Newly-minted Utah Senate candidate Mitt Romney accepted Donald Trump’s endorsement on Monday, and boy was it met with some disappointment. “That Mitt Romney wants—or would accept—the endorsement of Donald Trump disgusts me,” lamented Seth Abramson, one of those liberal “THREAD:” guys you might follow on Twitter. You hear that, Mitt? A fella on the Internet is disgusted with you.

Abramson, and others on #Resistance Twitter who vented about Romney taking the endorsement, appear to be ailing from one of the more delusional side-effects the Trump era: a misguided hope on the left that a handful of Republican white knights in Congress might stand up to Trump and save America from the apocalypse. John McCain. Jeff Flake. Bob Corker. Lindsey Graham. Susan Collins. Ben Sasse. Now Romney. All of them were #NeverTrump Republicans during the presidential campaign. And all of them have been willing to condemn Trump’s vulgarity, lack of discipline, attacks on the press, and pernicious habit of giving white people the benefit of the doubt over Americans with a darker skin tone. Corker might have landed the sharpest jab of all last October when he called the White House “an adult day-care center.” It needn’t be said who’s wearing the diaper.

Their reasons for speaking out might not be totally pure: Corker and Flake both realized they couldn’t win re-election because their MAGA badges weren’t red enough. But their willingness to chide Trump’s outlandishness—Flake compared Trump to Josef Stalin on the floor of the United States Senate—felt like a welcome defense of our norms and institutions. Their words stood out in sharp relief against the rest of the fall-in-line G.O.P. universe, addicted to the crack pipe of a Republican base that honors Trump with an 86 percent approval rating.

Those Republican senators stepping up to criticize Trump have been such a refreshing deviation from today’s G.O.P. standard that they’ve even been welcomed on the left as fellow travelers. Romney, too, has found himself in this category. He’s a starched-shirt G.O.P. elder hailing from a long ago time—those halcyon days of 2012!—when politics were a little more civil and the scandals were about dumb media-generated gaffes like “binders full of women,” not women accusing the president of sexual assault.

Romney lost that campaign narrowly—he got the silver, in Mitt-speak—and like many former politicians, he became less polarizing in political exile, partly owing to his surprisingly humble performance in Mitt, the Netflix documentary about his ill-fated campaign. During the 2016 campaign, despite refusing to actually campaign for any of Trump’s opponents, he gave a big speech calling Trump a “phony” and a “fraud.” Romney has since been willing to speak up from the sidelines when the president did sinister things like defending the white-nationalist marchers in Charlottesville. The response from Democrats: Come back, Mitt! We miss you!

That’s how much Trump has scrambled the universe. We are now living in a world where Democrats, activists, and woke pseudo-journalists who graduated from Oberlin in 2014 rush to celebrate “reasonable” Republicans who might break the Trump fever. Even George W. Bush—who ignored warnings about Osama bin Laden, misled the country into war, enshrined torture as an interrogation tactic, instituted a privacy-shattering surveillance state, cut taxes for the rich, exploded the deficit, and helped ruin the economy—is now somehow remembered fondly on the left these days. At least he’s not Trump! LOL! Romney became subject to the same kind of revisionism. But this elite fantasy that Romney was going to gallop to the front lines of the Republican civil war, bravely straddling Rafalca, to lead a showdown with Trump? It was bound to end in disappointment.