These examples don’t exhaust the list. Nearly everyone I know seems to have a well-developed theory as to why this country is past redemption, or almost, and every theory seems almost right. There is a great deal of ruin in a nation. A great deal of malice and misadventure, too.

McCain knew this. On his last visit to the Munich Security Conference in 2017, shortly before his cancer diagnosis, he spoke of his own mounting sense of alarm. Alarm, he said, at “the hardening of resentment we see toward immigrants” and “the growing inability, and even unwillingness, to separate truth from lies.” Alarm that “more of our fellow citizens seem to be flirting with authoritarianism and romanticizing it as our moral equivalent.” Alarm, above all, “that many of our peoples, including in my own country, are giving up on the West.”

It was no mystery to anyone in his audience that day where the real source of his alarm lay: An American president who, in matters of both character and conviction, was low and vapid and mean-spirited and bottomlessly dishonorable — McCain’s opposite in every respect.