The smart — or at least smart-sounding — argument for Trump is that he’s a “disrupter,” breaking up the calcified and sclerotic political establishment, yada yada. Left out of these rationalizations is the fact that “disrupter” is a morally and intellectually neutral concept. A chimpanzee running around a hospital ward with a hand grenade is a disrupter.

It’s like the fetishization of the word “contrarian.” “Ooo he’s a contrarian, he doesn’t bow to the conventional wisdom!” is a sentence you can use for Martin Luther King Jr., Albert Einstein, and Gandhi. But it’s also a sentence you can apply with equal accuracy to Charles Manson, Lenin, and some guy taking a dump on the counter at McDonald’s.

If you run into a room spinning around like a helicopter of fists, you very well may punch some noses that deserve to be punched, but you will also hit some that don’t. The dismaying thing about so many Trump supporters is the way they get the moral cause and effect backwards. The proof that someone deserved to be punched in the nose is the fact that Trump punched them.

This rush to insist that Trump can do no wrong is not merely intellectually incoherent and morally indefensible, it is poisonous. Imagine if, in 2008, Barack Obama had ridiculed John McCain for being captured and tortured. Every single member of Trump’s amen chorus would have denounced the comments unequivocally. But when Trump does it, the response is to marvel at how he survived the statement. That’s not moral or intellectual seriousness, it’s blatant power worship. And it is disgusting.

Speaking of disgusting, here is Ann Coulter defending her American Bismarck in classically Bismarckian terms, insisting that Marco Rubio is a pawn of his master in Rome. This nativist garbage pales in comparison to the racist and anti-Semitic bile that washes up in my inbox and Twitter feed every day, all in the name of defending Trump. And, no, I am not saying that all or even most Trump supporters subscribe to this garbage. I am saying that when you celebrate bomb throwing, you shouldn’t be surprised by what gets dislodged by the explosions.