Hillary Clinton is just as delusional as Trump if she thinks she can appeal to the twisted morality of his supporters after Pittsburgh

The quiet voice of sanity tending to be lost amid the din of partisan lunacy, you may have missed the words of Dr Jeff Cohen.

A member of the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, he is also president of Allegheny General Hospital, where the alleged killer was treated for gunshot wounds sustained in a shootout with police.

A few hours after Robert Bowers allegedly massacred 11 elderly people while yelling his desire for “all Jews to die”, this Jew visited him in his hospital room. “I just asked him how he was doing,” he told ABC News. “I asked him if he was in pain, and he said no, he was fine.”

Cohen added that Bowers was being cared for by another Jewish doctor and a Jewish nurse. “We have a very simple mission,” he said. “We’re here to take care of sick people. We’re not here to judge you. I am,” he forlornly continued, “trying to make some sense of this.”

Those words won’t make a jot of difference to the outcome of the US midterms a week today (though the killings, along with the Florida MAGA fan’s pipe bombs, seem to have stalled Republican momentum), or to the political landscape beyond. Few will be aware of them at all. Those who are won’t have an epiphany and stop hating Jews or anyone else if they hate them now.

But the facts they relate and the sentiment they express deserve to be recognised and demand to be celebrated. What Cohen passes off as basic medical professionalism is that, but it is also something more.

It is a reminder, when this is so easily forgotten, that however deafening the sound of people judging each other with poison darts on Twitter and with bullets, simple humanity will make itself heard.

Under another president, any other president, Cohen would surely be invited to the Oval Office to have the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest US civilian honour, pinned to his lapel.

Under this president, who reportedly had to be badgered by his Jewish son-in-law and Jewish convert daughter to express even the most glib, synthetic sympathy for the victims, that seems unlikely. Cohen will return to the obscurity from which he came, and the caravan of psychotic rage will roll on towards the next slaughter of innocents.

Nothing – literally nothing imaginable – will penetrate the perverted morality of those who support a man whose reflex response to the Pittsburgh horror was to blame its victims for the lack of armed security in a place of worship.

Hence the widespread assumption that, if he avoids tanking the US economy, Trump will be exceedingly hard to beat in 2020. For all that, potential Democratic opponents are already testing the water. Among this crowded field, in her own head if nowhere else, appears to be Hillary Clinton. As if on a mission to reposition herself as a living exemplar of the Einsteinian definition of madness, Clinton told an interviewer that she would like to be president.

The message was mixed. She did say she has “no desire to run”, but also suggested she has the ideal experience to clean out the steaming, putrid mess Trump will leave behind him. “I’m not even going to think about that,” she said of a third crack at the White House, evidently thinking about precisely that, “until we get through this 6 November [midterm] election”.

Easy as it is to ridicule the notion, you understand the air of shell-shocked bewilderment she wears these days like a carefully colour-coded accessory to the trusty pants suit. She probably ought to wear it more like a hair shirt, her complacency on the campaign trail having done as much as anything else to release the kraken. But to win the popular vote by 3 million and lose is a haymaker even the most durable punch bag in modern political history could not be expected to take on the chin without becoming a bit punchy.

If her own mind is the only conceivable venue in which she is a viable runner for the presidency, it is impossible to fathom the depths of the generic politician’s capacity for self-delusion. Thankfully, thinking of her dignity, her oldest and staunchest supporters wasted no time before pulling the plug on whatever ambition she was sustaining on life support.

Yet somehow, after 21 months of Trump, the Democrats are still without an unofficial leader. Even Barack Obama, who is finally, gingerly taking off the gloves, cannot find the words to make any more sense of how his country has sunk to this than Cohen can make of the massacre in his synagogue. Even Obama hasn’t developed a coherent vision of how it might be led out of this civil war.

A chilling sense of misery about the state of America and the world had infiltrated the bones long before Sunday’s Brazilian presidential election diminished any residual hope that the nationalist surge throughout western democracies might be nothing more than a blip.

The horror in Pittsburgh that preceded it by a day will not prove to be the ebbing point of this hideous tide. But while he may be president of nothing more than a hospital, a Jewish doctor, with two Jewish colleagues, soared above the screeching hatred to give a lesson, if only for a sacred moment, about what it should mean to be human.