Make no mistake: A Flight 93 mentality led to the January 6 presidency, now defined not by any of the good it accomplished over the past four years but by a hideous act of extremism in its desperate, spittle-flecked final days.

In Anton’s defense, he never said he believed that Trump knew how to fly a plane. In the future, when hiring someone to pilot the most advanced jetliner on the planet, he might want to add that to the job description, and check a couple of references.

Anton wrote in the Flight 93 essay that “only in a corrupt republic, in corrupt time, could a Trump rise.”

Rather than concluding that this spoke poorly of Trump, he made it into a kind of virtue. Anton poured scorn on anyone who fixated on Trump’s character flaws. “Yes, Trump is worse than imperfect,” he wrote. “So what?”

So what, indeed.