WITH HANDS THAT SMALL, SOMETHING HAD TO BE ENORMOUS TO COMPENSATE:

The question in the title of Timothy Egan's latest column for The Times is "Who Will Save the Republic?" My answer is Donald Trump, of course.

I mean this in the Anna Sebastian sense -- Madame Sebastian being the shrewd, sinister and very Teutonic mother played by Leopoldine Konstantin in Alfred Hitchcock's 1946 classic, "Notorious."

Anna's adult son, Alexander (Claude Rains), is part of a group of well-heeled Nazis living and scheming revenge in Brazil when he marries Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman), a beautiful young woman he deems trustworthy because her father was a convicted German spy.

Too late, Alexander realizes that Alicia is really an American agent, and that exposure of the fact will mean certain death for him at the hands of his fellow Nazis. When he confesses the problem to mother, she responds with the most reproachful reassurance in movie history:

"We are protected by the enormity of your stupidity -- for a time."

Just so with our 45th president. His views are often malevolent, and his conduct might ultimately prove criminal. But we, too, are protected, for a time, by the enormity of his stupidity.

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