Retired commodities dealer Leora Levy mimicked her party’s transformation to win a decisive upset in Tuesday’s Republican primary for the U.S. Senate. In 2016, Levy, a busy party establishment fundraiser, supported Jeb Bush for president.

In a newspaper plea for Bush. Levy called Donald Trump “ill-mannered” and “vulgar.” Trump nominated Levy to be our nation’s ambassador to Chile in 2019. The Republican-controlled Senate declined to confirm her.

Trump delivered again for Levy this month when he endorsed the Greenwich Republican five days before the party’s primary. Levy’s campaign had been gaining on party-endorsed rival Themis Klarides for weeks by casting herself as an implacable opponent of access to abortion and regulation of guns. Levy seemed on course to win before the late Trump boost, but his intervention made it inevitable.

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Levy matches the mood of her party. Angry and resentful are her themes. In Levy’s world, the apocalypse has arrived. Less than two years after voters defeated her hero, Levy sees a nation besieged by only troubles, a time of “general lawlessness.” She highlights her own immigration story while condemning those who seek the life she enjoys. The self-proclaimed “career American” would have you believe she is the last virtuous immigrant. Fear is her chilling calling card.

Enough Republicans, 47,000 of them, agreed with Levy’s message for her to defeat Klarides and Fairfield lawyer Peter Lumaj on Tuesday. The turnout was a third lower than 2018′s Republican primary. The battle of ugly sentence fragments that characterized the campaign left tens of thousands of party loyalists without a reason to vote.

There was one piece of encouraging news in the immediate aftermath of Levy’s win. The Trump loyalist did not complain about the legitimacy of the casting and counting of votes. Levy perpetuated no myths of bamboo ballots from China or voting machines manipulated by maligned forces controlled from Italy by the long-dead Venezuelan tyrant Hugo Chavez. Levy may be holding those in reserve until November.

Levy may find the campaign to November a trial. She faces incumbent Richard Blumenthal, a Greenwich Democrat. This is Blumenthal’s eighth campaign for statewide office. He’s never lost.

Blumenthal enters the final three months of the campaign with $8 million in the bank. Levy, who loaned hundreds of thousands of dollars to her primary campaign, has not been a prolific fundraiser for herself.

Voters will notice little interference from Levy as Blumenthal appears on our screens. His hardest decision will be which material to deploy. At her 2020 Senate confirmation hearing for the ambassadorship to Chile, Levy was confronted with her 2010 pronouncement that Democrats wanted to destroy the United States and “our way of life.”

In an epic reversal, Levy repudiated herself. She called her statement political “elbow throwing” and pointed out she was a private citizen when she hurled the abuse. In her Senate testimony just two years ago, she spoke of the American tradition of national unity after an election. That groveling performance revealed the Levy doctrine: Believe nothing I say in a campaign.

As one of Connecticut’s members of Republican National Committee, Levy has served on the executive committee of the party organization that has been paying millions of dollars of Trump’s legal fees. A late primary campaign endorsement from Trump was a mere token compared to Levy’s support for financing his battalion of lawyers.

Elsewhere, Republican primary voters in four towns did act in the public interest Tuesday when they rejected probate judge Peter Mariano’s bid for a sixth four-year term. Republicans in Beacon Falls, Middlebury, Naugatuck and Prospect chose state Rep. Rosa Rebimbas as their candidate.

Mariano was arrested three times last year on a DUI charge and twice for driving while his license was suspended. After getting a lenient deal from prosecutors, Mariano emerged from his four days in jail and received the Democratic nomination for probate judge as a welcome home gift.

Mariano and Rebimbas will meet again in the November election. Video of Mariano’s arrest reveal him repeatedly telling Naugatuck police officers he’s a judge and knows the chief and deputy chief of their department. Inexplicably, Democrats have embraced his behavior with their lifeline endorsement.

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Blumenthal, who owns the copyright on righteous indignation, will join Mariano on the party line in four towns. So will Gov. Ned Lamont and Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz. They remain silent accessories to their party providing Mariano’s only route to possibly abusing the public’s trust whenever he’s in a jam for four more years.

Kevin F. Rennie of South Windsor is a lawyer and a former Republican state senator and representative.