normalized.

The spectacle reached almost surreal proportions with Qatar’s Boeing 747. A foreign government provided the United States with a luxury aircraft valued at roughly $400 million for presidential use, provoking constitutional, ethical and security questions almost unimaginable under previous administrations. Trump defended the arrangement as beneficial to the country, and the administration maintains that it complies with the law. The aircraft nevertheless represents something historically extraordinary: an American president operating from an extraordinarily expensive airplane supplied by a foreign monarchy while his family conducts extensive international business.

Once again, Americans were invited not to recoil from the premise, but to become accustomed to it.

This is the essential Trump method.

Do something previously considered outrageous.

Defend it aggressively.

Attack whoever objects.

Force the courts, Congress, journalists and bureaucracies to spend months determining whether some precise statutory boundary has technically been crossed.

Meanwhile, move on to the next outrage.

Human psychology does the rest.

The nervous system cannot remain continuously shocked. Repeated exposure produces habituation. Yesterday’s scandal becomes today’s argument and tomorrow’s background noise. What once consumed a week of headlines eventually survives only a few hours. Behavior does not even have to become morally acceptable. It merely has to become familiar.

Familiarity is one of civilization’s most dangerous anesthetics.

Trump seems to understand this instinctively. He overwhelms the moral immune system. No individual controversy remains in public consciousness long enough to produce sustained resistance because another arrives behind it. Americans begin grading presidential behavior not against the historical standards of the office but against Trump’s previous behavior.

The measuring stick itself moves.

Soon the question is no longer, Would we tolerate this from an American president?

It becomes, Is this really any worse than what he did last week?

Once a republic begins asking the second question, the normalization is nearly complete.

None of this requires believing that every Trump policy is wrong, every investigation corrupt, every appointee incompetent, every gift illegal or every accusation against him true. Partisanship tempts people into exactly that kind of intellectual laziness. A constitutional republic demands something harder: standards that remain standards regardless of whose name appears on the ballot.

Republicans should want those standards when Democrats hold power. Democrats should want them when Republicans hold power. Americans should be intelligent enough to understand that every extraordinary power tolerated in the hands of a president we admire eventually becomes available to a president we despise.

Presidential precedent has no party registration.

The deepest damage Trump may therefore inflict upon the United States is not what he personally does with power. Presidents eventually leave. Administrations end. Elections intervene. Mortality settles every argument eventually.

The greater danger is what remains permissible afterward.

If presidents may openly intermingle political power and private financial interests, their successors will inherit the precedent. If prosecutors may routinely investigate presidential enemies, another president will inherit the precedent. If watchdogs may be discarded when inconvenient, another president will inherit the precedent. If foreign governments may bestow extraordinary benefits without producing national revulsion, another president will inherit the precedent. If loyalty to a person becomes more important than loyalty to an institution, the institution itself eventually becomes ornamental.

This is how republics deteriorate. Usually not with one spectacular act of destruction, but through thousands of accommodations.

One broken norm.

Then another.

Then an explanation.

Then an exception.

Then a precedent.

Then silence.

Eventually nobody remembers where the boundary originally stood.

The Challenger catastrophe occurred 73 seconds after liftoff, but the conditions that produced it developed over years. Warning signs appeared. Nothing catastrophic happened. The organization adapted. Risk became familiar. Familiar became acceptable. Acceptable became normal.

Until the morning came when reality collected the accumulated debt.

American democracy operates under the same unforgiving law.

The danger is not simply Donald Trump behaving abnormally.

The danger is America forgetting that it is abnormal.

And once deviance becomes procedure, procedure becomes precedent, precedent becomes tradition, and eventually a generation arrives that cannot remember anything different.

By then, nobody needs to destroy the guardrails.

We will already have taught ourselves to live without them.