My favorite scene in my favorite Tom Clancy movie is a little throwaway moment in The Hunt for Red October. The Soviet and American navies are jousting in the north Atlantic, with their exercises designed to provoke each other. An American F-14 goes careening out of control as it lands on a carrier and the commander, played by the late, great Fred Thompson, fumes, “This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we will be lucky to live through it.”

So let’s follow the progression: Two weeks after Trump was elected, Mike Pence went to see Hamilton on Broadway and got a respectful talking to from the stage. There was a long pause on this sort of direct action until, last Tuesday, Kirstjen Nielsen was heckled as she ate dinner at a Mexican restaurant. Three days later, Sarah Huckabee Sanders went to dinner at a restaurant called the Red Hen and the owner asked her to leave. And on Sunday, Maxine Waters upped the ante by suggesting that rather than just ask Trump staffers to leave, citizens ought to mob them and shame them, Cersei Lannister-style, whenever they are seen in public.

This is a disgusting and appalling lack of civility and a departure from the norms of American political discourse and I cannot fathom where liberals got the idea for it and, by the by, here is a list of some things the current president of the United States of America said while campaigning for his office: