One of the more revealing moments in the press conference that President Donald Trump held on Monday, with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in tow, came when both were asked about Roy Moore, the Republican nominee for next month’s U.S. Senate race in Alabama. Moore is running for the seat that opened up when Jeff Sessions became the Attorney General. He also, a reporter noted, addressing Trump, “has said that he believes homosexuality should be illegal and that Muslims should be barred from serving in the U.S. Congress. What makes you comfortable with someone with those beliefs serving in the U.S. Senate? And the same question to you, Mr. Leader.”

“Well, I’m going to be meeting with Roy sometime next week,” Trump said. “And we’re going to talk to him about a lot of different things. . . . He ran a very strong race. The people of Alabama, who I like very much, and they like me very much, but they like Roy.” This seemed to be Trump’s way of acknowledging that, in the primary race, he had endorsed Moore’s opponent, Luther Strange. And yet that fact was not, in itself, much of a basis for distancing himself from Moore’s positions: Trump had presented himself as torn between the two men, and Moore, ironically, had positioned himself as the true Trumpist candidate. Trump had also tweeted, after Moore’s victory, that they had spoken and that Moore “sounds like a really great guy who ran a fantastic race. He will help to #MAGA!” Trump suggested that, whatever he thought of Moore generally, the comments the reporter had cited, about gay people and Muslims, bothered him. (Although Trump, in his New York past, wasn’t hostile to the L.G.B.T.Q. community, he has, since becoming President, been happy to surround himself with people who are, including Vice-President Mike Pence. And, while Moore has argued for keeping Muslims out of Congress, Trump has said that he wants to keep them out of the country.) Instead, Trump said that he’d report back about their meeting and called on another reporter.

This evasion was something of a gift to McConnell, to whom the question was also directed and who responded by trying to shrink into invisibility. A true leader might have stepped to the microphone to at least say that he would welcome a Muslim senator in his caucus. It says much about today’s G.O.P. that opposition to a candidate like Moore—who came to prominence for insisting that the Ten Commandments hang in his courthouse, and who was removed from Alabama’s chief judgeship after instructing other judges to defy Supreme Court rulings on marriage equality—would provoke only an awkward silence. At another point in the press conference, when McConnell was asked about complaints from Steve Bannon, the President’s former adviser, and others about why McConnell, in effect, did not routinely back extremists, he defensively listed a number of not-ready-for-the-general-election Tea Party types who had lost Senate races, such as Todd Akin, who said that victims of “legitimate rape” don’t tend to become pregnant. “Winners make policy and losers go home,” McConnell said. That was a tactical response, not a principled position. Moore has a good chance of winning next month. What happens when demagogues, with a little institutional backing, take high office?

McConnell already answered that question, last year, by endorsing Trump, and did so again, on Monday, by undergoing a ritual of abasement and complicity in the form of the press conference. Trump has, in recent weeks, slighted and insulted McConnell; the Times reported that Trump recently “berated him during a phone call that devolved into a profane shouting match.” On Saturday, at the Values Voters Summit, Bannon talked about McConnell as a target in a war waged by the right on the G.O.P. establishment. Addressing “Mitch,” Bannon said, “the only question is, and this is just analogy, or metaphor . . . Who’s going to be Brutus to your Julius Caesar?” Analogy, metaphor, or injunction: assassination imagery is never appropriate. “I like Steve a lot,” Trump said, when asked about Bannon’s remarks. He added that Bannon was a good friend who was doing what he thought was right, but that he might persuade him to go easy on “some of the people he may be looking at”—as though Bannon were an attack dog that Trump could, if he felt like granting a favor, call to heel. (That may be a risky assumption on Trump’s part.) McConnell, meanwhile, seemed glad to be seeking Trump’s shelter. After Trump talked about what good friends they were and the unity of the Republican Party, McConnell said that he wanted to “underscore” those remarks. “We have the same agenda,” McConnell said. “We’ve been friends and acquaintances for a long time.” It is hard to declare war on an establishment that has abjectly surrendered.

“What Mitch will tell you is that, maybe with the exception of a few—and that is a very small few—I have a fantastic relationship with the people in the Senate, and with the people in Congress,” Trump said. He was calling on McConnell to be his witness that Senator Bob Corker, who had said, the week before, that most Republicans in Congress understood that Trump was an unfit leader, was a liar. McConnell stood by as Trump continued, “If you read the papers, you think, I’m, like, on one island and they’re, like, on the other. Well, it’s not the way it is.” The media, that is, lied, too.

Yet this was just one contender for the most degraded moment of the press conference. Another came when Trump was asked why he had not yet said anything publicly about the deaths of four American service members in Niger two weeks ago. He said that he had written some letters of condolence, though they may not have been sent yet (“they’re going to be going out either today or tomorrow”), and that he was planning to call the families. And then he said, “If you look at President Obama and other Presidents, most of them didn’t make calls, a lot of them didn’t make calls.” A number of people who had worked in the Obama Administration and said that they knew of calls or personal visits he had had with families began tweeting angrily, and a few minutes later another reporter asked a follow-up: “You said that President Obama never called the families of fallen soldiers. How can you make that claim?”

“I don’t know if he did,” Trump said, indifferent, apparently, to the gratuitous smear he had just levelled. “No, no, no, I was told that he didn’t—often.” That last word was partly swallowed. “And a lot of Presidents don’t. . . . President Obama, I think, probably did sometimes, and maybe sometimes he didn’t. I don’t know. That’s what I was told. All I can do—all I can do is ask my generals.” The White House later said that Obama had not called John Kelly, who was then a general, when Kelly’s son died in Afghanistan, in 2010. How Obama might otherwise have reached out was not clear. (Update: The A.P. has more on some of the ways that he did.) General Martin Dempsey, who was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Obama Administration, tweeted that both Obama and George W. Bush, and their wives, had “cared deeply, worked tirelessly, for the serving, the fallen, and their families. Not politics. Sacred Trust.” Trump had taken a question about his public statements on a military raid and responded with an empty assertion of his personal superiority to Obama. What’s also striking is that Trump was complaining about Obama supposedly not doing something that he himself had not done. As he said, the letters hadn’t gone out; he hadn’t called.