Right now, McCain, his allies and their ideas appear to be a waning force in the Republican Party. They are RINOs, cucks, and “globalists.” Many of them, like Tennessee’s Bob Corker, will retire rather than face bruising primary challenges from the ever-farther right. On Monday McCain called America “the land of the immigrant’s dream,” and said: “We live in a land made of ideals, not blood and soil.” To a large and growing segment of the G.O.P., which thinks magnanimity is for losers, these statements amount to a form of treason.

The honey badger, by contrast, will do anything to get what it wants. It is wily, nasty and has as much use for honor as a pornographer has for dress. In the 2016 presidential campaign, according to biographer Joshua Green, Bannon treated white supremacists as useful fellow travelers and urged Donald Trump to persist in what seemed to many to be his use of anti-Jewish tropes. Later he waged a smear campaign against H.R. McMaster on the grounds that the national security adviser was anti-Israel.

For the honey badger, it’s whatever works: anti-Semite one day; Israel’s make-believe champion the next. Bannon is the most revolting operator in American political life since Roy Cohn. He is also the most consequential one.