Senator Mitch McConnell, Representative Paul Ryan, and Representative Kevin McCarthy at the House and Senate Republican retreat in February 2018.
Credit: CQ Roll Call /AP/ Tom Williams

What did everyone think was going to happen?

There’s nothing we learned from Donald Trump’s meeting in Helsinki on Monday with Vladimir Putin that we didn’t already know. Seeing the president of the United States praise a foreign adversary to his face while insulting his own intelligence services carries some remaining power to shock, but nothing about Trump’s past statements, including his tweets in the days leading up to the summit, suggested anything very different was in store. We certainly should have been prepared for the likelihood that Trump would flatter Putin, denounce the media, and generally humiliate the United States for no discernible reason.

On the one hand, it’s healthy that the public is capable of expressing outrage. It’s reassuring that Trump’s appalling behavior and flagrant corruption haven’t been completely normalized. And yet there’s something empty about this reaction every time it occurs. The fact that Trump […]