While you’re looking the other way, Trump is changing America for decades to come | Jonathan Freedland

Now twice as long, his tweets are half as good. The early-morning dispatches from the iPhone of Donald Trump, often sent while he lies in bed, propped up on a pillow, lack the poison punch they packed in the 140-character era. They ramble a bit now, losing focus. But they still command attention and dominate the news to an extent no one on the planet can match.

This week it was Trump’s swipe at Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York senator who had called for the allegations of sexual harassment made against Trump during the 2016 election campaign to be investigated. Trump called Gillibrand a “lightweight” who used to “come to my office ‘begging’ for campaign contributions not so long ago (and would do anything for them)”.

That parenthesis was a misogynist smear, implying that a senior female politician had offered Trump sexual favours in return for cash. It duly dominated the US news cycle for 24 hours.

On other days, it’s not Trump’s tweeting habit that fills the airwaves, but the newest twist in the continuing saga of alleged collusion with Russia to tip the last election. The latest on that is the concerted work by Trump’s Republican enablers on Capitol Hill and beyond to prepare the ground for the firing of Robert Mueller, the former FBI director now serving as special counsel in the Russia investigation. Never mind that Republicans hailed Mueller only a matter of months ago as an unassailably neutral public servant, or that removing him would be a Nixon-level abuse of power, they are doing what they believe their party interest demands. Both these things matter. Trump’s tweets trample daily on the norms that underpin a democratic society, as well as trafficking in the most inflammatory racism and sexism. The Russia question could not be more grave: to collude with a hostile, authoritarian foreign power in subverting a free election is an assault on democracy itself.

The trouble is, they keep us looking the other way. Just as they consume Trump’s energy, they divert ours, preventing us from paying attention not to what he says via Twitter, or what he may have done with Moscow, but what he’s doing right now from his desk in the Oval Office.

On that score, it’s tempting – and fair – to assess his first 11 months in office as a failure. He has failed to fulfil so many of his signature promises, from building that wall to repealing Barack Obama’s healthcare reforms. Today Republicans hoped to unveil a bill that would cut the taxes of the very richest, but even if that gets passed next week it will be the only piece of major legislation Trump has managed to get through a Congress where his party enjoys the rare luxury of a majority in both chambers.

And yet, he has not done nothing. On the contrary, bit by bit and in ways that rarely command the front pages, he has done a lot to shape the way Americans, and others, will live for decades to come.

Start with Thursday’s decision by a Trump appointee to scrap the rules governing access to the internet known as “net neutrality”. It may sound of interest to nerds only, but it could affect the online realm inhabited by all of us. Put simply, until now your internet service provider has been obliged to treat all websites equally, so that a neighbourhood blog is just as accessible as a major corporate site. Your broadband provider has had to be neutral between blokeinhispottingshed.com and Amazon, and not operate a fast lane for one and a slow lane for the other.

Thanks to Trump and his man at the Federal Communications Commission, that obligation is binned. Now those ISPs can offer premium access to some and deny it to others. The big players will be able to pay the extra cash to ensure they stay in the fast lane, but the cost will shut out startups. The next challenger to Netflix or Facebook may be strangled at birth by prohibitive fast-lane tolls.

That’s a loss for those would-be innovators and for us, who will never see what they might have produced. Power online will be ever more concentrated in the hands of a few giants. But there’s a more direct political dimension. Take the blog maintained by the residents of Grenfell Tower, which warned of disaster before it struck. To ensure their warnings were heard, their US equivalents would now have to find a home on one of the mega-platforms, posting their material on, say, Facebook.

But how confident could they be that Facebook, if confronted by an irate local council, would continue to host and shield those residents, or people like them? A defining feature of the internet was that it was open and a broadly level playing field. Thanks to Trump, it will now be more equal for some – including the rich corporations – than for others.

No less enduring is the impact Trump is having on the upper reaches of the US judiciary, especially on those courts that decide critical questions of civil rights and discrimination. Trump, backed by a Republican Senate, has been working at breakneck speed to fill vacancies with hard-right conservative judges, including some who are ostentatiously unqualified. Just watch the excruciating Senate grilling of one nominee for the bench as he was asked basic undergraduate questions of law, and could not answer any of them. Needless to say, 91% of Trump’s nominees are white and 81% are male, re-stacking the judiciary with white men at a rate unseen for 30 years, reversing decades of steady progress towards a bench that resembles the society it judges.

Trump knows what he’s doing, hailing this shift as an “untold story” that “has consequences 40 years out”. He’s right about that. Judges are appointed for life. A judiciary made in Trump’s image will live on long after he’s gone.

That’s truer still of his record on the environment, which seems to have no purpose beyond vandalism, erosion of the Obama legacy and the enrichment of his corporate pals. One of Trump’s first acts was lifting the ban on mining companies dumping waste in rivers and streams. Since then he has told national parks they have to resume selling bottled water at sites including the Grand Canyon, even though the ban had prevented the dumping of up to 2m plastic bottles. Name a good rule, and the Trump administration has shredded it, whether it’s protecting whales from fishing nets or preventing drilling for oil and gas in pristine Alaska. His withdrawal from the Paris accords on climate change made the news, but every day Trump is doing what he can to make the planet uglier and sicker.

It’s a similar story with gun control, where Trump and his Republican henchmen have scrapped even the small moves Obama had made to keep the most dangerous guns out of the most dangerous hands. They even rolled back the restrictions that made it harder for fugitives and people with a history of mental illness to buy firearms. These developments are not as thrilling as a racist tweet or an FBI probe inching closer to the Trump inner circle. But they represent the most tangible part of the Trump legacy now taking shape. He’s a showman with a brilliant gift for misdirection. The least we can do is keep our eyes on his hands.

• Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist