My short 52-page pamphlet composed of 10 columns I wrote about Putin’s role behind the January 6 capitol sacking has been published, and is now available on Amazon. No one else to my knowledge has presented this important perspective and I believe it is essential as Pelosi’s group is formed and the hearings are set to begin.

Of course, ugly facts about the Trump presidency continue to surface, including the arrest of Trump 2017 inaugural fund head Thomas Barrack on charges of illegally lobbying for the United Arab Emirates. Additionally, it turns out that no less than four members of Trump’s cabinet had been referred to the Justice Department for illegal activity, all of which were squashed by Trump’s attorney general Barr.

They’re all damn crooks! But history will report that the biggest single crime of that administration was its screwing up the nation’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic which cost, officially, over 600,000 American lives in just over a year. Unofficial counts are much higher.

Key Republicans are not only continuing to suffer under the toxic influence of Trump, following an unbelievably damaged and corrupt man in a most pathetic way, but they are digging their own graves deeper and deeper as all of the new revelations about Trump continue coming to light. It is truly astonishing.

They’re ignoring the reality of how the U.S. electorate rose up to repudiate Trump over the last four years, beginning with the record turnout of Americans pouring into the streets the day after his inauguration in January 2017.

They, and some sad commentators, believe there will be a GOP rebound in the coming midterms, but that fiction is confounded by those pesky things known as facts, including the electoral results in 2019, when in local elections nationally, Trump was soundly repudiated even more than in 2017. Nowhere was that more true than in Virginia.

Looking at the bellwether case of State Del. Danica Roem, the first transgender candidate elected to such a high office, her upset victory against the state’s most infamous archconservative, Bob Marshall, in 2017 was turned into a veritable landslide in her re-election in 2019. Yes, it had something to do with her deft handling of her office, but it reflected a still-sharp national mood that saw Trump as a mafia-style thug and crook far more clearly than partisan Republicans.

For most Americans, from the beginning, his body language emanated from every pore of his body a sociopathic lying egomaniac and angry, brutal thug. It is stunning to me that far more people failed to smell, much less see, that.

We’ve also learned that, according to his early campaign manager Corey Lewandowki, the admission that, yes, hundreds of starving New York actors were hired at $50 a head to create the illusion that Trump had popular political support at the famous event when he rode down an escalator at his Manhattan Trump Towers property to officially announce his campaign.

Lewandowski, who furiously denied just this when asked by reporters at the time, casually conceded it was true all along in a statement this week.

Shame on you, media who took anything a Trump person said at face value at that time, or for that matter, at any among many points since. Trump’s skill at playing a gullible media so completely to his advantage was maybe the only thing in the world he was actually relatively good at.

If anything, we should be heartened at this stage by the outrage finally openly expressed by Dr. Anthony Fauci in a Congressional hearing on the Covid-19 pandemic this week when he was badgered by Sen. Rand Paul.

Paul again accused Fauci of being the “bad guy” in the pandemic, and Fauci finally had enough, and shot back with an aggressive repudiation of everything, all the misinformation, Paul was spewing.

Let this be an object lesson to advocates for sanity and reality everywhere. We cannot settle for a dispassionate encyclopedia-reading delineation of “facts.” Facts come against furious enemies and must be expressed with just as much if not more passion to prevail.

After all, science and medicine has always been driven by a passion to alleviate suffering.

Nicholas Benton may be emailed at nfbenton@fcnp.com.