Pardon my French, but

our Gallic friends have a saying that perfectly encapsulates the politics of President Trump.

"Cet animal est tres mechant; quand on l'attaque, il se defend."

The great Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov once translated that into this rhyming couplet:

"This animal is very mean, in fact.

"It will fight back when it's attacked"

That animal is our president, and once again he is showing a brilliance at the art of counter-attack that leaves his enemies sputtering.

When the fight over allegations of sexual abuse by Trump Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh began, the Democrats seemed confident they could fire up their base for the November midterm elections.

Instead they seem to be firing up the Republican base. An NPR/PBSNewshour/Marist poll showed that "the wide Democratic enthusiasm advantage that has defined the 2018 campaign up to this point has disappeared," according to an NPR report.

As South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham put it, "Whether you're a Trump Republican, a Bush Republican, a McCain Republican, a libertarian or a vegetarian -- you're pissed. I've never seen the Republican Party so unified as I do right now. The defining issue in 2018 has changed. It's about this."

Graham's observation has special weight when you consider that he was until recently the epitome of a McCain Republican, i.e. one highly skeptical of Trump.

The fight over Kavanaugh turned him into a fire-breathing right-winger. He singlehandedly turned the tide in Kavanaugh's favor at the hearing at which both he and accuser Christine Blasey Ford testified.

'This is the most unethical sham since I've been in politics,'' he said during a tirade that almost sounded like it could have come from The Donald himself.

Trump, of course, took it further. At a rally last week in Mississippi, he joked about the gaps in Ford's testimony, listing a number of questions she was asked.

He followed with this caricature of her reply:

"I don't know, but I had one beer. That's the only thing I remember."

His critics cried foul. (Though even the Trump-hating Washington Post conceded that it worked)

Even Graham criticized the remarks. But Trump followed up later in the week at a rally in Minnesota - one for which people began lining up at 5 a.m.

The Donald didn't disappoint. He labeled the Democrats "the party of crime" and predicted "their rage-fueled resistance is starting to backfire at a level that nobody has ever seen before."

It was vintage Trump. As I've noted, he has the timing and delivery of a Borscht Belt comedian.

The difference is that a comedian will say anything for a laugh. Trump will say anything for a vote.

My liberal friends in the fields of politics and punditry find this sort of thing distasteful. But as with that mythical French animal, that's what they get for starting up with Trump.

There may have been another president who has been subjected to more insults, but I can't think of one. From the moment he emerged on the political scene, Trump was characterized as a politician who was racist, sexist, misogynist and even "ableist," a term that refers to those who discriminate against the disabled.

A lesser politician would have broken under all that criticism. In fact, a lesser politician did. That's Al Franken, the Democrat who resigned as a U.S. Senator from Minnesota after some accusations of sexual harassment from his earlier career in comedy surfaced.

At that Minnesota rally, Trump jokingly said of Franken, "Boy did he fold up like a wet rag, huh? He was gone so fast. It was like, 'Oh, he did something,' 'Oh, oh, oh I resign I resign, I quit, I quit,' Wow.'"

Bad taste? Perhaps.

But Trump has made it a practice to stick with his positions no matter how unpopular they may seem at any given time. At first, his fellow Republicans assumed they could overpower him. Now they just come to his support, as Graham did.

As for the Democrats, I suspect that at some point they are going to have to revisit their tactics. Those street demonstrations and howls of outrage seem to energize the Republicans more than the Democrats.

That brings to mind an alternative translation Nabokov gave to that old French saying. In a response to his own critics, he wrote:

"This animal is very wicked;

"Just see what happens when you kick it."

The Democrats are seeing.

ADD - Another quote from Nabokov relevant to the story told by Christine Blasey Ford: "I cannot see how anyone in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst."

As I've noted, Ford is a psychologist and therefore should have been aware of the studies done by Dr. Elizabeth Loftus debunking the idea of repressed memory.

Yet she refused to give the full transcript of her own sessions with a therapist so it could be determined whether she had been led into recovering a memory of an event that did not happen.

That made her a hero of the "Me too" movement. But it also led to the debunking of that movement's key flaw: It accepts on face value any statements by accusers without granting that the accused may be innocent of those charges.

This assumption that anyone accused of a crime is therefore guilty of that crime is straight out of the Soviet Union that Nabokov fled.

Whether she knows it or not, Ford has performed a valuable service in alerting the electorate to the threat to impose that way of thought on Americans.