Trump’s greatest gift to America this year was to liberate people to be their worst selves.

It’s ok to relish extrajudicial killings. Hey, it’s just some stranded Venezuelan drug mule clinging to the side of a bombed-out boat. (Hegseth: “No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement.”) Trump has made it unexceptional to see a terrified Guatemalan housepainter (or as White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt put it in March, one of the “heinous monsters, rapists, murderers, kidnappers, sexual assaulters, predators who have no right to be in this country”) being bundled by masked agents into a car that will speed him to a supermax in oblivion.

After a PTSD-addled Afghan shot two National Guard officers in DC, killing one of them, Trump halted naturalization ceremonies for immigrants, who were poised to become U.S. citizens after years of waiting. This year has been a master class in the exercise of casual inhumanity.

Let’s go on. Trump has normalized foul misogyny towards women reporters, calling them “piggy,” “stupid,” “incapable,” and “ugly, both inside and out.” He has blinded us to the grift, the grossness, the “bigger, bigger, bigger” $300 million ballroom, and the vomitous fairground gold daubed all over the moldings and fireplace in the once-sober Oval Office, now labeled from the outside in gilt cursive script like a high-roller’s Las Vegas hotel suite. Here, he holds forth, the all-powerful potentate in Doritos bronzer, the most aureate of mighty assholes, entertaining a confederacy of smiling despots: Bukele, Orban, MBS. ——Tina Brown