Say what you will about Trump and his friends, his weird Twitter fans and his fan-base of racists. They have finally done what every one else had seemed to consider the next to impossible: They have made the establishment, the favorite whipping boy even of some of its members, manage to look pretty good.

Never in its wildest dreams (assuming an “establishment” has them) could it have inflicted in 10 or more decades the amount of damage to the party, the country and what was once seem as a normative code of public civility what Trump has managed to create in 10 months.