In news that shouldn’t surprise anyone paying attention, former journalist Leonard Downey Jr.’s commentary in this week’s Washington Post is titled, “A Second Trump Presidency Would Be a Disaster for the News Media.”

Attacks on the press were a staple of Trump’s four years in the White House that began on Day One when he marched his press secretary into the press briefing room to force the press corps there to swallow an incredible lie, that the crowds at the inauguration and parade were in the millions when clear photograph evidence contradicted that wildly false claim. Trump has spent his entire career in presidential politics demeaning and trying to discredit the press, often opening remarks at rallies, for example, by pointing his finger menacingly at the press assigned to them with the exclamation that they are “the enemies of the people.”

For all the sorry souls who continue to support Trump to this day and who buy his con that they, themselves, somehow are “patriots,” the Apple TV series that aired this month about Founding Father Benjamin Franklin should help to correct that pathetic claim. Followers of Trump are far, far from being “patriots” in the American revolutionary cause, maybe of Putin’s but definitely not in ours.

Actor Michael Douglas did an Emmy Award-worthy job of portraying a realistic picture of Franklin, who was perhaps the most important of all the Founders and an amazingly seminal figure in the advancement of the human race and democracy, overall. The TV series is roughly based on the important scholarly and highly readable work of Stacy Schiff, author of “A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France and the Birth of America” (2005).

Douglas’ portrayal of Franklin is uniquely commendable, depicting him as the titanic scientist and wise negotiator who truly single-handedly brought the French into the American revolution as indispensable contributors at all levels to the fight to establish the independence of the American colonies from the British.

The series focuses on Franklin’s years in Paris convincing the leaders there of the need to back the American revolution. It does not go into his earlier life when his role as an inventor discovering how electricity works, to that of working on and founding newspapers, philosophical societies, libraries, hospitals and a postal service that linked the colonies were critical in setting a context where the American revolution was possible.

Franklin was in France during almost the entire duration of the fighting in the colonies, starting in the earliest days of 1777, six months after the Declaration of Independence was signed but before the insurgent Americans had any real means of achieving their independence.

A highlight of the TV series shows how news of the first American victory in combat at Saratoga in September and October (two phases) of 1777 turned the tide of French support for the revolution, leading to the signing of the French Treaty of Alliance of Amity and Commerce with the American insurgency signed in February 1778. Until Saratoga, no one thought the insurgency would succeed, much as few thought England could survive Hitler in the early days of World War II.

If there is any shortcoming in the Franklin TV series, it might be in the lack of sufficient connection of Franklin to other leaders of the Enlightenment and the influence of their ideas on the emergence of democracy. The Ken Burns series on Franklin that ran in recent years on PBS does a better job of that, except that Franklin was not merely associated with the Enlightenment, he was the Enlightenment to a large degree.

What came through in the Apple TV series (where the actor portraying Franklin’s grandson, Temple Franklin, the young British actor Noah Jupe, is also deserving of an Emmy) was the humanist basis of Franklin’s motivation. It comes through in one of the final scenes, where prospects of the American victory have been established, and the Franklin character says the basis of the new nation would be founded in “virtue, honesty, education of the people and the rule of law.”

In fact, in all his writings throughout his long life, the essential role of “virtue” was central to everything Franklin stood for.