In case nobody noticed, Donald Trump on Tuesday essentially accused the father of his now-former Republican opponent Ted Cruz of being involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. The accusation was based on an extremely dubious identification in a photograph published by the tabloid National Enquirer, which has endorsed Trump.
For Trump, this sort of thing isn’t a bug; it’s a feature.
George Orwell was writing in 1944 about leftwing apologists for the USSR, but he might as well have been writing about any sane and sensible Republican (and I believe there are still many) inclined to support Donald Trump out of a misplaced sense of party loyalty:
Do remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for. Don’t imagine that for years on end you can make yourself the boot-licking propagandist of the Soviet régime, or any other régime, and then suddenly return to mental decency. Once a whore, always a whore.