Latest from Coffee House

If there is one that American industry President Trump is helping to revive again, it’s book publishing. The latest author to profit from this trend is Omarosa Manigault-Newman whose Unhinged, a memoir of her brief time in the White House, will soon appear. Her account, if the advance excerpts are anything to go by, is not the usual morose lamentation of a true believer who complains that the boss failed to adhere to the policies he enunciated during the campaign. She doesn’t appear to have any ideological concerns about Trump.Instead, she has launched a purely personal attack on Trump. Omarosa’s account has all the fury of a betrayed lover.

The to-ing and fro-ing between President Trump and Special Counsel Robert Mueller over an interview is starting to look like Groundhog Day, the movie in which Bill Murray plays a weatherman who wakes up to the same day each morning. Today, the Trump team apparently rejected Mueller’s proposed parameter of questions and Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani observed, “We’re restating what we have been saying for months: It is time for the Office of Special Counsel to conclude its inquiry without further delay.” It could, he said, be Mueller’s “last, best chance” to speak with Trump.

Beware the intern. Rick Gates first met Paul Manafort in 1995 when he was an ambitious young man. Soon he ascended to become partners in crime with him. The end of the affair was abundantly on evidence in the trial of Manafort today, where Manafort's former deputy and Trump campaign official Gates took the stand to testify. Asked whether he had committed any crimes together with Manafort, he responded, “Yes.” At least he didn’t reply, “Da.” Manafort fixed Gates with a steely gaze, but it didn’t deter his old chum from explaining that they had established no less than 15 foreign bank accounts in an effort to avoid paying taxes to the U.S. government. He also divulged that he had pilfered several hundred thousand dollars from Manafort along the way.

What does it mean to be “presidential”? Literalists might say: “It’s whatever behaviour and affect a President exhibits.” But most of us will have something more rigorous in mind. To be “presidential” means to be dignified but masterly, simultaneously courteous yet decorous, friendly in a self-contained sort of way. The problem with this view is that so many presidents throughout history have violated it, from Andrew Jackson and his smash-up-the-china parties at the White House to Bill Clinton's novel deployment of cigars with Monica Lewinsky. Donald Trump recently mocked the traditional idea of being presidential, explaining that behaving in that way is “a lot easier than what I do.

It’s a tale of two Trump scions. Ivanka is trying to wall herself off from the old man whose behaviour often seems to border on madness. Don Junior, by contrast, is doubling down on the lunacy.On Thursday Ivanka declared that she disagreed with her father’s depiction of the media as the “enemy of the people”— a statement, incidentally, that White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders refused to make yesterday — and that she was “vehemently against” plucking migrant children from their parents as they crossed into the U.S. from Mexico. But she has not been able to avoid the taint of working for her father. The brand may be soiled beyond repair. Already she’s had to shutter her eponymous fashion line.

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.