The extreme danger from the beginning of the Trump era was not just that the White House might be occupied by an unfit person, but that American institutions might follow him into further disrepute. This happened with institutional media, which responded to a manic, hyperbolic, unreliable president by taking on those same qualities. Their permanent crisis doubled as a political campaign to prevent Trump’s “normalization” and a scheme to boost profits by addicting audiences to a never-ending narrative of moral mania. To keep it up, elite media made the same request of audiences that Trump
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