Every day millions of people point to Donald Trump as the worst person in politics.

It’s not true. There are at least fifty people in Washington, D.C. alone who are unquestionably more loathsome than Donald Trump.

That’s the number of Senate Republicans who met with Donald Trump yesterday at the White House. One of their colleagues did not attend. He is home in Arizona fighting a brain tumor. Six days ago these fifty Americans learned that a member of the White House communications team, when the subject of their esteemed colleague’s opposition to Trump’s nominee for CIA director was raised in a meeting, had joked that McCain didn’t matter because he “was dying anyway.”

This used to be the kind of juncture where our politicians would come together regardless of politics, at least in public, and condemn a shocking comment about a legitimate American hero, much less one who may not live out the month.

Not any more. A small minority of these fifty Republican Senators expressed their disgust in public. An even smaller number demanded an apology. You can count the ones who asked that this person be fired from her job on the fingers on one hand. Over the next five days, as it became clear that their leader was not going to allow any such apology or any such firing, their puny protests devolved to “I am not going to say anything further about this” statements.

These were the people who were ushered into the White House yesterday for a face to face meeting with Donald Trump. Not a single one of them brought up this disgraceful and defining moment in the Trump presidency and in the history of their party. Not one.

There are literally no words in the English language—perhaps in any language—to convey the loathsomeness of these craven invertebrates. Trump was raised in privilege to be the penultimate shitheel. He never served in the military. He never knew John McCain. He was never a Republican. He has never respected the military, our institutions of government, or their stated codes of conduct and behavior. He has no morality. He will never apologize. He will never change.

These fifty other reptiles posing as human beings are, like John McCain, Republicans. They all know John McCain personally. They all know his profound personal history of sacrifice and service—his military service, his five years as a prisoner of war, his broken body that is the permanent record of the physical torture he endured, the more than three decades in government—and they all know that he is in the fight of his life. They all campaigned for him when he crisscrossed the country as their Presidential nominee in 2008. They have all honored him as a true American hero. One of those fifty is his fellow Senator from Arizona, who has praised McCain to the skies and who, after announcing that he was quitting politics without fighting for his Senate seat, has shown a penchant for making ringing speeches about political courage and moral conduct to an empty Senate Chamber. Another is, by McCain’s own account, his closest friend. Many in this group served in the military; they all can’t talk enough about how they honor our veterans. They all know that their President sneered at McCain’s war record during the 2016 campaign.

Trump doesn’t apologize because his world is divided into “winners” and “losers,” and people who apologize are in the latter category because you get no credit for saying that you’re sorry. This sociopathic view of morality is the new normal in the Republican Party. The ONLY thing that counts is the winning, whether it is ratings, polls, elections, or the size of your crowds. McCain is a loser not only because he was captured but because he lost to Obama. All the Americans who voted against Trump are losers.

This is no small shift. By buying wholeheartedly into Trump, the GOP has turned its back on the Constitution and the institutions created to defend it in favor of a personality cult where winners are defined as those most loyal—not to the country, but to Trump. The only people worse than an odious tyrant are the people who should know better but who support him anyway.

What is going through John McCain’s mind today? He has spoken eloquently about how he survived his horrific ordeal in the prison camp because he focused on his fellow prisoners and of one day returning home. McCain refused an offer of early release by the North Vietnamese, telling them that he would not allow himself to be freed until his fellow prisoners were also liberated. Now he discovers that he lived through that ordeal and spent thirty years serving his country and his party only to find that he doesn't have a single true friend among his fellow Republicans on Capitol Hill. No doubt he has also reminded himself that he has the respect of millions of others, the love of his family, and his own self esteem. That last quality is something his Republican colleagues will never experience. Or deserve. Or even understand.