A year and a half later, it turns out that life in Trump’s America does not much resemble “The Handmaid’s Tale.” It’s more like a playground for behaviorally problematic toddlers at which no one remembered to bring snacks.

Liam just ran head-first into a wall again. Samantha is spinning around in circles looking terrified. In the sandbox, Tyler has somehow managed to bury himself up to the neck. Everyone is cry-screaming.

To borrow a phrase from the left: This is . . . not normal. People used to be able to keep their spit together if, for instance, their taxes were reduced or joblessness was at the lowest level in a generation or a celebrity said he liked the president.

And yet, here we are.

When Kanye West praised President Trump for having “dragon energy” and being “my brother” in a tweet noting, “You don’t have to agree with trump but the mob can’t make me not love him,” social media went full Chernobyl. You’d think the “Make America Great Again” cap that Trump signed for West was a white hood. In his return to Twitter after a long hiatus, West also urged “breaking out of our mental prisons,” said “the thought police want to suppress freedom of thought” and gave a shout-out to Dilbert cartoonist (and Trump explainer) Scott Adams.

West’s praise of Donald Trump shouldn’t be that controversial. Sixty million Americans voted for him. He’s our president. If you don’t like him, that’s fine. But why go berserk every time you learn someone else does?

Yet for someone as young, black and cool as West to give a thumbs-up to Trump was like an electromagnetic pulse that fried the left’s thinking circuits.

“There are no excuses for trash politics,” said Jezebel with an almost audible harrumph. “Explaining exactly what’s going on here might be beyond our or anyone’s abilities,” gravely intoned Vox, the forum where 24-year-olds cheerfully explain how to solve health care or sexual violence. “No one wants to deal with this,” wrote Sean Fennessey of The Ringer in a lengthy screed, as though West had just praised the Holocaust. “In the days since he returned to Twitter . . . Kanye has clipped the barbed wire around his mind and begun espousing the empty phraseology of alt-right thinkers who rallied around President Trump.”

For a week, then, liberals were given a glimpse of what it’s like to be a conservative in the United States. When you’re right of center, every day of your life you hear political commentary from beloved athletes or entertainers that sounds completely asinine to you. The only possible responses are to wall yourself off in a cultural basement stocked only with James Woods movies and Ted Nugent eight-tracks or simply to agree to disagree with celebrities about politics. I’m neither going to stop enjoying the work of Bruce Springsteen, Steven Spielberg and Meryl Streep nor curl up into the fetal position every time they express a political view with which I disagree.

So they respond with bullying, pettiness and gratuitous attacks

Kanye’s comments recalled the four-alarm dismay when Nicole Kidman and Roseanne Barr suggested Americans come together and support Trump. Even country singers are apparently no longer allowed to sound conservative: Shania Twain — in that neo-Bolshevik rag The Guardian, no less — was forced to explain why she said she would have voted for Trump if she could have (she’s Canadian. “Even though he was offensive, he seemed honest,” she initially said. “If I were voting, I just don’t want bull—t. I would have voted for a feeling that it was transparent. And politics has a reputation of not being that, right?” After getting lambasted, Twain published the Twitter version of a hostage video, saying, “I would like to apologize to anybody I have offended . . . The question caught me off guard. As a Canadian, I regret answering this unexpected question without giving my response more context . . . I do not hold any common moral beliefs with the current president.”

The irony underlying the agony in all of this is that Trump haters routinely say they can’t stand his bullying, his pettiness, his gratuitous attacks. So they respond with bullying, pettiness and gratuitous attacks directed not only at him but anyone who supports him, even tepidly or silently. A Philadelphia accountant was thrown out of a West Village bar simply for wearing a MAGA hat a year ago. If that had happened in Texas to someone wearing an Obama T-shirt five years ago, it would have been national news. Today the attitude toward the cultural left that any Trump fan who gets slapped is, “Serves them right.” Unfortunately for them, on the president’s side there is still plenty of dragon energy.

Kyle Smith is critic-at-large at National Review