6 January—Christian churches celebrate this date as Epiphany. Putting aside the religious significance, an epiphany is a sudden realization—from the Greek ἐπιφάνεια (epiphaneia), meaning “manifestation”—sort of like a revelation. Five years ago the unlikely epiphany was the insurrectional siege of the United States Capitol by typically crazed supporters of delusional, unstable narcissist Donald Trump, who insisted he had won the 2020 presidential election that he clearly had lost.

The deranged, sociopathic Trump and his gullible, unwavering supporters still maintain that Joe Biden won the 2020 election only by fraudulent means and that therefore Trump was the real winner. Hard as it is to believe, a quarter to a third of Americans—all Americans polled, not just Republicans—still think Trump won in 2020. And about half of all Americans believe the Adam and Eve myth.

In simple terms, the unsuccessful 6 January 2021 coup d’état—because that’s precisely what it was—revealed graphically the brilliant demagogue Trump’s power to control a particularly impressionable, thoroughly mindless, inherently violent segment of what accurately (and euphemistically) can be called the great unwashed. It also revealed the lack of principle, courage, and moral fiber of most congressional Republicans in both houses, while at the same time revealing the principle, courage, and moral fiber of Vice President Mike Pence.

Theodore Roosevelt died on 6 January 1919, at 60. He was a good man and a good Republican president at a time when Republicans were still considered good guys. While TR was an active environmentalist, ardently opposed to unregulated big business, and in favor of social security and a minimum wage for women, contrary to some current opinion he wouldn’t be a Democrat today. He was a hawk and quite an imperialist, for instance.

Teddy Roosevelt’s Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, delivered in his 1904 State of the Union address, in part as a reaction to the so-called Venezuela crisis of 1902-03, asserted America’s right as an “international police power” to send troops to Latin American nations to intervene in order to maintain stability and prevent European interference, especially regarding debt collection and “chronic wrongdoing.”

Monroe warned against colonization of Latin America by European powers; it was pretty much a bluff because the United States in the 1820s just didn’t have the military might to enforce his doctrine. Roosevelt, on the other hand, justified intervention to maintain stability—nominally, anyway—and had the military might to enforce his corollary.

So, while TR would without any doubt regard Donald Trump as a man and a president with all the contempt he so richly deserves, it’s not impossible he’d approve of at least some of Trump’s abominations in and around Venezuela . . .