Robert P. George, the conservative Princeton professor, posted that Trump is using Nikki Haley’s first name to play on prejudice against nonwhite immigrants — a point that seems to me to be obviously true; indeed, it’s worse than that, since Trump keeps mangling her name either deliberately or with culpable carelessness. Trump was behaving “disgustingly,” George wrote, but added, “The decency of the American people blunts such stunts.”

Bill Kristol then weighed in, not to join in the criticism of Trump but to take a swipe at George. He complained that George supported DeSantis, who also appealed to prejudice (supposedly) and then endorsed Trump; and further complained that as a student of history, George “knows better than to blithely assure us ‘the decency of the American people blunts such stunts.’”

Kristol has let his political frustrations get the better of him. I’ll leave aside his half-articulated argument about DeSantis and George — although I am skeptical a fuller articulation would make it plausible — and instead focus on his comment about the “decency of the American people.”

Kristol’s criticism makes sense only on the assumption that George was saying that the American people are and always have been so virtuous that bigotry has never paid political dividends. That would indeed be a stupid thing to say. But we could read George in any number of better ways.

George’s comment could be treated as a mere tautology: Whatever decency exists among the American people reduces the appeal of indecency. It could be taken as a judgment about how Trump’s appeal works — an accurate judgment: Support for him has fallen after such incidents as the Charlottesville march, and it seems highly likely that his persistently weak polling is connected to his expressions of prejudice. Or it could be taken as hortatory: Consider all the times Joe Biden has said of Trump and America that “we’re better than this.” Blithe! Biden knows better!

Maybe Biden and George are pandering to the public in saying such things. Or maybe they both agree that “as publics go, the American public has a pretty good track record” — to quote a writer with whom Bill Kristol these days surely has his disagreements but whom he nonetheless respects.