Was it mere theatrics to revel in a chant of “Lock her up,” about Hillary Clinton, who has now been exonerated, twice, by federal investigators? Was it normal for the 44th successor of a president who could not tell a lie, to lie more than 15,000 times?

Trump has so desensitized us that a day without a round of blunt force cruelty from the White House is newsworthy. And now it all comes to a boil in the impeachment trial. The facts are not in dispute: Trump tried to force a struggling democracy into doing his political dirty work for him. He tried to squeeze a foreign power into meddling in our election. What is very much in doubt is whether enough good people will do something.

In the process of this high crime, Trump broke the law, as a nonpartisan congressional watchdog reported Thursday. The greater evil is the violation of the lofty purpose written into this country’s founding documents. The smaller evils are the Republican senators who know the president violated his oath and should be removed, but don’t have the guts to say so.

“Do not, as my party did, underestimate the evil, desperate nature of evil, desperate people,” writes Rick Wilson, the Republican operative and witty Never-Trumper, in “Running Against the Devil,” his new book. “There is no bottom. There is no shame. There are no limits.”

As for the contagion of evil, you need not look far. In Texas this month, Gov. Greg Abbott said his state would become the first to refuse to take in even a small number of legal, fully vetted refugees. These are people who’ve been approved by the federal government for asylum, after being displaced by war, famine or persecution. In the past, people from Vietnam, Cuba and Africa have been welcomed, and have gone on to become some of our finest citizens.

A handful of citizens, the Catholic Church, some members of Congress, objected. “Accepting refugees with open arms — giving without keeping score — is who we are as Americans,” tweeted Representative Pramila Jayapal, Democrat of Washington, herself an immigrant.

Sorry, that’s not who we are as Americans in the Trump era. When the hate flag is flying, most of Trump’s followers have stood up and saluted.