"When Trump instead issued a restrained message, expressing a need for moderation, you would have thought he had assumed the mantle of the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr...."

"... although under the circumstances, this is precisely the kind of statement any normal politician would make," Writes Neal Gabler in "The Media’s Gift to Trump: Low Expectations"

The media have set the bar so low that we fully expect Trump to be a bigot, as he demonstrated in the anti-Semitic tweet [sic], so criticism of his bigotry is largely relegated to left-wing journalists. It isn’t news. It doesn’t change the narrative.

As for the mainstream media, it is a very short distance from “That’s Trump going ballistic again” to “That’s just Trump being Trump.” But when it comes to drawing political conclusions, it’s all the distance in the world. Similarly, that low bar will inevitably lead to high praise whenever Trump jumps it. A Trump debate in which he is even intelligible or slightly muted would undoubtedly unleash a media torrent of approval: Aha! He is more presidential than we thought. We already are getting a preview of this on the Republican Party side, where any hint of sanity by Trump is embraced in a bear hug. It is part of the process of normalizing him.

Normalizing him, eh? After the media ran with the he's-not-normal meme — and ran it into the ground — it's now time for crying about how unfair it is that Trump only needs to show that he's normal, and it seems special. Gabler would be happy if the approach the media took had worked, but now that it's failed, the media has unwittingly given Trump the gift of needing only to seem normal.