Brilliant! Loved it. Thanks for posting. And glad to find another Mencken fan on this thread. Reading this piece about James A. Reed, you certainly get the sense that Trump would receive high praise from the Terror of Baltimore.
The last lines could have been written about today's Congress:
The American people have got so used to quacks in high office that they have come to feel uneasy in the presence of honest men. They will be annoyed, I suspect, by very few of that kidney hereafter. Reed struck back into an earlier and more spacious time. He was an anachronistic and disquieting reminder of the days when a Senator of the United States stood on his own legs and was his own man.
On the same link, you will find links to three of Reed's speeches, including the speech that Mencken heard in the Senate gallery on the eve of the Harding inauguration, as well as an article that Reed wrote for Mencken in the mid-1920s, etc..
Reed was an absolute terror to phonies in the Senate, even as Mencken describes.