WASHINGTON — When pigs fly.
That’s the kind of surreal day Thursday was at the Capitol. Donald Trump has so malignantly scrambled his party and this country that we keep seeing tableaus that defy belief and flout history.
The last time we took note of Dick Cheney and Patrick Leahy at the Capitol was in 2004 when the then vice president hurled a vulgarity — one not usually heard on the august Senate floor — at the Democratic senator from Vermont. Democrats had accused Cheney of using his government position to help win contracts for his former firm, Halliburton.
Now, 17 years later, the two men were back. Senator Leahy was snapping photos at the memorial on the first anniversary of the desecration of the Capitol. And Cheney was there with his daughter Liz, a congresswoman from Wyoming who is persona non grata in her own party and persona grata with the Democrats for speaking truth about Trump.
This time, Dick Cheney was not Darth Vader, employing his Death Star to blow up Democrats. This time he was Darling Dick, one of the only Republicans willing to defy Trump and say the obvious: The G.O.P. is embarrassing.
His erstwhile critic Nancy Pelosi warmly shook hands with “Vice,” and a cluster of Democrats waited to kiss his ring.
Trump is such an egomaniacal thug that Dick Cheney, christened “a self-aggrandizing criminal” by The Atlantic in 2011, seems saintly by comparison.
No matter, as The Atlantic pointed out, that as vice president, Cheney “advanced a theory of the...
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