… By the time Trump arrived, corruption had been normalised as realism. Trump merely stripped it of its polite fictions – not only in domestic politics but in foreign policy, where the US has long cloaked its violence in the language of democracy and human rights. Trump’s extrajudicial killings of unidentified individuals via unilateral military strikes in Latin American waters, for example, are not a break with American precedent but its most naked expression, the open performance of practices that past administrations enacted beneath the cloak of deniability and euphemism. Likewise, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) brutality and cruelty under Trump are not new. It is instead largely a dramatised, made-for-TV version of what Barack Obama – who earned the title of “deporter in chief” – pioneered over the years in which he built the career of Tom Homan, now Trump’s so-called border czar. Like Trump, Obama was a great admirer of Homan, awarding him a 2015 Presidential Rank Award for Distinguished Service to honour his passion for rounding up immigrants, separating children from their parents and caging people in detention camps.

The brazenness of Trump’s corruption and cruelty – the nepotism, the grift, the self-dealing, the open auctioning of government contracts and justice – does not shock us because it feels like an honest expression of what we already knew: that American government and institutions serve the wealthy individuals who own them, whether directly or indirectly through their donations and lobbyists or via networks of influence, bribery and extortion. The outrage that might once have followed is replaced by a weary recognition that things have always worked this way…