She hadn’t noticed until now?

Jenna Ellis – the Donald Trump lawyer who like the former president faces criminal charges regarding attempted election subversion in his defeat by Joe Biden in 2020 – says she will not vote for him in the future because he is a “malignant narcissist” who cannot admit mistakes.

Why yes, of course he is, but he always has been, and that has always been glaringly obvious. It’s more glaringly obvious with him than perhaps anyone else on the planet. How could it possibly take until now to notice?

“I simply can’t support him for elected office again,” Ellis said. “Why I have chosen to distance is because of that frankly malignant narcissistic tendency to simply say that he’s never done anything wrong.”

Then why could she support him until now? It’s not as if he’s covert about the narcissism. It’s not as if he has that psychopath skill of acting like a non-psychopath.

Ellis, 38, was speaking on her show on American Family Radio, a rightwing evangelical network run by the American Family Association, a non-profit that by its own description has been “on the frontlines of America’s culture war” since 1977.

Family. Yes, because he’s such a pillar of familyhood – so reliable, so loyal, so steadfast, so affectionate.

Ellis is a former counsel for the Thomas More Society, a conservative Catholic group, whose claims to be a constitutional lawyer have been widely doubted.

Described by the New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman as “a lawyer whom Trump sought out after seeing her television commentary”, in 2020 Ellis rose from relative obscurity to become part of what she called an “elite strike force team” working to overturn Trump’s defeat by Biden.

Elite in what way exactly?

She knew Trump well “as a friend, as a former boss”, she said, adding: “I have great love and respect for him personally.

“But everything that you just said resonates with me as exactly why I simply can’t support him for elected office again. Why I have chosen to distance is because of that, frankly, malignant narcissistic tendency to simply say that he’s never done anything wrong.”

Nope. You can’t have both. You can love and respect people who are lazy or absent-minded or boring, but you can’t love and respect someone you consider a malignant narcissist. Malignant narcissism obliterates love and respect the way lave obliterates everything it touches.