Among the self-appointed commissars of the culture, the hatred for Trump assumes the dimensions of a psychiatric disorder. But like the Soviet commissars of old, they don’t treat their own delusions. They instead rant and rant about the mental health of “dissenters,” those deplorables who refuse to conform to the dogmas of the commissars.

As the unreconstructed liberal columnist Anthony Lewis once sputtered, America needs a “new people.” It must come as bitter news to the commissars that most Americans, according to the latest polling, have no interest in joining their frenzied assault upon Robert E. Lee.

The commissars have had to content themselves with ugly little victories in university towns and urban hellholes. Just visit Baltimore if you want to see what the left’s “fundamentally transformed America” looks like. Its hoodlums and political class are barely distinguishable. Both are drunk on decades of lying PC victimology, out of which has come a criminal sense of entitlement and a barbaric contempt for American tradition. That Baltimore is ground zero for statue-smashing makes perfect sense.

New York City’s mayor Bill de Blasio has ordered a purge of all non-PC statues in the Big Apple. Robert Lee spent a little time in Brooklyn at Fort Hamilton, de Blasio has gravely informed aides. Commissar Cuomo, not to be outdone, has scribbled out a hasty note to the Army, demanding that any avenues on the fort named after Confederates be scrubbed clean.

One of the arguments against Trump last year from critics ostensibly worried about the “integrity of conservatism” was that he would revert to Manhattanite liberalism. He hasn’t. But they have. They can be heard whining about his ban on cross-dressers and transsexuals in the military, his insufficient enthusiasm for Islamic migrants, and now his defense of Robert E. Lee.

Paul Ryan, deferring to the propaganda of the commissars, says Trump “messed up” with his post-Charlottesville remarks. Leave it to the stupid party to ratify the lies of the left. Trump said nothing untrue and has behaved far more honorably than his cowardly “conservative” critics. They joined the anti-Lee mob; he didn’t. Remember that the next time one of those critics clears his throat pompously about the “threat that Trump poses to the conservative movement.” Those who use that phrase the most advance it the least.

Bret Stephens, in the midst of his frenzied prediction last year that Trump would go down to epic defeat, salivated at the prospect of rank-and-file conservatives learning a bitter lesson from supporting such a con man. Where is Stephens these days? He is on MSNBC, comparing Rex Tillerson to Pol Pot.

It is amusing to watch the Never Trumpers whip themselves up into such a lather, especially since they spend so much time contrasting their own self-proclaimed sobriety with Trump’s “excesses.” Bill Kristol, who has assigned himself the task of saving the republic from the bombast and vulgarity of Trump, calls Tucker Carlson an apologist for slavery and compared Trump aide Michael Anton to the Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt.

And why did Stephens compare the mild-mannered Tillerson to a mass murderer? Because he is upsetting the feelings of liberals at the State Department. He has no respect for its “bureaucracy,” according to Stephens, who ventured that Tillerson might be the worst secretary of state ever.

So it goes among the Trump haters, who grant themselves privileges they forbid others. They are egotists who don’t like Trump’s “narcissism,” late-night comics who don’t like his “vulgarity,” liars who question his “honesty,” and addled activists who question his “mental fitness.” He is a “joke,” they say, even as their desperate lunges make them an increasingly sick one.