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Not so when, so to speak, Alaric stormed the empire and reduced Rome to ruins, which is the only historic template for how progressives viewed and still view Trump’s successful march to the White House. The psychological shock was massive and unprecedented, the “pussy hats” were out marching in days, and opinion columnists sobbed over the trauma of voters who found themselves incontinent with rage and sorrow that Trump, the disruptor, had won.

It was not, among the virulently anti-Trump forces, supposed to have been this way. Within the coven of Clinton supporters a Trump victory was against nature; it could not be, the goddess of glass ceilings must have been, had to have been, cheated. Hillary herself over the months that followed unspiralled a vast catalogue of why she shouldn’t have lost and then fixed upon the No. 1 favourite. Trump and his lawless henchpersons had “stolen” or “manipulated” the process. And most particularly, most explosively, spun the story of how the dread Darth Putin and Trump had secretly, nefariously, maliciously colluded and “stolen” the election from Hillary.

From the elegant hostelries of Martha’s Vineyard to the sleek mansion-palaces of the Silicon Valley hyper-tycoons, the keening went on. And thus, as soon as Trump was installed, the charge was made, that Trump was in the White House only because he had “colluded” with the Russians, and therefore he was not “really” president. It went even more raw than that. Some of the cable networks, and most of the big press, became utterly absorbed in the effort to prove collusion. The most hysterical of the Russian conspiracy theorists, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC, went on every night for two and a half years articulating every wild wisp of an allegation that Trump was an agent of Russia, Putin’s stooge — a president beholden to an enemy tyrant.