Almost nothing Donald Trump does is surprising anymore, but less than a year into his presidency, it's stunning how consistently he still manages to degrade a vaunted office. We all knew he was a narcissistic nightmare when he ran for president, but I figured his obscene self-involvement must know some boundary (or at least have one imposed upon it by influential advisors once he was in office). But no. Trump has managed to make even a devastating natural disaster all about him. The brazen shamelessness of it isn't admirable or respectable, but it sure is extraordinary.

In just a few months – granted, months that feel like they've spanned years – Trump has single-handedly reshaped American norms of not just politics, but human decency, more than any leader in memory. For those of us who find these changed norms horrifying – who would prefer experienced and thoughtful leaders over reality-TV know-nothings, who believe public service should be about serving the public instead of enriching ones family – it's comforting to think that Trump is just a blip, and in a few years we'll return to a president who is maybe a little boring, but at least competent, polite, and willing to treat the office with the respect it demands.

I'm doubtful. I don't know how we un-break what Trump has broken.

Trump has an incredibly ability, one more typically found in petulant toddlers whose brains have not developed enough to take others into account, to make just about anything about him. A massive hurricane, downpour, and ensuing flooding currently destroying America's fourth-largest city and leaving scores displaced is no exception. His initial response on Twitter was one of childlike wonderment at the big, crazy storm. "HISTORIC rainfall in Houston, and all over Texas. Floods are unprecedented, and more rain coming. Spirit of the people is incredible.Thanks!” he tweeted, one in a series of responses that sounded suspiciously like his crowing over his campaign event crowd sizes. Oh and he did that too – "what a crowd, what a turnout," he noted approvingly when he visited Corpus Christi.

Yes, in the scripted part of his remarks, he offered thoughts and prayers. But whenever he had the opportunity to expound on the hurricane off-script, his commentary veered back into the fame-hungry and bizarre. Brock Long, the administrator of FEMA, “really has become very famous on television in the last couple of days," Trump noted. As for Hurricane Harvey itself, "it sounds like such an innocent name, Ben, right, but it’s not innocent," Trump told HUD secretary Ben Carson in Austin.

He had much less to say about the dozens of known dead, and the thousands who have lost their homes and possessions and have no idea what the future holds.

But perhaps most shocking is that Trump's utter lack of empathy and his ham-fisted response to this tragedy has been met with a shrug. He is such a disaster of a president that by not saying anything racist and not horrifically bungling the response, he manages to win the news cycle – he's not applauded, exactly, but the bar is set so low that even his utterly self-involved monologues don't disqualify him from being seen as at least somewhat presidential. Imagine if Barack Obama had uttered even a fraction of the idiocy Trump has in the past 24 hours – it would be such a departure we would be wondering what in the world happened, and if the president was having a mental break.

Maybe it's just that Trump is Trump, and the bar is lower for him and him alone. Perhaps. But that's not usually how this works. He isn't just Donald Trump the tacky gold-plated billionaire; he's President Donald Trump. And when he forces these huge changes – in the compassion with which a president treats the citizens of the country, in the solemnity with which he treats the office – it doesn't just change what we expect from him, but what we expect from the president.

What we expect now is chronic narcissism, juvenile observations, a goldfish-length attention span, and sub-zero compassion. We may have dropped the bar for the presidency so low it becomes nearly impossible to hoist expectations back to their appropriate loftiness.

Jill Filipovic is the author of The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness. Follow her on Twitter.

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