Forget raining, it’s pouring Trump scandal books. The past few days I’ve been toggling between Jeffrey Toobin’s, “True Crimes and Misdemeanors” and Brian Stelter’s, “Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth.”

There are separate discussions to be had about both, as there are over Bob Woodward’s “Rage”, the New York Times’ Michael Schmidt’s, “Donald Trump v. The United States” and top Mueller prosecutor Andrew Weissman’s “Where the Law Ends.”

But one stark takeaway from Toobin and Stelter is how completely unprepared “the establishment” was for Donald Trump. More to the point both are argue, is how unprepared traditional legal bureaucracies and journalism organizations still are even today, nearly four years and 20,000 lies after Trump was elected … the first time.

Toobin (and Weissman, based on interviews he’s already given), both lament the overly-cautious, tradition-bound behavior of Robert Mueller as he confronted Trump’s total obstruction of his investigation. A creature from an era when people in high offices showed basic respect for legal “norms”, Mueller (and at least one key deputy) refused to push a direct face-to-face confrontation with Trump or any of his family over the source of their wealth, despite clear indications that its roots were in Russia and therefore they were all highly likely to be compromised by Vladimir Putin.

The spectre of litigating against … the President of the United States … over large scale money laundering for Russian oligarch/gangsters was simply a place Mueller didn’t want to go. Better to deliver a narrowly-investigated, bridled report that suggested as much but left all the ugly charging business to Congress.

Stelter’s book is a dizzying trip into Fox’s alternate universe. The naked careerism and mendacity. The all but total dereliction of journalistic duty in favor of locking down and pandering to an audience with a nearly-religious allegiance to a “norm-busting” celebrity figure. It’s all there, plus some.

Bad as all that is, the problem both Toobin and Stelter suggest is that “normal”, “traditional” politicians, courts and media are still off-balance and indecisive about how to respond to Trump. And this comes barely a month before the next election and with Trump plainly setting up to deny the results of the election should he lose.

Fundamentally, the problem is that the people in control of response to Trump’s (and Bill Barr’s, and Mitch McConnell’s) flagrant norm and tradition-breaking are almost all figures groomed and elevated to their positions from what appears to be a lost era. An era when editors and judges and sensible, civic-minded politicians always gave presidents the benefit of the doubt, always sought to present a “balance” between “both sides” and always avoided the word, “lying.”

But if you watch the Trump spectacle day after day and if you read what you can, the only conclusion is that we don’t live in that era or world anymore, and given social media and every other platform of disinformation, we never will again. The evolution of “normal” has passed our institutions by and is rocketing into a new time zone.

The Eisenhower-era of journalism, courts and politics is long gone. And we’re at a point, right now today where tradition-groomed and bound judges, politicians and journalists are have to ask themselves if they’re really going to play this moment as Robert Mueller did? Are they going to continue to respect the “norms” of their professions, all of which have been mocked, abused and degraded by Donald Trump, in the anachronistic hope that eventually, at some point, if not now, November or a decade from now, normal respect for tradition will prevail again?

Or, are they going to accept a harsh reality and adapt to change?

Frankly, if Trump is able to create enough chaos to declare and sustain victory I don’t see how old time tradition will hold sway in the US of A ever again.