On Wednesday evening, the night before Montana held a special election to fill the state’s lone U.S. House seat, the Republican candidate in the race, Greg Gianforte, body-slammed a reporter, Ben Jacobs, of the Guardian, who was asking him a question about his position on health-care reform. Gianforte was swiftly charged with assault. On Thursday night, he won the election. The uncertainty, after the vote, was whether this sequence of events was unfortunate but explainable (early voting meant that Gianforte might have had an insurmountable lead before the attack) or extraordinary and terrible, in that a political candidate had, unprovoked, attacked a reporter, and his partisans had cheered him and the voters had not blinked. Theories aside, though, the events, and the news coverage of them, pointed to the same phenomenon: early in the Administration of a President with authoritarian tendencies, American public life continues to be consumed by political partisanship that has proved impossible to shake.

The Montana race was, from its beginning, a profoundly strange event, featuring two pretty loopy candidates. Two years ago, Gianforte, a millionaire tech executive, gave a speech, at the Montana Bible College, in which he said that the concept of retirement was “not Biblical” and offered as evidence the assertion that Noah had been six hundred years old when he built the ark. The Democratic candidate, a sixty-nine-year-old bluegrass musician named Rob Quist, worked in the Bernie Sanders tradition, and often eschewed traditional stump speeches in favor of songs, sometimes performed with his daughter. One Republican operative described Quist, to Politico, as “a glorified homeless person.” Quist drew national attention for his candidacy by setting aside the accumulating scandals around Donald Trump and focussing on a deeply felt revulsion toward Republican plans to gut public support for health insurance. This, and the ongoing progressive alarm at the Trump Presidency, helped Quist gather six million dollars in campaign donations. But, as the race neared its conclusion, for all the weirdness of the principals, it seemed to be following a generic path: D versus R, which in Montana meant curtains for the folk singer.

That was before Gianforte attacked Jacobs. In the hours that followed, darker themes emerged. Gianforte’s staffers reported that, rather than shunning the candidate, the conservative grass roots seemed to be rallying around him: his campaign pulled in more than a hundred thousand dollars in donations between Wednesday night and Thursday morning. “Gianforte, the manly and studly candidate, threw the hundred-and-twenty-five-pound wet-dishrag reporter from the Guardian to the ground,” Rush Limbaugh said. Duncan Hunter, the conservative congressman from California, said, “It’s not appropriate behavior—unless the reporter deserved it.” Even among the Republican leadership, whose views were assembled by the Associated Press, the response was disapproving but wan. Paul Ryan, the House Speaker, said, “I do not think this is acceptable behavior, but the choice will be made by the people of Montana.” Steve Stivers, a congressman from Ohio, who chairs the National Republican Congressional Committee, said, “We all make mistakes.” Luke Messer, a representative from Indiana, volunteered, “I’m not sure whether it will hurt him or help him.”

As the last Montanans were casting their votes, the broader situation was clarifying. In Brussels, Trump hectored the other members of NATO to pay more, as if America’s longest-standing allies were tenants in arrears and he the slumlord, and as if things might be rectified by some stern, pompous letters from a real-estate attorney in Bethpage. The situation “is not fair to the people and taxpayers of the United States,” the President said. One minor scandal this week—that it was minor is merely a reflection of our recent experience with scandals—was the revelation that Trump had shared the secret locations of American nuclear submarines with the President of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, who has overseen a campaign of extrajudicial murders. Trump this week also had kind words for the Egyptian dictator Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, the engineer of his own appalling crackdowns. Set aside the questions of collusion and conspiracy that surround the President’s relationship with Russia and you still have Trump’s bizarre expressions of fondness for Vladimir Putin. None of this has cost Trump any detectable support from his own base. The possibility, becoming likelier these days, is not that American voters will affirmatively turn toward authoritarianism but that political partisanship is the condition under which we lose touch with ourselves.

Such a situation was apparent in Montana this week, at least. “I’m not proud of what happened,” Gianforte told the crowd at his victory rally, on Thursday. “I should not have treated that reporter that way, and for that I’m sorry, Mr. Ben Jacobs.” From the crowd, a woman called out, “And you’re forgiven!,” and there was a hearty round of applause. “Please,” Gianforte said. He seemed to very much want to apologize. It wasn’t obvious that his audience would let him.