Donald Trump shared an unspeakably racist meme about President Obama and Michelle Obama on social media.

With our nation stretched to its breaking point by a litany of Constitutional crises and human rights emergencies, just a hair’s breadth from exploding into inexorable chaos, our sitting president used the unrivaled platform he has been given to perpetuate one of the longest-running and most dehumanizing stereotypes about people of color.

It is a historic dereliction of duty, a gross and unprecedented failure of leadership; it is dangerous, damaging, deadly.

And before you start thinking anything crazy, I just want to remind you (and myself) that we’ve been here before:

This is gonna end him.
This will be the tipping point.
This is the red line.
He’s finally gone too far.

How many times over the last ten years have you said this or thought this?

How many times have you heard this from well-meaning friends, trusted journalists, beloved podcasters, or even from me?

How many new additions to his vast resume of filth convinced us all that this would be the moment when our friends, family members, and neighbors finally had the scales removed from their eyes, when their buried humanity would show itself, when they would be broken from their mindless cultic stupor and reject him?

When he mocked a disabled reporter.
When he urged rally protestors to be beaten.
When he boasted about grabbing women by the genitalia.
When he mocked a decorated prisoner of war.
When he called veterans suckers and losers.
When he talked about a female reporter’s menstrual cycle.
When he shrugged off hundreds of thousands of pandemic deaths.
When he incited a violent insurrection at our Capitol.
When he screamed about immigrants eating family pets.
When he slandered citizens executed in the streets of Minneapolis.
When he berated a female journalist for asking about the burying of a human trafficking investigation, his name appears in thousands of times.

If I had space here, I could easily list a thousand such moments when reasonable human beings were positive that we’d arrived at a nadir of morality, a political Waterloo, one that would precipitate the exodus of the brainwashed sycophants and empty-headed disciples who allowed him to ascend to a place he was never worthy of.

And yet, here we are, with this snarling, repugnant cesspool of a man once again slumped upon the highest seat in our nation and almost by the hour, tearing apart everything our forebears and ancestors spent two hundred and fifty years building.

And we’re here because tens of millions of people with whom we share this beautiful land have deemed every single bit of moral filth that has erupted from within his dead and blackened heart acceptable.

No violent rhetoric toward individuals or people groups has been a moral dealbreaker. No vicious attack on women or people of color or immigrants or queer people or Democrats has proven beyond the pale.
No lawless or immoral word or act has been the catalyst for their defection.

And so, no, his targeting of the Obamas with the kind of vulgar white supremacist propaganda that has forever poisoned our national bloodstream will change nothing for the people we know and love who have spent ten years fiercely tethered to him.

They will cling tightly to his side as he sinks rapidly like a bloated whale carcass toward an ever-deepening moral bottom, because they either harbor that same bigoted ignorance or they lack the courage to oppose it.

If they were people possessing the decency and goodness we still give them credit for, they would have abandoned him long ago.

They will have no great awakening.
They will not publicly condemn him.
There will be no epiphanies or moments of clarity.

He is them, and they are him, and that’s just how this is.

And since they will not part from him, we will need to part from them.