Michael Tomasky asks the question. And it’s chilling: It’s not just unprecedented that we now have an ex-president with a mug shot. It’s insanely, amazingly, staggeringly, chillingly unprecedented. It makes me think about the past—about how we got to this insane, amazing, staggering, chilling point. And it makes me think about the future—about what grim precedent Trump will drag us into next. We got here because Donald Trump, now also known as Prisoner P01135809, has never had any regard for laws of any kind. We’ve known this for decades. When I was a young reporter in New York, and Trump was not yet a wannabe dictator, and the working-class men of the heartland registered him in their minds (if at all) as a swanky Manhattan rich guy who had nothing to do with their lives, Trump’s habits and attitudes were well known in New York. Sometimes, people went at him, but no one ever got him. And often, the people with the power to do so didn’t even go at him. Robert Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney for most of the years Trump was operating in New York, left his office in 2009 with a sterling reputation. And he largely deserved it. But the record does tell us, as Morgenthau’s biographer Andrew Meier wrote in The New York Times earlier this year, that Trump befriended Morgenthau, and the D.A. reciprocated. Trump donated to Morgenthau’s campaigns and his pet charities. Morgenthau accepted an invitation to stay in Mar-a-Lago. And yet, late in life—Morgenthau lived to be 100,…