HOW CAN ANYTHING STILL STUN THEM?:

In a rare moment of bipartisan unity on Sunday, Republicans and Democrats came together in mutual astonishment after President Trump, in part of an early-morning storm of tweets, said that he and Russian President Vladimir Putin had discussed joining forces to battle "election hacking & many other negative things."

Fifteen months later, is anyone still waiting for the 45th president of the United States to stop acting like a rowdy shock jock? Trump couldn't metamorphose into a thoughtful and levelheaded statesman even if he wanted to. His words are so often obnoxious and juvenile because that is his nature: He is vulgar, boastful, combative, and mean-spirited. He thrives on picking fights, he shows little respect for truth or Constitutional norms, and he relishes the pandemonium his invective triggers.

After Trump's crude Twitter attacks on MSNBC's Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, White House deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked whether such insults aren't beneath the dignity of the presidency. Her response: Trump is a "fighter" and cannot be expected to be "attacked day after day, minute by minute, and sit back." Translation: Acting presidential is for losers.

Like all presidents, of course, Trump will be judged in part by his policy achievements, some of which may be first-rate. But his coarseness has already dragged the presidency to a sickening new low -- and we aren't even one-eighth of the way through the four-year term he was elected to.

For months, many of Trump's opponents have warned against allowing the president's thuggishness to be "normalized." Alas, that isn't an option. Americans "normalized" Trump by sending him to the White House.

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