Only subscribers got to read today’s column about why it takes more than political pressure to turn your back on your country. It takes an overwhelming lust for power.

Ron Johnson seems ready to go where Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wouldn’t go, picking up where Donald Trump left off in attempting to betray the US electorate. Lindsey Graham seems prepared to whitewash the Kremlin’s sabotage of our sovereignty and its role in electing an illegitimate president. Both men are enabling Trump’s purge of career officials more loyal to truth, justice and the American way than they are to him. Yet from what I can tell, neither is being held accountable for his actions. It’s as if they don’t have agency of their own. According to one member of the Washington press corps, whose perspective I take as conventional wisdom, “they’re cowed by Trump.”

Actually, they aren’t. They’re willing co-conspirators.

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Thanks! —John Stoehr