The Julius Streicher of our time pushed Trump’s political credibility into a nosedive that hit terminal political velocity as he crashed the Moore campaign into the trash fire on top of Burning Dumpster Mountain.

It was Bannon who turned this race into a contest between his squad of Team Bannon, Roy Moore, and NAMBLA versus Mitch McConnell, the Senate, and Republicans who have the temerity to not favor electing a child molester to the U.S. Senate. Like a 300-pound lump of gristle, Bannon decided to lodge himself in the throat of the most powerful serious Republican in D.C. It was a bad, bad bet.

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The con game Steve Bannon has pulled on Republicans in the last year-and-a-half goes something like this: Only Bannon and Breitbart have an ear to the ground and a finger on the pulse of the new nationalist movement that’s reshaping conservatism and its own image. The scam centers on the concept that a rising force of nationalists who hate brown people, gay people, and anyone who doesn’t toe the neo-nationalist line is unstoppable, implacable, and at the immediate disposal of Trump and Bannon. The scam puts hatred of the media and “elites” (by which they mean, “people who can read”) before any conservative principle.

We also realized last night that there is a Newtonian character to Donald Trump’s social media power. Trump may motivate his part of the Republican base with whatever lunatic batshittery streams from his fingers to his Twitter account, but activating those individuals also brings an equal and opposite reaction from people who don’t breathe through their mouths, don’t read the comments section of Breitbart or /r/The_Donald, or believe that everything wrong in their lives comes from the conspiracy between George Soros and the lizard people.

Yes, Donald Trump gets the base riled up. His rock-bottom approval ratings mean he also activates women, African Americans, Hispanics, and every other demographic group that doesn’t fit into his 1950s (or is it 1850s?) fantasy of what America looks, works, and feels like. Those folks—and for many of you Trump readers, this is a complicated idea, so follow along—comprise what scientists call a majority of voters. And they hate him. They hate him so much they’ll crawl across broken glass to vote against him and any candidate he endorses.

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Today’s walk backs, revisions, and memory-holing of Donald Trump’s full-throated endorsement of Roy Moore isn’t a coincidence, but no one’s falling for it. Donald Trump strongly and powerfully supported a man he knew to be a pedophile. Donald Trump dispatched Steve Bannon down to Alabama in order to rile up the pointy white hat crowd in the Darwin’s waiting-room meeting halls where Roy Moore’s cousin-curious supporters grunted and hooted their approval as Bannon capered on stage like a hirsute gremlin. It didn’t go unnoticed that his firehose of insults was not directed as much at Doug Jones and the Democrats, but at Republicans and conservatives he seeks to destroy.

Last night was a small victory for decency and political sanity. It was a moment when America’s reddest state said, “Nah. We’re good with the abortion guy over the guy who wants to hit it with high school girls.” It was a signal that the decency caucus in D.C., as small and scared as they feel sometimes, have a path out of the madness of Trumpism, if they’ll take it. If they don’t, 2018 will be a political bloodbath that no tax cut will solve.

The fact that Steve Bannon got beat like a rented mule is just the icing on the cake.