It is hard not to be dumbfounded by the problems in the US today.

We have lost count of not just the number of investigations—congressional and judicial —under way that touch on the relationship of President Donald Trump’s campaign to Russia’s involvement in the American presidential election but also his senior campaign staff who have fallen by the wayside as a result.

We have also lost count of the number of impeachment moves against him, and court challenges against his policy moves. And now, a new front has opened concerning his mental health.

He soldiers on, apparently undeterred. Waging the counter-offensive by means of his Twitter account. From which nothing and nobody is spared.

The head of the military essentially told him: “Don’t call us, we’ll call you” when it comes to attending regular meetings of the highest security advisory body. This with a military that’s deployed all over the world, in a number of active combat situations.

The professional foreign policy body—including its senior diplomats around the world— is reportedly reduced to following his Twitter feed to get a sense of what the White House wants on any given live situation.

Leading to its heads of mission being left to their own devices—for better or for worse. Not to mention the slow but steady emptying out of the State Department.

Even those normally critical of Empire and the age of the unipolar world have been taken aback. This is decidedly not the way in which we thought Empire would fall.

Nobody’s adjusted. After all the decades of being (understandably) annoyed at US interventionism around the planet, it’s a bit of a shock to realise that (suddenly!) nobody’s home.

Every would-be disdainful and rude authoritarian no longer has any reason to check his (sic) own tendencies to crassness, crudeness, blatant cronyism and nepotism. It’s a new free for all out there.

The problem, too, is that the dust is simply not settling as we become acculturated to the new normal. The age of the blatant lie in politics—in which facts become “fake news.”

Our capacity for outrage and shock is waning. The age of politics as reality television. It looks like reality. Unfortunately, it is reality. But we can’t live with the levels of adrenaline induced by outrage and shock on a daily basis. So we start refusing to believe it’s reality.

Maybe—someday—we’ll look back on this and think we needed this insane moment to remind us not to take anything for granted; to not try to excuse the inexcusable; to re-set, firmly, the threshold for what we think is acceptable public political behaviour. Maybe.

Maybe—someday—we’ll look back on this and know this was the moment at least some of our own bad public political behaviour changed. Because, when we looked around, we realised we were on our own.

That there was no finger-wagging power leaning over us against which we instinctively had to rebel. The moment thus that some of our own leadership at the highest level stepped up to the global plate to re-introduce courtesy, dignity, higher aspirations for us all. Maybe.

L. Muthoni Wanyeki is the Africa director of the Open Society Foundations. [email protected]