Never before have I felt such overwhelming disgust at Trump’s weird, unexplained, unquestioning, total embrace of Vladimir Putin, in effect an act of presidential connivance in an attack on the United States. The cri de coeur of Hill, for whom America was hope, was shattering.

Trump is Putin’s stooge. The American president’s contempt for Ukraine’s fate is quintessentially Russian, for, in the mythology of Greater Russia, Ukraine as an independent state is a mere illusion (hence Putin helps himself to Crimea). Never before have I felt with such acuity — except perhaps during the earlier testimony of Marie Yovanovitch, the former American ambassador to Ukraine — how the public service of dedicated patriots is under attack from Trump’s diplomacy as an exercise in narcissism. In these two cases, of course, it’s narcissism compounded by misogyny.

For me, Hill’s words went deeper still. My own encounter with British prejudice was different, that of a Jew, the son of South African immigrants, with the anti-Semitism that cast me as a “yid” in my first year or two at high school. The prejudice that, for immigrants bent above all on assimilation, was best met with silence when “Don’t be so Jewish!” was wielded to mean don’t be so stingy, or someone was referred to as looking Jewish, “with her great conk of a nose.” American citizenship — the miraculous, ever renewed gathering-in of strangers made equal before the law — was also liberation from all that. It was belonging, as opposed to not quite belonging.

So when Hill spoke of the United States as a “country of immigrants” and said that “this is what for me really does make America great,” and said, “This is the essence of America. It’s why I wanted to be here, and why I wanted to stay here,” and said, “This is my country and the country that I serve” — when she said all that in her no-nonsense north England accent, I could not help feeling again in all its force the American idea as release from class prejudice, as release from bigotry, as liberation from the tyranny of who came first and who came last. Europeans ask, where do you come from? Americans ask, what can you do for us?

This is the very revolutionary American idea under attack from Trump and his Republican enablers and the Fox News fabulists. Make America Great Again is, in fact, Deny What America Is. It’s a frontal attack on the rule of law, the foundation of democracy. For Trump, the law has always been something to be finessed or circumvented.