The Founders knew a little something about ambitious men. While they drafted the Constitution — and as they explained themselves in The Federalist Papers — they obsessed over how to contain those ambitions and make sure the new nation’s institutions could withstand demagoguery and corruption. Thus the whole checks-and-balances thing. “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” they wrote. For more than 200 years it worked, more or less.

These days, not so much. American democracy is fragile at the moment, thanks largely to Trump, an ambitious man who cannot tolerate being counteracted — not by other ambitious people, and certainly not by a majority of voters. Now other Republicans are taking his cue. Ambition is amplifying ambition, not counteracting it. We’re all worse off as a result.

Of all the “strange new disrespect” pieces I’ve read over the last year, I think my favorite was a story about Vance, written last summer by Molly Ball of Time magazine. In a possibly-unguarded moment, Vance indicated to Ball that his decision to evolve from his earlier anti-Trump conservatism was born of a desire to win support from Republican voters. Trump is “the leader of this movement, and if I actually care about these people and the things I say I care about, I need to just suck it up and support him,” he said.