There’s a funny exchange in the otherwise forgettable movie Father’s Day of 1997 that goes like this:

Billy Crystal: You’re a tragic hero. You’re Lou Gehrig.

Robin Williams: Who?

Crystal: Lou Gehrig. Everybody knows Lou Gehrig. The baseball player. He died of Lou Gehrig’s Disease.

Williams: Wow, what are the odds on that?

In the immediate run-up to the November midterm elections—out of which Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, was one of the few Republicans to emerge with much credit—Donald Trump himself appeared to become the ultimate victim of what has been called Trump Derangement Syndrome when he took credit for having put Mr. DeSantis in the governor’s mansion and proceeded to deride him as “Ron DeSanctimonious.”

It’s true that the former president has never numbered graciousness among his virtues as a public man, but such a misstep only hours before an election in which, though not a candidate himself, he had so large a stake seemed like a gratuitous effort of self-sabotage with the sort of swing voters his favored candidates were just then trying to attract.

There were other examples of his tone-deafness after the election, when he also announced his candidacy for the presidency in 2024. These included a similar belittling of another former protégé, Governor Glenn Youngkin of Virginia, and a dinner with three notorious anti-Semites, the most charitable interpretation of which is that he was, as Byron York says, “played” by one of them, his