What the Fed Moment Reveals About America’s Malignant Normality

The US Justice Department’s move to scrutinise Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell over the Fed’s building renovation, after years of presidential browbeating on interest rates and repeated attacks on institutional independence, marks a line crossed that once seemed unthinkable. What might earlier have triggered outrage is now processed as just another Washington skirmish, noticed briefly and then absorbed.

That reaction is what brings to mind The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, the book edited by psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee and published in 2017. The volume, an assessment by 27 mental health professionals, was framed as a warning not about one erratic leader alone, but about a deeper civic vulnerability, the human and institutional tendency to normalise danger once it acquires power.

It was never really a book about Donald Trump. It was a book about us, about institutions, professions, and societies confronted with abnormal power and slowly persuading themselves that nothing abnormal is happening.

At the heart of the book are two concepts that feel even more relevant today than they did during Trump’s first rise: malignant normality and the witnessing professional. Together, they offer a framework for understanding not just Trump, but the repeated failure of democracies to respond when leaders openly erode norms, constraints, and guardrails.

The term malignant normality, borrowed from psychoanalyst Robert Jay Lifton, describes a process by which profoundly abnormal behaviour comes to be experienced as routine. It is not mass delusion, but gradual adaptation. Each violation is shocking at first, but repetition dulls the response. The abnormal does not disappear; it becomes familiar, and familiarity quietly disarms resistance.

Trump’s political ascent followed this script with unsettling precision. Early transgressions such as mocking opponents, attacking judges, and dismissing facts as opinions were treated as novelties, even entertainment. Soon they were reframed as “his style.” What once disqualified a politician was rebranded as authenticity. The baseline shifted, and with it the definition of what democratic politics could tolerate.

Crucially, malignant normality thrives not because people fail to notice danger, but because they learn to live with it. Media cycles moved from alarm to fatigue. Institutions prioritised continuity and self-preservation over confrontation. Elites explained away excesses as tactical, transactional, or temporary. Over time, the sheer volume of norm-breaking made outrage unsustainable. Democracy’s immune system did not collapse; it simply grew tired.

The psychiatrists’ argument was not that Trump was uniquely pathological in a clinical sense. It was that the social response to him was pathological. When lies become expected, cruelty becomes entertainment, and threats to institutions are dismissed as rhetoric, the problem is no longer the individual; it is the environment that has recalibrated itself to dysfunction.

This leads to the book’s most controversial idea: the witnessing professional. In stable times, professionalism demands restraint. Psychiatrists do not diagnose at a distance; lawyers do not speculate on motives; bureaucrats remain within defined lanes. But the book argues that in moments of systemic danger, these same norms can harden into ethical blinders rather than safeguards.

Professionals, the contributors argue, possess asymmetric knowledge. They see patterns the public may not: escalation, impulsivity, contempt for constraint, and erosion of reality testing. When such patterns appear in a leader wielding enormous power, silence is not neutrality. It is the withholding of risk information, often justified as prudence or decorum.

The authors framed their intervention not as political activism, but as a duty to warn, analogous to public health or engineering ethics, even if it violated the Goldwater Rule. One does not need a formal diagnosis to identify danger, only the willingness to recognise and articulate it.

This position unsettled professional hierarchies because it inverted the usual logic of deference. The office did not confer psychological immunity. Etiquette did not outweigh collective risk. The witnessing professional was called upon to speak precisely because institutions have a tendency to delay until costs are irreversible.

What makes the book especially resonant today is how accurately it anticipated the second phase of normalisation. Trump in 2016 was a shock. Trump, after January 6, multiple indictments, and open threats of retribution should have triggered democratic alarm bells. Instead, much of this has been absorbed into partisan routine, processed as noise rather than a warning.

Criminal proceedings are recast as persecution. Attacks on independent institutions are described as reform. Explicit authoritarian language is reframed as decisiveness. This is malignant normality in its mature form, not denial of danger, but coexistence with it, and even a degree of accommodation.

More troubling still is the retreat of witnessing professionals. Many spoke out early. Fewer do so now. Fatigue, polarisation, reputational risk, and professional cost have made silence easier the second time around. When danger persists long enough, it loses its urgency. Normalisation does not require agreement; it only requires exhaustion.

One of the book’s most important insights is that Trump is not an anomaly but a prototype. The political style he represents, rule by disruption, grievance, and contempt for constraint, has proven exportable. Similar figures now operate across democracies, exploiting institutional weaknesses while claiming popular mandates, often faster than systems can adapt.

In this sense, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump is less a partisan text than a study in democratic failure modes. It examines how systems erode not through sudden coups, but through incremental accommodation, how abnormality wins not by force, but by fatigue.

The lingering question the book leaves, especially for elites and professionals, is an uncomfortable one: at what point does restraint cease to be responsibility and become abdication? History is littered with moments where insiders later admitted they recognised the risks but trusted institutions to self-correct.

Malignant normality depends on that trust. The witnessing professional exists to challenge it.

Nearly a decade on, the book has aged uncomfortably well, not because it “diagnosed” Trump, but because it diagnosed a society learning to call danger normal. In an age where abnormality campaigns as authenticity, the most subversive act may no longer be resistance, but recognition, the refusal to pretend that what is unfolding is ordinary, acceptable, or sustainable.