Politics

Tolstoy wrote one of literature’s most famous opening lines, in Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The peculiar unhappiness of Paul Manafort’s family life is described in excruciating detail in 285,000 text messages from an iPhone belonging to one of his daughters. The messages were posted by hackers on the darkweb last year and provided several damaging stories about Manafort. He goes on trial today, charged with evading tax on tens of millions of dollars from his work as a political consultant in Ukraine. Now, the texts have been published in their entirety on the ordinary internet, where they can easily be searched and read.

Only a few months ago he was an “honourable man.” Now honour has apparently been replaced by dishonour. “The man is a pathological manipulator, a liar,” Rudy Giuliani declared on “Fox News Sunday.” For good measure, he also referred to him as a “scoundrel.” Ooh la la. How long before he goes on to describe Michael Cohen as the Bill Sikes of Trumpworld? Today, Giuliani has once more entered the lists for Trump in an apparent attempt to sanitise the Trump Tower meeting in June 2016 that had Kremlin-linked figures promising dirt on Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump Jr. declaring, “If it’s what you say I love it.” This meeting has become the fulcrum around which conspiracy theories about the Trump campaign revolve.

Is there a fracture line in the values of Americans today? A regular narrative that continuously emerges is that President Trump’s values are rural ones, while those living in U.S. cities are sympathetic to the “urban” values of democratic socialists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York City. With the impending opening on the Supreme Court and its tangible impact on social policy, questions about which values best represent America have been increasingly salient. At first glance, the “urban-rural” divide seems reasonable. From varied strands of path-dependent economic development, industrialisation, and demographic history, urban-rural differences inevitably exist because the United States is such a vast country.

The midterm elections are about 100 days away, and polling suggests that Republicans are in real trouble. Voters have soured on the GOP despite great jobs numbers and robust economic growth. The American public has an unfavourable view of the legislative agenda coming out of Washington, which they believe only caters to the very wealthy donor class. Had Trump followed the advice of former Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, might the shellacking Republicans are facing in the upcoming election have been avoided? At the beginning of Trump’s term, there was an ideological tug of war over the direction Republicans should be championing.

“A storm’s a coming, baby” the adult film star Stormy Daniels promised during her Saturday Night Live appearance back in May. Judging by the tumult of the months since, she’s made good on her claim – though hardly in the way she envisioned. First, she found herself in handcuffs after Ohio police arrested her and two other women for breaching the state’s ‘no touching’ law. Charges have since been dropped. Then Glendon Crain, her husband and a fellow porn industry veteran who performs under the name Brendan Miller, is filing for divorce, a temporary restraining order, and sole custody of their daughter.

It seems like ancient history now, but the week before the ill-fated summit in Helsinki President Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. It was Trump’s second nomination to America’s highest court in as many years and conservatives overwhelmingly cheered his choice. “I’ve often heard that, other than matters of war and peace, this is the most important decision a President will make,” Trump said in the East Room of the White House. “The Supreme Court is entrusted with the safeguarding of the crown jewel of our Republic, the Constitution of the United States.” Kavanaugh was picked to replace retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy, a Republican appointee who was nevertheless a swing vote on the Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, back at the DNC...With the world mesmerized by the insane ravings of John Brennan, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency under Barack Obama, our inner heartstrings are tugged with compassion with the obvious suffering of another human being.  In the case of Brennan, one’s mind turns not to Hamlet (“O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!”) but rather "Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad." There may be a dollop of animal cunning behind Brennan’s humiliating anti-Trump outbursts. He may be hoping against hope that his own role in the effort to delegitimize and reverse the results of a free, open, and democratic presidential election will be swept under the rug and he will emerge unscathed.

Remember William of Occam? He was the medieval English monk who invented the razor. Not the one that kept his tonsure bare and shiny, but the one that he applied to the confusion of evidence. Bearded philosophers still use Occam’s Razor, the principle that when all else fails, the simplest explanation is the likeliest explanation. Apply William’s logic-chopper to Donald Trump’s Helsinki performance, and you’re quickly down to two possibilities. One is that Trump, as John Brennan frothed on Twitter, is ‘treasonous’ and ‘wholly in the pocket of Putin’, presumably because of unspecified but urine-scented kompromat.

If anyone wanted an encapsulation of the screwiness of our times just consider the following straight question being asked of an interview subject. ‘How does being a communist impact your view of the US presidency, whether it’s Obama or Trump?’ And then consider that this pleasant question was being asked by Teen Vogue. It was posed to a young woman called Ash Sarkar who writes for an obscure blog named Novara Media.  Last week Sarkar had her 15 seconds of fame when she managed the impossible and appeared to out-arrogant Piers Morgan in a television shouting-match ostensibly about Donald Trump’s visit to the UK.

Did Vladimir Putin finally become Donald Trump’s new best friend in Helsinki? Trump, who has been panting to meet with Putin, lavished his Russian counterpart with praise. His extraordinary performance is meeting with some hostile reviews, many of them centering on the suspicion that Trump truly is a creature of the Kremlin. Rather than confront Putin, he publicly cosied up to him, after remaining immured with him for about two hours with only a few translators, thereby nourishing the conviction that Putin has the goods on him. The summit, which was intended to smooth relations with Moscow, is having the reverse effect by heightening suspicions about his motives and rendering it even more difficult for him to dispose, in one fashion or another, of the Mueller investigation.