The Stages Of Grief
Over the past week, I think there's been a major shift in polite opinion, prompted in part -- but not completely -- by the Wall Street Journal piece that simply gave everyone permission to admit what people had been seeing for months, if not indeed years. The other factor is that Trump's conviction in the New York "hush money" trial gave him, if anything, a slight boost in the polls , but it also fed $400 million in donations in the week following the verdict. This brings to mind the Kubler-Ross five stages of grief, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I think we can say that polite opinion in the wake of these developments has moved entirely past denial. A week ago, in the immediate wake of the guilty verdict and beginning to recognize that calling Trump a "convicted felon" wasn't going to change a thing, Harold Myerson got mad in The American Prospect, calling Trump The Martyr of Mar-a-Lago: The political consequen...