But much to your shock, a bunch of your favorite writers don’t like him at all. They see him as almost as bad as the opposition. You’re stunned; life has finally given you a guy who treats the other side as bad as they treat you, but guys like David French are insisting the goal all along was to get everyone to treat each other better. Fox News turns itself into a mirror image of MSNBC, but guys like Jonah don’t seem to like it; he’s saying righty agitprop is as bad as lefty agitprop. Swaths of the Republican Party’s leaders want nothing to do with this guy. You conclude that guys like John McCain and Mitt Romney must be wrong when they recoil from this new guy, too. After all, they lost their presidential campaigns, what do they really know?

For a long time, you saw these writers and GOP officials as staunch allies; now they see Trump so differently than you do that you feel betrayed by them. They must have some secret, hidden motive to drive this otherwise inexplicable antipathy to Trump — they must have secretly craved a gig on MSNBC, or the approval of Democratic officials, or to attend those Georgetown cocktail parties. That’s the only way this makes sense, right? It couldn’t possibly be that they genuinely don’t believe that Trump’s presidency will pay off for conservatives and Americans in the long run.

If American society has taught you anything in the past few decades, it’s that when somebody wins, it means they were right. Ask anybody in Hollywood who’s had the biggest hit movie. Studies indicate the richest and most successful CEOs often treat people badly, often unnecessarily so. Steve Jobs was a colossal jerk, but people loved him with a cult-like passion anyway. Nobody remembers Bill Belichick’s “Spygate” and inflation scandals. Barry Bonds still has the Major League Baseball career home run record. Michael Jordan reportedly had a serious gambling habit during his playing days, and some people wonder if his sudden, short-lived retirement was a deal to avoid a suspension. Few remember; all they remember is every young man in America wanting to “be like Mike.” Winning cures everything.