Step by slimy step, President Donald Trump has made us numb to his crudeness and cruelty.

The solipsistic Trump, with the parasitic tech emperors and the internet itself, is degrading American values, making honour and integrity seem anachronistic.

Still, some moments shock beyond the pale. Whatever the pale is any more.

US President Donald Trump in the Oval Office during a meeting with Zohran Mamdani, mayor-elect of New York, who Trump had previously dismissed as a “communist”.Credit: Bloomberg

On Air Force One recently, Trump cut off Catherine Lucey, a Bloomberg News journalist pressing him about the release of Epstein files that could further implicate Trump in the lurid mess. Stabbing his finger at her face, the president of the United States snapped at Lucey: “Quiet! Quiet, piggy.”

Press secretary Karoline Leavitt later preposterously explained, “The president being frank and open and honest to your faces, rather than hiding behind your backs, is, frankly, a lot more respectful than what you saw in the last administration.”

It was nauseating, if not surprising. Trump loves to call people who annoy him “pigs” and “dogs,” and in the case of his inamorata Stormy Daniels, “horseface”.

It was misogynistic, but Trump bullies both men and women, attacking their looks and character and hurling nasty, intensely personal epithets and nicknames. He mocked Chris Christie, once an ally, as “a fat pig,” “a slob” and “sloppy.”

When I interviewed him decades ago in his more appropriate incarnation as a flashy developer hogging attention in New York, he would rate the looks of supermodels and actresses, dropping snap judgments like “Sadly, Heidi Klum is no longer a 10.” Sometimes he sent me pictures of female journalists from newspapers, commenting with a Sharpie scrawl on who he thought looked good or bad.

Politicians were never........

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