Trump has achieved the seemingly impossible with his bigotry: He has brought the two most popular strains of political thought together and reminded us that, for all our faults, Americans are pretty decent folk who, when called upon, can extend respect and civility to cultures that are different than our own. Without Trump’s provocation against Muslims, it’s hard to imagine Speaker Ryan standing before the press corps’ video cameras to disassociate himself, his party and the country from Trump’s hysteria. “This is not conservatism,” Ryan said emphatically.

“I have a temperament where I bring people together,” Trump agreed in September. He was talking about his skill at filling auditoriums with cheering supporters, of course, but it turns out he has an even greater skill at uniting practically everybody else from both parties against him. Trump’s cheering supporters are actually few, relatively speaking. He pulls from 25 percent to 35 percent in polls of Republican and Republican-leaning voters, but as Nate Silver wrote recently in FiveThirtyEight, this translates into “something like 6 to 8 percent of the electorate overall, or about the same share of people who think the Apollo moon landings were faked.” In October, when the Washington Post’s Philip Bump took his own yardstick to the polls, he estimated that Bernie Sanders commands more supporters than does Donald Trump.