The following interhange about Trump, with its spot-on assessment, is in today's NYTimes' Tuesday "Conversation" between Republication Bret Stephens and Democrat Gail Collins. And it speaks directly to the ironclad sense of gloating superiority maintained by several on this board.

"Gail: Amazing we've gotten this far (in this conversation) without mentioning that the man we all regard as the very, very likely Republican nominee for president is facing multitudinous criminal indictments in Georgia, New York, Florida and Washington.

Bret: Ninety-one counts in all. You could almost take 'em down and pass 'em around like bottles of beer on the wall.

Gail: So far, many of his supporters seem pretty eager to accept his claims that everything is just an anti-Trump political conspiracy. Can that last? It's still about a year until the Republican presidential nominating convention in Milwaukee. I can't help feeling that something will come up that even his fans will find impossible to ignore.

Bret: "Gail, the truest thing Trump ever said is that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and his base would stick with him. The proper way to understand his appeal isn't by studying normal voter behavior. It's by studying cults. In a cult, the leader is always, simultaneously, a savior of his people and a victim of a vast and shadowy conspiracy. Unfortunately, all of these prosecutions, however merited, do more to reinforce than undermine the thinking of his followers."