It's been quite a week for Republicans, as their presumed nominee for president implodes, taking the soul of the party down with him.

"This is the most un-American thing from a politician since Joe McCarthy," Lindsey Graham said this week about Trump's widely discredited racist comments about the judge hearing lawsuits against his scam university.

"There will come a time when the love of country will trump hatred of Hillary," continued the conservative senior senator from South Carolina, not exactly a standard bearer for political correctness.

Wow. The Earth is moving when conservative Republican politicians begin to appear to thaw their Clinton hatred.

And yet here in Connecticut, it is the Republican Party that seems to be in ascendancy, with hopes of capturing, at the least, control of the state Senate in the fall elections.

Connecticut Democrats seem to have only themselves to blame for this.

And it seems even a racist, misogynist candidate at the head of the Republicans' national ticket probably won't save them.

Let's be honest.

Connecticut's fiscal ship is in flames, a conflagration of epic proportions catalogued in a long list of state rankings that consistently place Connecticut last or close to last in important economic assessments.

A principal core of these problems is decades of coddling government unions so that feeding the generous pensions of state government workers, the highest average in the country, at $39,172 per retiree, is now the fastest growing item in the state budget.

Gov. Dannel Malloy has finally found religion on this topic, but the rest of the Democratic leadership turned deaf ears to his sermons during this year's dismal session of the General Assembly, in which none of the institutional fiscal failures was addressed.

As Malloy appears ready to don his survival suit for a leap from the burning ship of state — each new Trumpism seems to buoy his chances of an appointment in the Clinton Administration — the rest of the Democratic leadership pack have kept their union collars firmly in place.

It is hard to imagine, but true, that the party seems destined to put an employee of the powerful union representing state workers in charge of the House.

Talk about a conflict. Watch for an enormous, state government jobs and entitlement protection package funded by new taxes, once the elections are safely in their wake.

In what seems like it should be a plot narrative out of Alice in Wonderland, Democrats are poised to elevate House Majority Leader Joe Aresimowicz, a $97,000-a-year employee of the AFSCME, to the powerful job of House speaker.

Of course voters will have to let Democrats keep control of the hen house, before they turn its leadership over to the foxes.

It is unlikely that voters this year will upend this decadeslong strangle hold of the House by unions.

But this does seem to be a pivotal year in state politics.

You need to look no further than eastern Connecticut to see it.

The region's delegation made a sharp turn into the GOP camp in the last election, and local Democrats seem cued up to lose more seats this year.

What could eastern Connecticut Democrats have been thinking of in nominating Timothy Bowles, a retired state worker earning a $62,232 state pension, to replace Andrew Maynard in the 18th District?

That means two of the party's candidates from the region for Senate take home more in state pensions than the typical hardworking Connecticut wage earner.

Are they going to champion the desperately needed reform of Connecticut government pensions?

I doubt it.

I expect a summer of a quickly deflating Trump candidacy.

Maybe the only prominent Connecticut Democrat who may benefit from that is the governor, who must drift into his own dreamland these days in a comfy Clinton cabinet chair.

This is the opinion of David Collins.

d.collins@theday.com