The Fall Of Decorum
Grace, comfort, and the line between moral failings and institutional corruption
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The Fall Of Decorum
In August 2025, Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer did something that in his 75 year old mind, probably felt like crossing a line he never thought he would.
He, a statesman with a multi-decade long career in the political limelight, said a swear word, publicly.
Specifically, he said…
"No Fucking Way”
… in response to a question whether Democrats would support Trump's bid to extend federal control over the Washington D.C. police force.
It made headlines. A senior politician finally speaking the language of the moment. And maybe it was. But it was also an old man recalibrating his behavior to match a new normal he didn't create and doesn't fully understand. Somewhere in Democratic leadership, after Trump's first term, a meeting occurred. Thirty minutes, maybe less. The conclusion: voters think swearing is cool, we gotta catch those vibes.
A sign of the times.
Decorum in politics has a rich history, and for good reason. There has long been an expectation in our society that political leaders should conduct themselves with a level of respect and dignity that befit their positions. Elected office itself carries weight, and that weight demands some acknowledgment.
But then Trump descended a golden escalator, and spoke his mind in a way that a large chunk of the electorate gravitated to. Here was a man able to command the attention of a base of people, smitten by his rhetoric about his feelings towards certain people and topics.
It would be dishonest to pretend that instinct was entirely wrong. Politics had long become a theater of careful non-answers, of language so managed it communicated nothing. Trump offered something fresh and unfiltered.
But I think something important happened in that loosening that nobody quite noticed in real time.
The electorate that voted Trump into power twice extended him a fair amount of grace: for the affairs, the divorces, the cruelty, the language. His first wife Ivana, mother of his three oldest children, is buried near the first tee box at his Bedminster golf course, her grave photographed in 2023 overgrown with weeds and long grass. His relationship with his current wife began as an affair. He has said things publicly about women, immigrants, and political opponents that would have ended careers in any previous era of American politics.
Yet each accommodation passed quietly until we arrived somewhere few people consciously chose to be.
And ever since then, politicians began removing the filter of decorum from their vocabulary, in what I believe to be a vain and inauthentic attempt to catch the political momentum Trump’s rhetoric had captured.
It’s a minor super power of his; an ability to maintain and grow his influence despite carrying an encyclopedia-length novel of despicable personal words and actions that would disqualify almost any other aspiring political leader.
People have found an uncomfortable level of, well, comfort in elected officials behaving in ways they’d never be okay with their sons and daughters mimicking.
And that brings us to a set of contentious races in the midterm elections, and a choice of how we extend grace to moral failings pitted against institutional corruptions.
Sometimes, those moral failings are real, and become difficult to surmount.
In Maine, Oyster Farmer Graham Platner is running against the longstanding incumbent Susan Collins. Platner is delivering his own populist message, one I agree strongly with, about the importance of revitalizing a class politics which benefits working class people in the wake of decades of corporate power grabbing and wealth transfer.
“We have entered an era of a politics of power. And in this nation, power comes from two places: organized money and organized people, and the money is organized. That’s why it’s winning.” — Graham Platner
Platner, however, comes with his own Uhaul-sized baggage.
His wife disclosed to campaign advisors that she caught Platner sexting other women while married. He had a skull and crossbones tattoo on his chest — later identified as the Totenkopf symbol used by Nazi SS units — which he said he got during a drunken night in Croatia while serving with the Marines, claiming he didn't know its significance until 2025. His deleted Reddit posts resurfaced, containing misogynistic, racist, and homophobic comments he called "indefensible". And as of this week, a New York Times report cited former girlfriends alleging physical altercations.
To err is human as the saying goes, and after a decade of cancel culture digging up every questionable tweet anyone has ever made, I actually do hope we can give a degree of grace to people for the mistakes of their past. But in this day and age when moral failings like these are ignored in the person seated in the Oval Office, will they matter for Platner’s election chances? Should they matter?
Yes they should, but I don’t think that is the right question.
The grace we have begun extending to human failing has quietly become the grace we extend to institutional corruption. And those are not the same thing. Grace and forgiveness are powerful acts and muscles of our conscience. And like all muscles, it can experience atrophy, creating space for dangerous people to seek power.
In Texas, Ken Paxton just won the Republican primary for U.S. Senate with 64% of the vote, defeating four-term incumbent John Cornyn by nearly 28 points. Paxton is Texas’s former Attorney General — a man impeached by the Texas House in 2023 on charges that included bribery, abuse of office, obstruction of justice, and misuse of state resources to benefit a campaign donor. He has faced securities fraud charges for over a decade.
And most damning, as his Senate primary campaign kicked into gear, Paxton's office came under fire for negotiating a plea deal for a Waco attorney charged with repeatedly sexually abusing a young boy; a man who had been facing a possible life sentence without parole. Paxton's prosecutors offered him one day in jail and no requirement to register as a sex offender.
Paxton’s corruption isn’t just a personal failing. It’s a documented abuse of public office. That needs to matter.
The $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” Trump created (and that the DOJ appears to be shelving) by suing his own IRS — settling a case in which he was effectively both plaintiff and defendant, using taxpayer money from the congressional Judgment Fund, with no judicial oversight and no congressional authorization — is also not just a moral failing. It is an attempt at one of the most brazen acts of presidential self-dealing in modern American history.
The muscle we use to say "this crosses a line" has been so underused that it barely fires. And then the truly disqualifying things arrived, and we seem to have nothing left.
The question here is a difficult one: How do we rebuild the ability to locate a line in the sand?
I don’t have a clean answer to this question. But I think it starts with being honest about the difference between grace and comfort.
Grace is an active choice, extended to a specific person for a specific failing. Comfort is what happens when you stop choosing altogether; when the threshold moves so gradually that you stop noticing it moved, until one day the line between moral failings and full blown institutional corruption becomes blurred.
We as voters also deserve our own form of grace, and that comes with not just expecting, but demanding accountability and decorum from those who represent us.