Whenever something bad happens, people talk about passing a raft of new laws to stop it when the problem is law enforcement actively ignores the laws we already have to address these problems, especially when the perpetrators are white and/or rich.

The problem is not a lack of laws, it's a lack of enforcement.

"More laws!" is a way of looking like they're doing something instead of addressing the elephant in the room, which is that more and more restrictive laws will only end up being weaponized against Black, poor, and other marginalized people.

Because white men, especially those with money and political power, will continue getting a slap on the wrist even when committing crimes that would get someone else a lifetime in prison or shot dead in the street.

Black activists have been pointing this out for years. The impetus behind "defund" was the recognition that white supremacy is baked into to the entire justice system and cannot be fixed without ripping it up by the roots.

When I say Trump is not special, I mean his politics fall comfortably on a spectrum between neocons and Tea Party Republican and his preening reality TV persona and alternating gleeful and sulking narcissism are fairly typical for that type of conservative.

Trump's only innovation was to unapologetically say the quiet part out loud and get away with it, bringing the GOP's racism, misogyny, and desire for white supremacist, monarchal rule to the forefront, but Republicans and the media were eager to enable him from the start.

It could have been anyone, though. You can see guys like Jim Jordan and even Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham wish they'd done it first. Because the GOP and their rabid white supremacist base were fully primed for someone to come along and say and do what Trump did.

Once Trump won, the entire GOP folded into Trumpism overnight because there was never any practical difference between them. The early worriers like Graham merely feared it wouldn't work and there would be a political price to pay. It turns out: not really. The base ate it up.

The media spent about a year trying to spin Trump as a continuation of "respectable" Republicanism or in tension with them before they caught on that conservatives didn't care and just started repeating his lies with a shrug.