In a way, we owe part of the problem to a prevailing ethos among politicians that practicality rules supreme, that it’s okay to bend the truth, and that ends justify means.

This goes just as much for Democrats as Republicans, though clearly the ethos problem doesn’t apply to Democrats in this particular circumstance.

Politics, as they say, is the art of the possible, and I’m not some naif trying to deny that real-world politicians have to compromise with themselves sometimes.

But I think in the last two or three generations, our political class has lost something important — a certain sense of class and character, a resolve to hold core values sacred.

I don’t think a Mitch McConnell, for example, would have been possible two generations ago. I’m not saying that the voters would have thrown him out, I’m saying his own sense of ethics would have precluded his hypocrisy.

Maybe I’m wrong, but I think Republican kowtowing to Trump is a symptom of something more deeply rotten in the state of the US.