Capitol Hill Ralph Club

WASHINGTON — I never thought it could be as brutal.

The same Republican gargoyles who once tore Anita Hill limb from limb knew they had to tread gingerly, with women at the barricades. They outsourced the estrogen to “a female assistant,” as Mitch McConnell called Maricopa County sex-crimes prosecutor Rachel Mitchell.

And race, which scorched the Hill-Thomas hearings, was not a part of this excruciating face-off. Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh were summoning memories of summer days in the very white, very cosseted country club, prep school world of suburban Washington.

But, shockingly, it was more brutal.

Not only because the sexual transgression Blasey was describing was more savage. But also because Kavanaugh simply adapted Clarence Thomas’s playbook of raging against the machine. Thomas’s fury was white-hot. Kavanaugh’s, weepy. But the pitch was the same.

“This is a circus,’’ Thomas seethed in 1991.

“This is a circus,’’ Kavanaugh seethed on Thursday.

Kavanaugh echoed Thomas’s martyrdom, claiming he was being “destroyed” by partisans conspiring to dig up dirt. He charged that Democrats were conducting a “grotesque and coordinated character assassination” because of their anger about President Trump’s ascent and their desire for revenge after his own seamy work helping Ken Starr in his pervy pursuit of Bill Clinton.

It was a cri de coeur custom-made for the age of Trump — and custom-designed to please Trump himself: entitled white men acting like the new minority, howling about things that are being taken away from them, aggrieved at anything that diminishes them or saps their power.