But Ford’s story—Kavanaugh, then 17, pinned her down against a bed when she was 15, tried to take her clothes off, and covered her mouth to stifle her screams before she was able to get away—isn’t the only allegation. Two other claims followed. The first, that Kavanaugh exposed himself at a party at Yale, had been pursued by several outlets. When The New Yorker published the claim, The New York Times wrote that it “had interviewed several dozen people over the past week in an attempt to corroborate Ms. Ramirez’s story, and could find no one with firsthand knowledge.” The second story, alleging a series of gang rapes at parties where Kavanaugh was present, and implying—although, carefully, never actually claiming—that he took part in these alleged acts, was presented in a sworn statement that circumvented vetting by the news media entirely. The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday that, in trying to confirm that accusation, the paper contacted “dozens of former classmates and colleagues, but couldn’t reach anyone with knowledge of her allegations. No friends have come forward to publicly support her claims.”

All of a sudden, the picture being painted of Kavanaugh was not just of a man who drank heavily as a teenager and committed sexual assault—in and of itself justifiably disqualifying in many people’s minds—but instead of a psychopath; a monster who repeatedly attacked women, and then coached girls’ basketball and hired female clerks as cover for his creepy predations. “The U.S. Senate may yet confirm Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, but he should stay off basketball courts for now when kids are around,” wrote a columnist for USA Today. (The paper later deleted the comment.)

Ever since the rise of Donald Trump, the conservative movement has oriented itself as a circular firing squad. The attacks on Kavanaugh broke that formation.

Read Eliot Cohen on how the Republican party is abandoning conservatism.

In terms of ideological and partisan sorting, no single event in Trump’s presidency has had anything like this impact. And nothing will be quite the same no matter how this ends.

In the days leading up to the hearing, I started noticing something: Mild-mannered anti-Trump conservatives would, in private conversations, fume at Kavanaugh’s treatment and insist Democrats had crossed a line and could not be appeased—the judge had to become a justice.

Some made such comments publicly. Republicans willing to jettison Kavanaugh over Ford’s allegations “are either capitulatory or craven,” wrote Commentary’s Noah Rothman on September 18. “I am afraid I have become radicalized on the present issue,” tweeted Decision Desk HQ’s Jeffrey Blehar on September 26. “Feeling … myself … becoming … radicalized,” tweeted Ben Howe on September 27. After Democratic Senator Mazie Hirono told CNN on September 23 that she was assessing Kavanaugh’s denial of the allegations against him “in the context of … how he approaches his cases” and his “ideological agenda that is very outcome driven,” Tom Nichols—an anti-Trump Republican who advocates voting straight-ticket Democrat in the midterms to set the GOP straight—tweeted, “This is the kind of answer that makes people think voting Republican is more a matter of self-defense than ideology.”