We can’t lose sight of that, but in all our fury and feelings of helplessness, we sometimes do. Too many people spend too much of themselves on the shouting and save too little for the plotting, and Trump does his best to leave us morally wiped out. He’s a steamroller. But if we hang in there, we don’t have to be flattened.

My plea isn’t a partisan one, nor am I romanticizing the Democratic Party, which has problems galore. I’m recognizing that when it comes to babysitting this president, the Republican Party is a lost cause. Sure, congressional Republicans discovered a few stray vertebrae of backbone over the past few days; there was some scowling from Mitch McConnell and faint mewling from Paul Ryan. But Trump could put a babushka on the Statue of Liberty and those two would find a way to look to the side, or they’d pronounce her prettier than ever.

That’s because they read polls, including an astonishing one that SurveyMonkey just did for Axios. It revealed that 79 percent of Republicans approved of Trump’s sycophantic performance at the news conference with Vladimir Putin, while 85 percent deem the investigation of Russian intrusion into our elections a distraction. They bear less and less resemblance to the followers of a coherent ideology and more and more to the members of a cult. That word is gaining currency in our political discourse for excellent reason.

Congressional Republicans have decided that to cross Trump is to commit suicide. They need to be convinced that not crossing him is as fatal a course. That’s what a big-enough blue wave would do, and that’s why once loyal Republicans who cannot abide him — the columnist George Will, for one prominent example — have gone from chastising the Republican Party to cheerleading for the Democratic Party and urging Americans to support it in November. It’s the last resort.