“Yes, he lies or exaggerates. Yes, he insults people," she once said on Fox News.

“Another great argument to deploy against Trump is that he plays fast and loose with the facts,” Hemingway wrote in the early days of his administration. “This is an easy argument to make because not only does everyone know this, they’ve known it for decades. There are hundreds of examples of his imprecision,” she added, “from claiming without evidence millions of fraudulent votes cast to a larger crowd size at his inauguration, to give two recent examples.”

Why would anyone who values the civic virtues necessary to preserve the republic trust those who cease to care that it is fraying, throwing support to a man they see as a lying, juvenile insult-monger so long as they’re getting their way?

Then there is Trump’s treatment of women.

When he was accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women during the 2016 campaign, Hemingway wrote, “None of it is particularly surprising for a man who spent decades bragging about his sexual prowess, adultery, handsiness, sexual entitlement, and so on and so forth. That this information is coming out is all so obvious that if you saw all these warning signs—and everyone saw these warning signs—and still supported Trump, you should look inward.” Will Hemingway now look inward the next time Trump mistreats a woman? Trump is “reprobate and immoral,” she wrote back then, adding that “he chose the wanton, unscrupulous lifestyle and bragged about it.”

Even during his presidency she has referred to him as “known perv Trump.” What does it mean for her to write that one month and declare her unsolicited support the next?

It means that her standards have been corrupted.

These are just a fraction of Trump’s flaws—the subset openly acknowledged by Hemingway, who spends most of her time on Fox News and The Federalist attacking the left, the media, and matters that don’t touch on the president. While it is more than sufficient to illustrate that a leading voice on the right has grown comfortable vesting extreme power in a man whose abysmal character is clear to her, a more complete reckoning with what Trump has done goes farther toward clarifying why being tied to him puts the whole Red Tribe in peril.

It may be, for example, that Hemingway, who lives in the Washington, D.C., area and focuses on the culture war more than threats to liberty from police, does not devote a lot of thought to Joe Arpaio, the Arizona sheriff who Donald Trump pardoned.

But Americans who might be taken to be Mexican or Guatemalan or El Salvadoran by a passing cop may know that Arpaio presided over a law-enforcement agency that routinely violated the civil rights of people of Hispanic descent, including American citizens; that he was investigated by the Department of Justice, who declared that they found one of the worst patterns of racial profiling that they had ever seen; that he was ordered to stop violating the Constitution; that he continued to violate constitutional rights so flagrantly that he was convicted of criminal contempt of court; and that Trump pardoned him for that transgression.