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Trump’s “black soul.”

Ethan Miller/Getty Images

Bret Stephens at The Wall Street Journal has a good insight into what makes Trump’s response to the Khans so egregious:

What makes Mr. Trump’s remarks so foul is their undisguised sadism. He took a woman too heartbroken and anxious to speak of her dead son before an audience of millions and painted a target on her. He treated her silence as evidence that she was either a dolt or a stooge. He degraded her. “She was standing there. She had nothing to say,” Mr. Trump told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. “She probably, maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say. You tell me.”

In this comment there was the full unmasking of Mr. Trump, in case he needed further unmasking. He has, as Humayun’s father Khizr put it, a “black soul.” His problem isn’t a lack of normal propriety but the absence of basic human decency. He is morally unfit for any office, high or low.

This is, increasingly, Trump’s image. Not a mere bigot or blowhard but a fundamentally disturbed person who just might be evil incarnate. The top story on The Washington Post right now is “There is something very wrong with Donald Trump.” The second-most read story is “Is Donald Trump plain crazy?”

Today saw the first endorsement of Hillary Clinton by a Republican congressman. As Stephens says, “[A]t least she’s not a sociopath.” This may well be the reason more Republicans join Clinton as we head into the fall.