Trumpity Trump: what a s@*thole.

If it wasn’t clear before, it is now as obvious as the Donald's comb over: the infighting in the White House is hilarious, or would be if it did not involve the President of the United States. Petulantly tweeting that you’re a “very stable genius” is a pretty good indicator that you’re no such thing. And then when you tweet “my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart”, you’re coming across as an immature teenager. This is the President of the United States, you know, the man who’s response to Kim Jong-Un’s nuclear threats was to tweet that his nuclear button was bigger than Kim’s nuclear button. Although the truth is that his button isn’t any bigger, it’s just that his hands are really tiny.

Thanks to Private Eye for this.

I'll confess to being something of a political geek (No! Really? You could have fooled me.) and over the years I have read numerous political commentaries and biographies. Nothing, but nothing, has been as excoriating or incendiary as the book by Michael Wolffe, Fire and Fury. Heralded as an insider's portrait of a dysfunctional White House, it is hugely entertaining. It is not particularly well-written but it is a good read, despite it lacking the firm pen of an editor to weed out the many, too many, Americanisms that make parts of the narrative quite difficult for a European to understand (Hooray for the on-line dictionary on my Kindle). How true is it? I'm obviously in no position to judge but common-sense says that it's unlikely to be completely false, neither will it be 100% accurate. The truth lies somewhere between the two extremes and wherever on the spectrum it falls, it is still a damning condemnation of not just Donald Trump, but all of his sycophants, who collude with him and who are guilty by association.

Does the book reveal anything we didn't know or suspect? Not really. Donald Trump has proved to be the man, and the president, his many opponents expected and warned against. Trump is Trump and the notion that the vain and narcissistic showman would be moderated by office is shown to be as fanciful as it always was. Since he's been in office, his self-regard has merely grown to presidential proportions.

Remember, this is the President of the United States. Remember, this is the man who is a congenital liar: a man who has defended violent white supremacists in Virginia, retweeted the bile of British neo-fascists, backed police brutality against suspected criminals and threatened North Korea with 'fire and fury'. He has withdrawn the US from the Paris Climate Change Accord, recognised Jerusalem as the capital of Israel (in defiance of international law) and jeopardised the Iran nuclear deal, which is supported by American allies, such as Britain and the EU.

His core supporters, if they read the book (which they probably won't), will not care a jot. Why should they care? As far as they are concerned, the federal government isn't functioning properly anyway. After all, nothing Washington has done in the past 30 years has been of any help to them. They wanted someone to shake the place up and they judged that Trump would do it. They will be no more troubled by disarray in the White House than the Paris mob that stormed the Bastille was troubled by disarray in Louis XVI's Versailles court. Disarray was exactly what they hoped for.
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Where will it all end? Who knows? But what I think is that, rather than courting celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey, the Democrats need inspiring candidates of their own to mount a real challenge to the Republicans. And, at the moment, I couldn't put a name to one.

Should all this concern us in the UK? Of course it should, at many levels. If for no other reason than domestic distractions are bad news for international politics. And that brings us back to Brexit.