Will California’s Kevin McCarthy ever have the courage to break up with Donald Trump?

Someone, please give Kevin McCarthy a backbone.

He’s either lost his — or he never had one in the first place.

How else do you explain his recent effort to gaslight us into believing President Donald Trump made a reasonable and timely effort to quell the Jan. 6 resurrection?

The storming of the Capitol wasn’t that long ago, and those of us who may not remember every last detail of one of the worst days in American history have easy access to photos, videos, moment-by-moment timelines and eyewitness accounts.

Yet there was McCarthy on Fox News Sunday, attempting to rewrite history.

And it’s a shame, really, because for a minute, the House Republican leader from Bakersfield seemed to finally be putting his country over his political party by distancing himself — ever so slightly — from Trump.

Exhibit A: During the impeachment trial, he acknowledged that Trump “bears responsibility” for the attack.

“He should have immediately denounced the mob when he saw what was unfolding,” McCarthy said then.

He didn’t go so far as to vote for impeachment, though he did suggest censure.

He even took some heat from GOP stalwarts in his home district in the Central Valley for not being supportive enough of the beleaguered president.

But since then, McCarthy, 56, has been walking that back — way, way back — presumably because he believes he needs Trump’s blessing if he’s to become speaker of the house in the event Republicans retake the chamber in 2022.

His efforts to ingratiate himself have been an embarrassment, not unlike watching the frantic hand-waving of a teacher’s pet, trying to be called on in class.

He earned this headline on Monday from Vanity Fair: “Kevin McCarthy is now lying about the Capitol riot to make Trump like him.”

Among other falsehoods that came out of his mouth in the Fox News interview, McCarthy implied that Trump did make a timely effort to call off the Jan. 6 attack.

The congressman said he spoke to the president by phone that day and urged him put out a statement aimed at stopping the riot.

“And that’s what he did, he put a video out later,” McCarthy said.

Never mind that it took roughly two hours for Trump to finally get around to Tweeting out that video.

Or that the president used that message to continue to spew lies about a “stolen,” “fraudulent” election, and told the traitors defacing the Capitol, “We love you. You’re very special.”

Many of these “very special” people are now charged with federal crimes.

It’s disappointing, but we shouldn’t be surprised McCarthy is now defending Trump’s actions.

Nor is it surprising that he’s now pushing to have a bipartisan commission on the Jan. 6 insurrection also investigate Black Lives Matter protests.

“I think if you’re going to have a commission, you should look at the whole broad spectrum,” he told HuffPost. “We just went through a whole summer of riots throughout the city.”

No, congressman, there was not a “whole broad spectrum.” There was only one insurrection that attempted to overturn the outcome of a free and fair election.

Again, we shouldn’t be surprised.

After all, this is the same man who Trump often referred to as “my Kevin.”

The same man the New York Times recently described as “an alpha lap-dog inside Mr. Trump’s kennel of acolytes.”

The same man who voted against certifying 2020 election results in Arizona and Pennsylvania.

The same man who has still not discovered how to be his own man.

For his sake — and more importantly, the sake of his nation — we can only hope that it’s not too late for Rep. Kevin Owen McCarthy to finally figure out who he is.

This story was originally published April 27, 2021 at 6:00 AM.