While each week seems like it can’t get more degrading than the last, we mustn’t sell ourselves short. Over the past seven days, we’ve managed to become a society in support of both shrugging off due process (guilty as charged, if someone says so) and shrugging off teenage sexual assault (boys will be boys). We have seen the press go C.S.I. on Georgetown Prep yearbooks and commentators insisting that the denials of guilt by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh just make him guiltier. We’ve seen Stormy Daniels’s lawyer accuse Kavanaugh of “gang rape.” The leader of a conservative think tank released a Son of Sam–quality Twitter thread, based on days of research, arguing that a Kavanaugh doppelgänger had been to blame for an alleged assault. The certitude and derangement, even by Washington standards, has been impressive. President Avenatti may be the fate we deserve.

Last week, the fate of Kavanaugh rested on unsentimental Republican calculation. This week, there’s more sentiment (anger), but waverers remain. At least 48 Republicans appear to be sticking with Kavanaugh. (The Republican base would melt down if they did anything else.) But three Republicans are seen as wavering: Jeff Flake of Arizona, Susan Collins of Maine, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. Kavanaugh can weather the defection of one, albeit at considerable cost, but probably not two. Of the three, Susan Collins, a red senator in a blue state, is widely seen as the most important decider of all.

Collins sees two camps, red and blue, each with a narrative that has hardened over the past week. In the world of Kavanaugh’s foes, we’re living through a circus of right-wing bad faith. Kavanaugh is a prevaricating hack, a product of Conservatism Inc., henchman for Kenneth Starr, and water carrier for George W. Bush and Karl Rove. His origins are in fratty, hard-drinking loutishness, which he now pretends was outward manifestation of a choirboy’s record. He is dishonest about his jurisprudence (he’ll overturn Roe v. Wade) and everything else. Christine Blasey Ford has no reason to lie that he did something terrible, and now more stories are coming out. Republicans have played dirty from the start, withholding mountains of documents shedding light on Kavanaugh’s political work, and now they’re trying to breeze past the allegations and vote him onto the court, bypassing any due diligence by the F.B.I. Applauding them is red-state America, rife with misogyny and rape culture. Especially rich, according to this perspective, is the notion that Kavanaugh, the man who made sure Bill Clinton was questioned in clinical and pornographic detail over Monica Lewinsky, is now objecting to intimate questions about his own sex life. Equally rich, Republicans are complaining about abuses of the process despite the fact that Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland never even got a hearing.

In the eyes of Kavanaugh’s supporters, what we’re seeing is a circus of left-wing bad faith. Democrats have already spent weeks throwing every possible hindrance at Kavanaugh, making him answer more written questions than any nominee has ever faced, and winking at illegal disruptions to the hearings by screaming protesters. After sitting on their evidence for a month and a half, they have unveiled a flimsy eleventh-hour allegation against Kavanaugh in order to run out the clock and prevent the Supreme Court from convening on October 1 with nine justices. Ford, after being in touch with Feinstein’s office for weeks, has kept finding reasons not to testify. Her lawyer is a Democratic activist who has been doing everything possible to drag things out (the latest excuse was that Ford is afraid of flying and setting conditions that no witness ever gets to dictate. Ford’s allegations are either lies (impelled by a perception of apocalyptic political stakes) or faulty memories. A thinly sourced story in The New Yorker of an another alleged assault by Kavanaugh just proves how determined the media is to assist Democrats in their game.