Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Donald, the Lawbreaker-in-Chief, once bragged that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose a single vote. At the time, this sounded like the usual carnival-barker hyperbole—an offhand remark designed to shock, amuse, and remind everyone that normal rules simply did not apply to him. Years later, with a hand-picked Supreme Court nodding solemnly as the guardrails fall away, the joke appears to have been less metaphor and more mission statement.

The genius of the boast was not its crudeness, but its honesty. It was a thesis statement. Laws, norms, ethics—these were for other people. What followed has been a masterclass in consequence-free governance: subpoenas shrugged off like parking tickets, conflicts of interest waved away as fake news, and open contempt for legal accountability reframed as “strength.” When rules are enforced only against your enemies, law itself becomes just another branding exercise.

Since stepping back into the White House, Donald has treated legality like a buffet: sample what you like, ignore what you don’t, and complain loudly when anyone suggests there should be a bill at the end. Aligning himself with oligarchs and dictators has been less a foreign policy choice than a lifestyle preference. Why bother with messy democratic ideals when you can admire systems where loyalty matters more than law and power answers only to itself?

The truly remarkable feat is how all of this has been normalized. Each broken rule is defended as savvy. Each abuse of power is rebranded as disruption. The institutions meant to restrain a would-be strongman are told to calm down, stop overreacting, and remember that this is just how politics works now. After all, if the Supreme Court says the emperor’s clothes are legally invisible, who are we to argue?

Even if Democrats were to claw back the House and Senate, the question lingers like a bad smell in a marble hallway: how long does it take to repair damage that was done deliberately, proudly, and in broad daylight? Institutions can be rebuilt, but trust is slower. Norms, once shattered, don’t spring back—they have to be relearned, generation by generation, by people who grow up knowing what it looks like when power goes unchecked.

Donald’s Fifth Avenue comment was never really about violence. It was about impunity. And the most biting satire of all is that he didn’t need to test it. He already knew the answer.