A lone Republican resigned this week after Donald Trump’s servile performance in Helsinki, where Vladimir Putin smirked his way through a remarkable press conference that laid bare the American president’s obvious fealty to the Russian autocrat. Who was this brave Republican who spoke up and left his party? No, it wasn’t Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, whose team Trump had just belittled on the international stage. No, it wasn’t Jon Huntsman, Trump’s ambassador to Russia, who once ran for president himself on the notion that he was a maverick truth-teller. And no, despite his furrowed brow, it wasn’t John Kelly, Trump’s ever-humiliated chief of staff.

It was . . . wait for it! . . . Chris Gagin, the chairman of the Belmont County Republican Party in southeast Ohio. Haven’t heard of him? Don’t worry, most national political reporters hadn’t either, until Gagin wrote on Twitter that he was stepping down from his provincial post on Monday as “a matter of conscience” following the Putin spectacle. His tweet was nonetheless passed around by reporters and lefties on Twitter as evidence that Republicans do, in fact, have the power to call out Trump for the damage he is unleashing on our democracy. But while Gagin’s decision is admirable—Trump won a smashing 68 percent of the vote in Belmont County—he is still just a local-party activist. The stakes are small. What his resignation demonstrated, more than anything else, was how the much more powerful leadership class of the Republican Party remains, as ever, unwilling to challenge Trump even as it becomes clear that the president is, himself, a national-security crisis.

Is the president compromised, either by a pee tape or by shady Russian money? We may never know, but we saw on Monday that Trump, for some reason, is willing to genuflect before Putin even if it means eroding the power of the United States, our values, and our intelligence community in full view of the entire world. Putin meddled in our presidential election, sends warplanes to buzz U.S. airspace near Alaska, and held a press conference in March bragging about Russia’s ability to reach the United States mainland with ballistic missiles. In response to all that, in one of the biggest moments of his presidency, Trump chose to kiss Putin’s ass. When Hugh Grant’s character in Love Actually is better at standing up to tough guys than you are, chances are you’re the cuck. Turns out it’s easier to behave like an alpha when you’re tweeting at Maxine Waters from the safety of your own bedroom.

How have Republicans responded to Helsinki? Most sided with the intelligence community, ratifying their belief that Russia did indeed meddle in the 2016 election but, as usual, stopped short of criticizing Trump personally. Some, like Lindsey Graham, went a step further, urging Trump to “be tough on Putin.” John McCain, ailing in Arizona, issued the harshest words of all, calling the press conference “one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory.” He continued: “The damage inflicted by President Trump’s naïveté, egotism, false equivalence, and sympathy for autocrats is difficult to calculate. But it is clear that the summit in Helsinki was a tragic mistake.”

McCain’s contempt for Putin is known to burn white hot, but what’s important about his post-Helsinki statement is that it’s precisely what every one of his Republican Senate colleagues believes. They just refuse to say it out loud, for reasons that have been chewed over ad nauseam ever since Trump took office. The Republican base, motivated by cultural issues and grievance politics, holds Trump in far higher esteem than any elected official hailing from politer wings of the G.O.P. The conservative media has similarly contorted itself to defend Trump at every turn, even against criticism from Republicans. In this environment, there is no political room for a Republican to criticize Trump without being torn apart by the MAGA wolves.