Last year, when the presidential season got going, I made an observation: Donald Trump would often say “the Republicans” or sometimes even “you Republicans,” as though they were foreign to him, and he to them. Yet he was running for the Republican nomination. Which he has now cinched, apparently.

I myself have had to start saying “the Republicans,” and I find it very hard. Sometimes I slip up, saying “we” and “us.” Those words come naturally to my lips. I used them for so long. Indeed, I was a Republican a lot longer — decades longer — than Trump has been.

Divorced …