But Gaetz's tweet presaged a day of testimony in which nearly every one of Cohen's GOP questioners sought to malign, shame, and discredit him—never mind the fact that it was Trump who hired him and kept him around for 10 years. As former U.S. Attorney David Kelley told MSNBC's Ari Melber, "The government didn't pick Cohen as their witness, Trump did."

No matter what Cohen said or did, Republican lawmakers dismissed him as a "pathological liar." Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar saw fit to literally hurl the schoolyard taunt at Cohen, "Liar, liar, pants on fire." That's apparently what the hearing preparation of a five-term congressman yields in today’s Republican party.

Republicans should have been ashamed, embarrassed, even remorseful perhaps for helping to create and foster the farce now consuming our country. But instead, they were steadfastly unapologetic and unconcerned by the Pandora's box of illicit activity Cohen cracked open. Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, the ranking GOP member on the Oversight Committee, just wasn't that impressed by the Trump-directed criminal conspiracy to cover up hush money payments that Cohen detailed from end to end. So what if Cohen brought corroboration in the form of checks signed by Trump, Don Jr. and Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg?

“I think it’s news we knew about," Jordan flippantly told CNN, because a conspiracy to defraud the American people, hatched on the campaign trail and carried out from within the White House, is so last week.

That's because the Republican party, or what's left of it, now exists in sole service of Donald Trump's fraud. Neither principle nor ideal of any sort guides the party—just the destruction of objective reality, lest it expose Trump as the petty and impotent huckster to whom they have sold their souls. As Peter Wehner wrote in the New York Times:

More than tax cuts. More than trade wars. More even than building a wall on our southern border. Republicans are dedicated to annihilating truth in order to defend Mr. Trump and they will go after anyone, from Mr. Cohen to Robert Mueller, who is a threat to him.

Republicans weren't attacking Cohen this week, they were attacking truth itself, because truth and Trump are mutually exclusive propositions. They cannot coexist and the survival of one depends on the destruction of the other.

Cohen spoke to that reality with the wisdom of man who has been there, and he warned lawmakers and the country alike about the path he saw them sliding down.

"Everybody’s job at the Trump Organization is to protect Mr. Trump," Cohen told lawmakers. "Every day, most of us knew we were coming in and we were going to lie for him on something. And that became the norm. And that is exactly what is happening right now in this country and it is exactly what’s happening here in government, sir."

At the end of Trump's first 100 days in office, a fellow Manhattanite who had decades of experience tangling with Trump foretold where the country was headed.

"As anyone who has followed his jerry-rigged career from the 1980s onward will tell you, Trump just drags you to the bottom of the pond every time," wrote former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter. "Decades ago, he was a short-fingered vulgarian tooling around town in a mauve stretch limo, reeking of Brut. In those days, competitors, subcontractors, politicians, and wives were the ones who found themselves mired in the Trump muck. Now it is the country that’s up to its knees in it."

Pretty damn close to the entire Republican party—roughly a third of the country—is now mired in Trump's swampland. It's up to the rest of us to keep the remainder of the country from getting sucked under.