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In today’s edition:

• Looking back at O.J. Simpson
• Trump’s followers are sinking deeper into disinfo
• Bipartisan, pro-child, anti-fraud, dead on arrival?

The end of O.J.’s run

On Wednesday, O.J. Simpson died of cancer at 76. Headline writers puzzled over how to describe a decedent best known for being a celebrity acquitted of a double murder after a trial that devoured the national news, tabloid and otherwise, for the better part of a year — and who most people still think was guilty. Uh, “football great”?

Yet it is possible to acknowledge the sweep of a life whose most horrific episodes were so shocking in part because of how golden the earlier times had been. Gene Robinson, in a contemplation of the real meaning of O.J., gracefully does just that, without remotely letting the man off the hook. “I have not a scintilla of doubt that he committed the murders,” Gene writes.

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Yet he also remembers, long before that white Bronco chase and all the luridness that followed, “the thrill of watching Simpson run. A linebacker would be bearing down on him, inches away, and suddenly he would zigzag left or right, or both in succession, and he was gone.” If only Simpson could have made that the top line for his legacy, rather than buried in paragraph three.

Fake facts for Trump’s real friends

Is Donald Trump like Nelson Mandela? Or like Abraham Lincoln, but better? Or, come to think of it, is he really more like Jesus?

To be clear, those are figures to whom Trump likes to compare himself, not our analogies. But don’t be too quick to criticize his hubris, says Dana Milbank in this week’s rundown from our crazed capital village: “It is altogether fitting and proper for Trump to compare himself with a Civil War-era leader. This is because, thanks largely to Trump, the rights of American women have just been returned to where they were 160 years ago.” At least in........

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