News Journal:Don’t get used to Trump’s deviant behavior.

I’ve been thinking for quite some time now that we are all becoming accustomed to events and actions that once would have been unimaginable. We digest a few more outrages just about every day, and yet nothing seems to dramatically change in our lives.
We are surviving. A kind of numbness has set in.
Last week, reading a Themis Trading report on the increase of illegal activities on Wall Street, I came across a quote from Dave Cliff, a professor at England’s University of Bristol. It crystallized my vague thoughts.
A mouthful, indeed, but the next sentence especially hit home: “In this way, deviant events become normalized: the absence of a catastrophe thus far is taken as evidence that future catastrophes are less likely than had been previously thought. The flaw in this line of reasoning is starkly revealed when a catastrophe then ensues.”
Internationally, our president has bewildered and angered both allies and antagonists with his erratic — yes, deviant — behavior, threatening nuclear war, trashing all kinds of treaties and agreements, embracing dictators and insulting democratic allies. Yet here we are.
Nothing terrible has happened. So far.
But let me concentrate in this column on what his deviant behavior has done domestically, particularly in one important area. A couple of days ago, I heard a pundit on CNN say, “It is terrible the way Republicans and Democrats are trying to politicize the Justice Department.” I almost fell off the treadmill I was walking on.
What she was talking about was clearly the effort by one President to subvert investigations by the Justice Department, not efforts by “Republicans and Democrats.” In fact, in my over 40 years in and around the federal government, I saw only one effort to influence an investigation being carried on by the Department of Justice. That was in 1973, when FBI director Patrick Gray had to resign because he had destroyed evidence of the Watergate break-in at the request of the Nixon White House’s chief domestic policy adviser, John Ehrlichman.
I had just started on the staff of Senator Joe Biden. In all the years since, I never saw anyone, Democrat or Republican, break what we all knew was a clear, well-established rule. Whether you were in the White House or Congress, you never tried to get information about, let alone try to affect, an ongoing investigation by the Department of Justice.
There is now no question that, on numerous occasions, President Trump has contacted people throughout the Justice Department and tried to influence their decisions on open investigations. Even more unprecedented, those investigations directly affect him personally.
How perfectly Trump’s behavior fits Professor Cliff’s description of someone “acting outside the safe operating envelope of a complex system.” His analysis explains how many people, not seeing any immediately grievous consequences to the president’s actions, come to believe that “the safe envelope should be extended to include” them.
So just how many ways is President Trump pushing to extend the envelope? They are too numerous to mention, but again just sticking to domestic behavior:
By attacking his own appointed cabinet secretaries and key staff and then firing them on Twitter. By announcing major policy decisions and then reversing them within days.
By mounting a sustained campaign to destroy the free press. By firing and hiring staff at a rate never before seen in any administration.
By telling daily lies, and repeating them over and over again despite incontrovertible evidence that they are lies. By never admitting a mistake or accepting personal responsibility for anything.
By attacking anyone he sees as an opponent, no matter how that deepens the divisions in the country.
Of course this is all deviant behavior. And yet our lives haven’t changed significantly. Yet.
But I am very afraid. I believe we are now headed for a constitutional crisis of an unprecedented magnitude. Let me end with the wise reminder from Professor Cliff:
“In this way, deviant events become normalized: the absence of a catastrophe thus far is taken as evidence that future catastrophes are less likely than had been previously thought. The flaw in this line of reasoning is starkly revealed when a catastrophe then ensues.”

Ted Kaufman is a former U S Senator from Delaware