Trump’s doughty defenders would surely protest that they are the real patriots because their party is the real country. The fact that Trump himself talks this way, they might say, is the best proof that he alone can be trusted, no matter what, to defend that real country’s true interests. If Trump thinks the enemy within is more dangerous than the adversary without, and chooses to ally with that internal enemy’s external adversaries, then doing so must be the prudent course, however “unorthodox” it looks.

But this is no defense, but rather a restatement of the terms of the indictment. It is the diseased mentality of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, who, exiled for his arrogance by the Rome he had fought for so bravely, joined forces with Rome’s great enemy and waged a war of exterminating vengeance on the country that, though it had once turned his back on him, he should surely have remembered was still his.