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Now is the summer of our discontent — that’s pretty much the way we all felt a year ago, when we were shut down, locked up and trapped in the pandemic summer of 2020.

But this week — despite the fact that all Americans over age 12 have received what many would call the God-given gift of a chance to receive, absolutely free, a lifesaving COVID-19 vaccine — we are somehow feeling just as bad. Maybe even worse.

Every time we glanced at our news screens this week, we saw shattering proof that our Shakespearean medical tragedy hasn’t resolved, after all. A far more communicable and deadly delta variant has been allowed to surge big time in all 50 states. Why? Because about one-third of our fellow Americans haven’t gotten the free lifesaving vaccine doctors urged us to take. Many are staunch Donald Trump supporters who are making it a political thing. And in doing so, many willfully risk the probability of contracting the Delta variant, bringing it home and infecting their household’s unvaccinated children and vulnerable seniors.

Meanwhile, when our news screens weren’t showing that tragic COVID-19 news, they were bombarding us with images that showed Americans are simultaneously being confronted with yet another tragedy — one that isn’t really Shakespearean, but Jeffersonian: Our democracy is being attacked by Trump’s staunchest supporters, who are hell-bent on shattering America’s democracy, still believing they can actually reverse Trump’s 2020 election defeat.

This week, a House select committee hearing showed us images uglier and more un-American than we have seen before: Video of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection in which a crowd (sent by Donald Trump after a rally) bashed and smashed into the U.S. Capitol — battering and almost killing vastly outnumbered Capitol and D.C. police. Four brave, patriotic officers testified about the pain and punishment they endured from the rioters.

It was a domestic attack on an American government unlike anything in U.S. history. And I found myself thinking about what two Republican former presidents I knew very well — Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush — plus Ronald Reagan (whom I knew, but not as well) would have been saying today if they had sat with us as we watched our news screens this week. I’m sure Ford, Bush and Reagan would have been beyond repulsed — they’d have been unprintably furious — to have witnessed the conduct of their Republican presidential successor, Donald Trump, as he incited that crowd and ever since.

Imagine Presidents Ford, Reagan and G. H. W. Bush watching along with us the vicious video we saw this week of cops being pummeled nearly to death while defending our democracy. And imagine their reaction when they heard Trump’s lies this week in his recorded interview, conducted March 31, by The Washington Post’s Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker for their new book, “I Alone Can Fix It.”

“It was a loving crowd,” Trump said. ” … There was a lot of love. … Many, many people felt it. …They were ushered in by the police. The Capitol Police were ushering people in.”

Indeed, while my media colleagues breathlessly reported those words as big news, Presidents Ford, Bush and Reagan would probably have remembered that Trump had actually road-tested those lines on friendlier turf a few days earlier. On March 26, he told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham the Jan. 6 rioters posed “zero threat” to Congress and the police. ” … They’re hugging and kissing the police and the guards, you know?” Trump said. ” … A lot of the people were waved in, and then they walked in. And they walked out.”

Presidents Ford, Reagan and G. H. W. Bush would repudiate Trump’s effort to shatter America’s democracy, knowing that Trump’s effort would please only one other president — Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

Indeed, Ford, Bush and Reagan would find a way (preferably privately) to halt the shameful efforts of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and other Republicans who so reprehensibly lie and suck-up to Trump.

If you want to know what Presidents Ford, G. H. W. Bush and Reagan would say today, just listen to what Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., told that hearing as one of two Republicans who agreed to serve on the committee:

“Do we hate our political adversaries more than we love our country and revere our Constitution? … I pray that we all remember our children are watching as we carry out this solemn and sacred duty entrusted to us. Our children will know who stood for truth and they will inherit a nation. We hand to them a republic if we can keep it.”

I can imagine Jerry Ford, George H. W. Bush and Ronald Reagan leading an old-time patriotic crusade to repudiate Trump’s conduct and remind Americans what it was that once made their old party so grand.

Martin Schram. is an Op-Ed columnist for Tribune News Service, a veteran Washington journalist, author and TV documentary executive.