Numb to corruption: How Republicans trained their base to ignore Trump's criminality

https://www.salon.com/2019/02/20/numb-to-corruption-how-republicans-trained-their-base-to-ignore-trumps-criminality/?fbclid=IwAR2FwOHQi9pMoxgK9jjkTvPKPuAsIY1Gbfu-_k9RdXB6dBTs1iGr6OMa5Jc
"First, Republicans normalized the idea that all politicians are corrupt by electing a series of deeply corrupt politicians themselves. Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush have all been warm-up acts to Trump. Watergate, the Iran-Contra affair, falsified intelligence to justify the Iraq invasion: Every one of those presidents helped train their voters to defend political corruption if it was conducted for supposedly meritorious ends. With Watergate -- a bush-league burglary gone wrong -- the training wheels hadn't come off. But by the time Bush administration lies had led us into the disastrous quagmire in Iraq, your average conservative had not only become adept at making excuses for political corruption, but had fully accepted that doing so is a normal and expected aspect of supporting the Republican Party. It's honestly not that big a leap from defending the corrupt Bush administration to defending the corrupt Trump administration."