There are certain social norms so old and so deeply embedded that you barely notice them until they begin to crack.
One of those norms is how we respond to death.
For most of my life, I have never thought of someone’s death as a positive thing. Even when the person was cruel, destructive, dishonest, or plainly terrible, death still seemed to demand a pause. Not agreement. Not absolution. Not some revisionist sainthood. Just a pause. A recognition that something final had occurred, and that finality itself called for a measure of restraint.
Historically, that seems to have been true for most people. Even in deeply polarized times, even when political hatred ran hot, there has usually been some lingering line the majority would not cross. A leader could be mocked, condemned, exposed, voted out, disgraced, and still, when they died, the dominant instinct was not celebration. Criticism might remain. Relief might remain. But open joy at death was generally held behind the veil.
That is what feels different now.
I want to be precise, because precision matters here. I do not believe political violence is inevitable. I do not believe most people desire political violence. I am not talking about assassination fantasies, bloodlust, or some widespread wish to see leaders murdered. That is a different category entirely.
What I am talking about is colder than that.
I believe that if our current president died of natural causes one evening, there would be real celebration across the country. Not universal celebration. Not unanimous reaction. Not some grotesque national carnival. But enough delight, enough jokes, enough public cheer, enough people treating it as good news, that it would register as a genuine social phenomenon.
That is not the same thing as wishing death on someone.
Wishing death is active. It is a desire. It reaches forward.
Celebrating a natural death is retrospective. It says: I did not have to cause this, but now that it has happened, I experience it as relief.
That distinction may seem small on paper, but it feels morally significant. One points toward direct violence. The other points toward the collapse of reverence. Both are dark. They are simply dark in different ways.
What unsettles me is not just that I sense this shift, but that I cannot find much evidence that this has been a mainstream American feeling toward a sitting president before now. America has always had political hatred. That is not new. We have had demagogues, authoritarians, frauds, racists, warmongers, and men who stained public life with cruelty and ego. We have had eras of fracture that make the present look tame by comparison. But even then, there was usually still some civic taboo around the death itself.
Now I am not so sure.
I noticed this not because television told me to. In fact, I largely avoid the emotional theater of 24/7 cable news. I read print journalism, long-form reporting, documented claims, slower media. I am not especially interested in being manipulated by music cues, countdown graphics, theatrical outrage, or the industrial production of panic. And even with that filter in place, the vibe still feels unmistakably different.
It is not just approval numbers. It is not just economic metrics. It is not just polling, partisanship, or some abstract chart of national dissatisfaction. It is something harder to quantify but easy to feel: the weakening of the old reflex of restraint.
There was a time, not very long ago, when a tan suit could become a genuine political controversy. That now feels almost impossibly quaint. Not because politics was healthy then. It was not. But because the moral scale was different. The ambient feeling was still that politics, however petty and theatrical, remained within the realm of ordinary democratic irritation.
Now, for many people, politics no longer feels like irritation. It feels like threat.
And when a leader is experienced not merely as wrong, but as corrosive—degrading institutions, humiliating truth, inflaming cruelty, and damaging the social fabric in real time—mortality itself gets interpreted differently. Death is no longer perceived purely as tragedy. For some, it begins to look like release.
Again, I am not talking about the desire to kill. I am talking about a social mood in which death no longer feels sacred.
That may be the darker threshold.
Because when a society reaches the point where a natural death would be greeted by widespread celebration, it means something deeper than partisan dislike has taken root. It means a significant number of people no longer experience the leader as a fellow citizen occupying an office they oppose. They experience him as a contaminating presence, a source of ongoing degradation, a person whose disappearance from the world would feel like relief.
That is not normal democratic tension. That is civic rupture.
Still, I want to be careful not to overstate the case. I am not arguing that everyone feels this. I am not arguing that such celebration would be justified. I am not arguing that violence is coming next. I am only saying that the mood has shifted enough that this kind of reaction now feels imaginable on a large scale, and I do not think that used to be true.
That realization disturbs me not because it proves one side is evil or the other side is righteous, but because it reveals how much shared emotional ground has eroded. Death used to impose a pause. Now I suspect it would trigger content. Memes. Victory laps. Public catharsis. Maybe even literal parades in some places.
Not because Americans have all become monsters, but because many now feel they have been living inside a political reality that is itself monstrous.
There is a tragic symmetry in that. Public life becomes more degrading, and public feeling becomes less reverent. The leader coarsens the culture, and the culture responds by losing one of its final taboos. The death of one man becomes a mirror reflecting the spiritual condition of millions.
That, more than the celebration itself, is what troubles me.
Because a society does not arrive at that mood all at once. It gets there slowly—by normalizing humiliation, spectacle, dishonesty, contempt, and the exhaustion of empathy. It gets there when politics ceases to feel like disagreement and begins to feel like desecration. It gets there when enough people no longer believe they are contending with an opponent, but enduring a presence.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe if that moment came, the old taboo would reassert itself and the country would default to ritual respect. I would be happy to be wrong.
But I do not think I am.
And the fact that I can say that plainly, without hyperbole, without pleasure, and without even wanting it to be true, tells me something has changed in America that goes beyond elections, scandals, or ideology.
It tells me that death itself no longer feels fully protected from the corrosion.