Watching Donald Trump on the stump in New Mexico this morning, I’m reminded of Robert Deniro in Goodfellas when Spider briefly and fatally stands up to Joe Pesci’s character, Tommy.  “Good for you. Don’t take no shit off nobody, “Deniro tells him, seconds before Tommy shoots Spider a bunch of times in the chest.

One of Trump’s appeals is that “he don’t take no shit off nobody.” Not even the Republican governor of New Mexico in her own state.

Susana Martinez is the governor of New Mexico and head of the Republican Governors Association for this election cycle. Which means she’s in charge of the national efforts to raise money for Republican’s running for governorships across the country.  It’s the kind of position an ambitious politician takes to rack up IOU’s across the country from candidates who might support her when she runs for national office. Chris Christy had this job for the last cycle, and it was going pretty well until the thugs on his staff closed the George Washington Bridge (and two interstate highways) for three days.

Martinez gets a lot of potential VP talk. Although, she and her staff apparently got staggeringly drunk last year in a hotel suite, throwing bottles of beer out the window into the street and being so rowdy that the hotel had to call the police to break it up. But, such an episode might actually make her a more attractive candidate for Trump.  But, not after yesterday.

Trump was in New Mexico yesterday, and Governor Martinez found some other pressing duties to attend to and avoided appearing on stage with him or even meeting him. This kind of thing happens all the time when you have an unpopular candidate and is a sure sign that for all the stories about Republicans closing ranks behind Trump, they don’t really mean it. Let’s see how many of them actually want to be photographed with the guy.

Again, this kind of thing happens all the time. Think back to when there were still Democratic governors and senators in the deep south. Any time a Democratic president or presidential candidate showed up in their state, the Democrats in those states would regrettably inform President Clinton or Senator Kerry that there was a county fair four-hundred miles away that they were just committed to attend. Really sorry that they couldn’t make it, but next time, for sure.

But, Trump reacted to Martinez’s demurral by just ripping into her in front of a Republican audience in her own state.  It’s remarkable. She’s the sitting Republican Governor of an increasingly Democratic state. She’s Latino and a woman. And she’s head of the Republican Governors Association. And he just rips into her like she was Hillary Clinton.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3L5qtzJs-80

Which brings me to my larger point. Anyone who has worked on a political campaign, whether for a presidential candidate or for some small local office, knows that the great joy of politics is the connections you make with other people.

My father, he and my mother are local politicians in Western Pennsylvania, once was quoted in the local paper as saying, “everyone should run for office once in their lives.”

A political campaign is one of the purest forms of community. Disparate people working for a common goal. People you flat-out come to love. People you hate but have to work with. People you know weren’t on your side in that last primary and won’t be in the next one, but you are together with them for a few months this time, and, really, they aren’t that bad a person. Shared ecstatic moments when you win. And broken hearts shared with people you might never meet again, but who you’ll never forget.

Trump has none of this. He elides all that’s warm, and human, and joyful about politics.  Hillary will have quite a team out there working for her: Obama, Biden, Bill, eventually Bernie, Elizabeth Warren, and a plethora of senators and governors and congress people all over local television and showing up at endless barbecues and Fourth of July parades.

Trump has a few people on the payroll and his statuesque wife and daughters, but he’s otherwise all alone in his well-upholstered plane or sitting on the sofa in Trump Tower eating candy, watching all the news channels at the same time, and firing off tweets.

No team. No friends—lasting or even just for the moment. Nothing that makes politics so much fun and so essentially human.