“Donald Trump is compromised,” Republican political consultant Stuart Stevens told former CNN news anchor Jim Acosta on January 19. “He’s acting as a functional asset of the Russian federation,” Stevens, who at one time served as Mitt Romney’s top campaign strategist continued. “And if you are a Republican senator and you’re going along with Donald Trump, he is compromising you….

The degree to which the Republican party has been compromised by Russia, I think, is one of the great underreported, understudied stories of our time. And it's been going on for a while. I mean, you go back to early warning signs, the way that they [Russia] funneled all this money into the NRA, and they were compromised by this, and then they clearly compromised the Heritage Foundation. And now you have that consistently for decades the single greatest antagonist to the Soviet Union and then an expansive Russian Federation was the most conservative element of the Republican party. And now it's the beating heart of the pro-Putin [constituency].... You don't say that you're a Ronald Reagan Republican, the guy that stood in front of [the Berlin wall and said] "Tear down the wall Mr. Gorbachev," and you go along with Donald Trump. No.  Either you're lying then or you're lying now. I think all this stuff that we put out as principles for the party were just marketing slogans.

Up until a few days ago when the Court of International Trade ruled that Trump did not have the authority to impose broad tariffs on US trading partners¹, one of the noisiest news stories was the release of the book titled Original Sin, by CNN news anchor Jake Tapper and British journalist Alex Thomson. As its subtitle conveniently informs us, the book claims to document “President Biden’s decline, its cover-up, and his disastrous choice to run again.” The “original sin,” in the authors’ view, Axios’s Mike Allen tells us, was Biden’s decision to run again. Setting aside Democratic party insiders such as Jaime Harrison and Jake Sullivan disputing key claims made in the book, and setting aside the sloppy and unclear appropriation of a term that theologians have debated since at least the time of St. Augustine, I would assert that the bigger story is Trump’s very public cognitive deterioration and its effect on what passes for policy in the current administration.