A startled wife catches her husband in bed with another woman. The husband asks if she will believe him or her lying eyes.

So much for old jokes.

But it is no joke that former President Trump is asking Americans to close their eyes to his suspicious affection for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“You wonder, what does Putin have on Donald Trump that he always has to be beholden to him, his buddy in vileness?" Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), the former House Speaker, bluntly said on MSNBC last week. "I don’t know what [Putin] has on [Trump] but I think it’s probably financial.”

Top Republicans are sounding the same alarm, usually in private but sometimes in public.

“Obviously, former President Trump is pushing" for the U.S. to break away from the NATO allies, Paul Ryan, a Republican and former House Speaker, told the Washington Post last week.

“So, what I very much worry about is [that Trump and his followers] are helping curate a line of thought, a school of thought [inside the GOP] that is isolationist, that is pro-Putin, pro-Russia, pro-tyranny at the end of the day,” Ryan said of Trump’s coziness with Putin. “And that is extremely dangerous for all democracy but for us as ourselves as a democracy.”

The two former House leaders spoke out after House Republicans loyal to Trump refused to act on a bill to send money to Ukraine to help it resist Russia’s invasion.

Trump recently........

© The Hill