When I was in college at Dartmouth, one of the worst people in my extended social group was a skinny super-buttoned up college Republican type. A friend of some friends. Most of us were not very interested in politics, but it was the post-9/11 early Bush years and a higher than normal amount of them were from conservative parts of the country or otherwise sympathetic to that kind of jingoistic nonsense. This kid, Michael Ellis, hung around at the Dartmouth Review, the vile right-wing campus rag obsessed with clinging to the racist Indian mascot that the college had jettisoned years ago. (When I was there, they also spread misinformation about students registering to vote in NH losing their financial aid somehow, so as to tamp down on us poors voting in a swing state.) He also took part of a year off to work for Karl Rove in Bush’s 2004 re-election. I remember having lunch with him once where people pelted him with “you know those guys are evil right?” sort of questions, and he kept smirkily giving them “I do, but we’re getting away with it” responses. Another time, he got extremely drunk on scotch and blathered at everyone about how much he loved Richard Nixon for some goddamn reason. He sucked. Supposedly, his parents were quite liberal so he had gone full-Goebbels to anger them.

Once, fatefully, I mentioned to him that there was an episode of Monty Python with his name, “Michael Ellis” in the last season of that show. It’s a bad episode from the end-run of Flying Circus after John Cleese left, but I had the whole series on DVD. It was the extravagant thing I bought myself after a summer working for minimum wage as a dishwasher in high school. It came in a beautiful multi-colored set of 14 DVDs and cost about $150, which was a fortune for me at the time. He asked to borrow the DVD of his episode, as he’d never seen it, and I lent it to him. After it took him a very long time to return the disk, I managed to run into him and ask for it back, or at least money to replace it, and he tried to blow me off. He claimed that I should have asked for it back sooner, as if it was my fault that he’d just kept it.

Since I hated him, I didn’t bother keeping in touch after college. But I was aware that he was in Washington being a lawyer or something, which sounded about right for the kind of dickhead who steals your Monty Python DVD and then tries to blame you for it. I doubt I’ve thought about him for years. He’s been off doing his stuff (law?) and I’ve been doing mine (astronomy, technology, not being an ethical monstrosity). Cut to this morning, where I read that he is one of the Trump administration flunkies that they are trying to “burrow” into government prior to their eviction. Quoth CNN: “Michael Ellis, an official on the National Security Council, shifted over to the National Security Agency as legal counsel, which takes him out of a political appointee role at the White House and into a civil servant position, two sources confirmed to CNN. This makes Ellis harder to fire once the Biden administration comes in.”

Not only that, but he was also “in the room when Alexander Vindman reported his concerns about Trump’s 2019 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky” and was apparently one of the people, if not the person who decided to cover it up by moving it to a secure server—a key reason for Trump’s impeachment.

Hopefully, he’ll be ousted from whatever utility closet they try to hide him in when the Biden administration does a sweep of these kind of amoral stooges. People sometimes tell themselves that Republicans under Trump were something different and worse than in previous times, but it isn’t so. These kind of sneering, power-grabbing, un-American shitheads were like this as college freshmen. It is fundamentally who they are as people, and indeed it is why they are Republicans. The Bush administration was just as unethical at every layer of government, stacked with the same kind of well-dressed liars and thieves, using their gilded qualifications as a distraction from their utter moral depravity. The next (Republican) one will be too, unless they’re hounded out of public life, as they deserve to be. If we’re lucky, prosecutors will find the backbone to bring charges against the mid-level thugs known to have committed crimes over the past four years; and for people in the grey area, legally-speaking, efforts like The Trump Accountability Project are a worthy start at alienating them from polite society.

We sometimes talk about the people at this level of government as if they’re automatons, or hear about how they have friends who like them outside of politics, or pretend that you can separate out the work part of their life from the social parts as if they aren’t connected. Well, I barely knew this guy, in college, when everyone is supposed to have been at their most fun and carefree, and he was brazenly shitty about petty stuff back then! You can draw a straight line from covering up stealing my Monty Python disk to covering up the Ukraine extortion, it’s really just a matter of scale. He probably recalled his college experiences to draw up legal memos that justify seizing blankets from caged refugee children if they didn’t ask for them back soon enough or something.

I couldn’t remember whether I’d replaced my DVD. As I said, it’s from late in the show and I doubt I’d watched it more than once. So I checked. It’s still missing. Because of course it is.