Both the establishment media and most prominent Democratic politicians have gone so far off the deep end,against President Trump and in favor of ever-more leftist policies, that they are creating sympathy for the president they hate.

Even before the feeding frenzy in response to last weekend’s tragic shootings, I was reporting data on this phenomenon and also giving examples of the sorts of media behavior that causes it. But the data is also supported by anecdotal experience that really brings it home.

For instance, in just one particularly pointed example of many I could give, a decadeslong friend pulled me aside two weeks ago in a tone of lamentation. A moderate Republican who has repeatedly expressed emphatic distaste for Trump, this guy said (I’m quoting from memory, rather than exactly) this: “Quin, I can't believe I'm saying this, but I increasingly find myself sympathizing with Trump, just because the media and Democrats are so outrageously unfair to him and because the Dems have gone so hard left.”

It was the combination, he said, of the unhinged criticisms of Trump and of the presidential Democrats’ embrace of loony leftism, that left him and a number of like-minded friends thinking they might even need to vote for Trump next year, though they avoided doing so in 2016.

I am not willing to go that far. I wholeheartedly believe the president is a bigot and that his rhetoric has contributed to a toxic and dangerous atmosphere in what is supposed to be “civil society.” Yet as an original and continuing Never Trumper, I nonetheless feel obligated to write a third consecutive piece largely defending Trump from what amount to intellectually dishonest assaults.

Trump's contribution to toxicity is a far different thing from his somehow deserving the blame for a mass shooting. And proposing further moves to keep guns out of dangerous hands is the exact opposite of “being a prisoner to the gun lobby,” as Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused Trump of being.

Meanwhile, most of the media world and grassroots leftists just went into conniption fits over an absolutely accurate, neutral, objective headline in the New York Times, on the grounds that the headline fails to criticize Trump. The Times then actually bowed to pressure and changed its front-page news headline to subtly editorialize against the president. That shows how both professional standards and common sense have eroded.

As conservative columnist Deroy Murdock noted on Fox News on Tuesday (at the 3:34 mark, here), when Trump doesn’t rush to the site of a tragedy, or fails to quickly enough offer sympathetic comment thereon, the media mavens criticize him for failing as “consoler-in-chief.” Yet when Trump announces plans to go to El Paso to offer condolences for the victims, the same mob blasts him for daring to show his face and thus supposedly interfering with or tainting the community’s grief.

One can believe, as I do, that Americans today give the presidency a far too central role in everyday life and that the expectation he will be a national hand-holder and grief counselor is absurd and yet recognize that a president who fails to perform such a ceremonial duty will be lambasted unmercifully. How dare a local congresswoman say the president of the United States is “not welcome” in her city?

Put all this together with the widely believed notion that Trump is the only thing standing in the way of free healthcare for illegal immigrants and other absurdly leftist policies such as taxpayer-funded abortions right up through birth, even for men. Suddenly, even hardened Trump critics find themselves, by default, "on his side.”

If the media and the Democrats want to know who to blame for Trump’s position of power, they need only look in the mirror.