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In every revolution there are revolutionaries who love the old regime even as they tear it down. John McCain was a symbol of that. He stood for masculinity, anger, honor, and pain to a generation of Americans — roughly speaking, the Baby Boomers — who have spent their lives treating such things as a pathology. John McCain was an unmedicated American. He was a totem of military strength to a post-Vietnam media and political elite that accepts war (of the humanitarian variety) but not warriors. ​McCain the man is impossible to separate from his place in politics, and that’s a shame. As a man, he was brave. He was self-directed and defiant, traits that stood out in a gray Washington during his thirty years in the Senate.

In a bruising midterm election year, the race for governor of Georgia could be the most contentious in the country. It’s certainly the most ideologically polarised. Here’s why. Democrats rejected a relatively moderate candidate in the primary and nominated Stacey Abrams, an Ivy League-educated liberal who if elected would be the nation’s first black female governor (she won with 76 per cent of the vote). Republicans rebuffed their sitting lieutenant governor to nominate Brian Kemp, a self-proclaimed ‘politically incorrect’ white conservative boosted by President Trump (he won with 69 per cent of the vote).

It was a mild February in the great state of Alabama, and presidential candidate Donald Trump had a surprise announcement for an already electric crowd. Dressed in a sports coat and donning a red ‘Make America Great Again’ hat, the boisterous billionaire excitedly told his supporters about his first endorsement from a US Senator. ‘I have a little surprise for you,’ Trump teased, as if promoting a new reality TV show. ‘I have a man who is respected by everybody here, greatly respected...He’s really the expert as far as I'm concerned on borders, on so many things.’ And out strolled Jeff Sessions, the senior senator of Alabama.

‘What does the kooky libertarian see in the authoritarian Putin regime?’ So asked the Weekly Standard’s Editor-in-Chief Stephen F. Hayes on Tuesday in his op-ed ‘Rand Paul, Russian Stooge’. ‘Senator Rand Paul has been making the rounds in recent days touting deeper US engagement with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. It’s often the case when Senator Paul talks about foreign policy his pronouncements are a curious admixture of odd conspiracy theories, pacifist banalities, and ahistorical analogies—all delivered with the confident condescension of someone who doesn’t have any idea what he’s talking about.

‘Settled law,’ an unsettling phrase when it comes to the unborn, has haunted minds since Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh appeared on the horizon last month. The words thudded into the news cycle again this week when an elated Senator Susan Collins said Kavanaugh had assured her during their two-hour meeting that he considers the 1973 landmark abortion rights case Roe v. Wade to be settled law. This prompted rather some unseemly celebrations from the pro-abortion side, and sighs and despair among those who hoped America might change course on this emotive and important issue.

A few take-aways from yesterday’s prosecutorial frenzy. 1. Paul Manafort is in deep trouble. Absent a presidential pardon, he is likely to spend the rest of his life behind bars. 2. The crimes of which Manafort was convicted — eight counts of tax evasion and bank fraud — not only predated his brief relationship with Donald Trump but had nothing to do with main focus of Robert Mueller’s original writ, namely, to investigate ‘any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump.’ That was the nub of Mueller’s marching orders. But note that Rod Rosenstein also authorised him to pursue ‘any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation.

The 2018 midterm election season was already shaping up to be an excruciatingly steep one for the Republican Party. The first 18 months of Donald Trump’s presidency have been a dizzying experience for many GOP lawmakers; every week, there is some brand new controversy the president creates. With every racially-tinged comment from the president’s mouth or indictment in the Russia investigation, the Democratic base gets more eager to run to the polls and cast their ballots in November. And then came August 21, 2018, the political equivalent of Pearl Harbour. In one courthouse, former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort was found guilty on eight counts of bank fraud and tax evasion.

Steve Bannon is planning his political comeback. But don’t tell him that; in Bannon’s eyes, he never really stopped being a combatant in the war against the elitist cabal. A few years ago, Bannon was a figure on the fringe of the American political spectrum. He may have commanded a loyal group of readers from his chair at Breitbart, but Steve Bannon only became a household name in America when then-candidate Donald Trump hired him in August 2016 to turn around a flailing and chaotic campaign. Trump was mocked as a laughing stock when Bannon came onboard.

The Senate made a major discovery today. By unanimous consent, it passed a non-binding resolution affirming that the press is ‘not the enemy of the people.’ Who knew?The spur for this senatorial effusion of support for the press was, of course, the recent temper tantrums of El Jefe. Fresh from stripping former CIA director John Brennan of his security clearance and professing to be thunderStrzok about the misbehaviour of the FBI, Donald Trump, who has always enjoyed a love-hate relationship with the press (New York Times columnist Gail Collins reminisced today about how Trump once called her a dog and a pig), was in full attack mode against the Boston Globe, which urged newspapers around the country to stick up for press freedoms in editorials.

Against all odds, Rand Paul is once again the most interesting man in politics. When TIME first called him that in 2014, the Kentucky senator looked to be a serious presidential contender. Now he’s become President Trump’s unlikeliest alter ego — a Republican who can say and do many of the same things the president likes to say and do, but with greater ideological focus and discipline. Nowhere is this more apparent than in foreign policy, where the senator has both the institutional independence and the philosophical self-assurance to fight battles that the president’s advisers don’t want Trump himself to fight. Russia is a case in point.