“Shocking but not surprising” is the fairly standard response to Trump’s latest outrageous statements during a long ABC News interview, the gist of which is that he sees nothing wrong with taking dirt on political opponents, i.e. “opposition research”, from foreign governments, and would only “maybe” notify the FBI, also claiming that everyone does this!! He even flat out called his own FBI director wrong for saying that any such contacts with campaigns should be reported to the agency! Aside from this being just more (although unusually blatant) typical Trump projection of his own unscrupulous nature and misdeeds on everyone else, much of this was probably intended to provide cover for Don Junior’s actions related to the infamous Trump Tower meeting as well as many of his campaign’s other collusive actions. And this is not the first time that he has made comments to this effect, although not at such length. Not only does this openly flaunt the rule of law by the country’s chief law-enforcement officer, further debase the already pathetic ethical level of politicians, and further undermine the FBI and intelligence community in general, particularly in their efforts to protect our future elections, but this could be viewed as an open invitation to all foreign governments to try to aid Trump’s 2020 campaign for their own interests! It could not be any more obvious that as far as Trump is concerned, the rules (and laws!) just do not apply to him (or his family), but it is still amazing that he has become so brazenly open about it.  It will be interesting to see if ANY congressional Republicans openly criticize these statements or if they continue to be complicit and just keep their mouths shut, or even come up with some creative rationalizations/excuses, as his surrogates/apologists are already trying to do. One commentator not surprisingly deflected by regurgitating the garbage about Clinton‘s campaign and the Dossier compiled by a foreigner, which therefore apparently makes this all OK!  The other detrimental effect is that this unprecedented attempt to normalize previously completely unacceptable if not illegal behavior will further inoculate Trump’s base and anyone else gullible enough against the justifiable outrage of the mainstream media and his political opponents. And each increasingly outrageous statement or behavior even tends to gradually numb the rest of us, so that the public’s sense of shock and outrage becomes ever more fatigued!  Also, with the many Democratic House investigations being very effectively stymied by the White House stonewalling, the potential critical momentum to capture public attention following the Mueller report release has been blocked. This is not helped by disagreements among Democrats regarding how to proceed or the overly large field of Democratic presidential contenders. It is going to be a long painful crawl to the 2020 election!