Trump can be outrageous, dangerous

After years of being outraged at conservative outrage over the predominantly non-outrageous actions of President Barack Obama, I am now outraged by the outrage of liberals over the less outrageous actions of President-elect Donald Trump because those particular outrages cause us to gloss over the outrageous things he's doing that are actually outrageous.
Make sense?
Let me put it a different way:
Throughout Obama's two terms, everything the president did was met with hysterical outrage by Republicans.
He went golfing? OUTRAGEOUS!
He invited a rapper to the White House? IT'S AN OUTRAGE!
There were things the president did that were truly outrageous from a conservative perspective-taking executive action on immigration, making religious colleges and hospitals provide contraceptive coverage under Obamacare-but those outrages were lost in the incessant bellowing over everything else.
It was akin to the boy who cried wolf, except no wolf ever came along to devour the boy, which is a shame, because it would've put a stop to all the cries of outrage.
And how did liberals respond? By being outraged at eight years of outrage.
Now, from the moment Americans learned that Trump was elected, all of the outrage has flipped.
Trump kept many of us, myself included, in a perpetual state of outrage for the past year, and he has continued to do what he does best: Be outrageous.
Had any other president-elect in history tweeted a description of his cabinet-selection process and added, "I am the only one who knows who the finalists are!" it would have been outrageous. But when Trump tweeted that last week, it was just Trump. It was mere bluster, and any outrage over such a "look at my presidential reality show" comment was wasted.
Of course Trump's supporters get outraged every time they see a liberal expressing outrage over a Trump tweet. And thus the outrage cycle chugs along, whether on Twitter or cable news networks or radio or at the coffee shop or wherever.
And that's outrageous for two reasons:
1) Liberals are already doing with Trump EXACTLY what conservatives did with Obama-existing in a state of perpetual outrage.
2) An overabundance of outrage lessens the impact of outrage over things that are truly outrageous.
At the end of last week, Trump settled the Trump University fraud cases for $25 million. A president-elect issuing a massive payout over what looked for all the world like a scam targeting struggling Americans is legitimately outrageous.
Trump also announced that Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions-a fiercely anti-immigration ideologue who scares the bejesus out of civil rights activists-was his pick to be the next attorney general. Sessions was denied a federal judgeship in 1986 by the Senate due to past racially insensitive comments. Immigrants, minorities and liberals in general certainly have cause for outrage over that decision.
But on Friday night, Vice President-elect Mike Pence attended the Broadway play "Hamilton" and was lustily booed by the audience and politely addressed by a cast member who said, "We truly hope this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us."
Soon Trump took to Twitter and expressed his outrage, demanding that the cast of the show apologize.
There was outrage over Trump's outrage. And outrage over the crowd's booing. And outrage that some would be outraged by people expressing their unhappiness with an elected official.
The nation was filthy with outrage.
And you know what was buried under that avalanche of outrage? THE THINGS THAT PEOPLE SHOULD ACTUALLY BE OUTRAGED ABOUT!!
I don't care if Pence was booed at a play, and I don't care if that outraged Trump supporters. The unmerited outrage led people to stop Googling "Trump University" and start Googling "Pence and Hamilton." The choice of Sessions as attorney general took a back seat.
And now a new week starts and we'll move on to new outrages, pushing the old outrages-the justified and the unjustified-out of the public consciousness.
That's a big mistake. If everything Trump does is met with outrage, outrageous acts of consequence will be obscured by outrage over acts of no consequence.
And that, I dare say, would be an outrage.