While I was working on my PhD in the late eighties and early nineties, My wife and I purchased a very large house so that we could rent out rooms to other students. I was walking by the office of one of the campus ministers who had become a friend of mine over several years. She stopped me and asked if I had a room to rent to a young woman who was trying to begin her college program.

The young woman in question had been living in a shelter for battered women in the area and wanted to live where she would have more freedom to attend classes. I agreed to interview the young woman. She came to the house where I explained to her that the residents of the house were exclusively women, some of whom had small children with them. Under those circumstances, it would have to be a condition of her residence that she have no contact with the man who had been abusing her.

She began to cry and confessed that she had been seeing him even though she was in a shelter for battered women. “I just love him,” she exclaimed “I have to be able to see him. With some degree of sorrow, I had to turn her away. Attachments such as the one I have just related are self-destructive but real.

Every time I read a post from someone who extols their admiration for Mr. Trump in glowing terms, I am reminded of that unfortunate young woman.