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As any admirer of stage comedy will vouch, nothing beats a double-act. This immortally funny formula requires little more than one man making a lot of silly anarchic jokes while another, the so-called ‘straight-man’ or ‘stooge’, remains rigidly po-faced. The funny-man’s gag does not have to be that funny, for the real joke – the great laugh, as it were – is triggered by the straight-man’s priggish reaction to it. The more pompous the straight-man, the funnier the joke.

Donald Trump’s dominance of the US political scene shows up in surprising ways, at surprising moments. For instance, in the retort of an exuberant Democratic senatorial candidate striving for headway in a televised debate with his incumbent Republican opponent. ‘He’s dishonest,’ says Congressman Robert Francis ‘Beto’ O’Rourke, assailing Sen, Ted Cruz. It’s why the president called him Lyin’ Ted, and it’s why the nickname stuck.’ Oh, boy, the Dems are looking to Donald Trump for character references? As I keep saying – and you’ve probably had the same thought – it’s a weird time we live in, getting weirder by the minute.

It has long been fashionable for Americans to claim descent from Rebecca Rolfe (née Pocahontas) the heroical daughter of Chief Powhatan of Virginia. Woodrow Wilson’s wife was one, the actor, Glenn Strange, another. Then people started claiming any family connection whatsoever to Mrs Rolfe’s descendants, as the Bushes now do. Soon the great contagion spread to the point where everyone in the State of Virginia was descended from Mrs Rolfe, and then all the smart-sets from all the other states joined the rush for Native American blood of their own.

Much has been made of the so-called ‘mob mentality’ of left-wing protesters in the last few weeks. The GOP has been eager to paint anti-Kavanaugh activists as the kind of hysterical torch-wielders that deeply concerned this country’s founders. It’s intriguing, therefore, to see how quickly many in the media seized the opportunity to show the violent ‘mob’ mindset in action on the right. Last night, VICE founder Gavin McInnes was the talk of Twitter after footage emerged showing a protester being beaten by a group of ‘Proud Boys’ (McInnes’s followers) on a Manhattan pavement. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Shortly after yesterday’s outlandish Oval Office episode, several national political reporters under age 40, such as the New York Times’s Jonathan Martin and the Washington Post’s Ashley Parker, claimed total ignorance of Kanye West’s discography — as though impressed with themselves for being oblivious to one of American pop culture’s most titanic figures of the past decade and a half. Maybe they’ve really somehow never heard ‘Jesus Walks,’ ‘Gold Digger,’ or ‘Power,’ which would cast slight doubt on their ability to gauge the political sentiments of the population they purport to cover. Or maybe they just feel compelled to throw Kanye down the memory hole now that he’s taken up with Donald Trump.

So Michael Bloomberg is now officially a Democrat. He started out as a Democrat, became a Republican, then an independent, and now he’s back to being a Democrat. These days, for a Manhattanite worth $52 billion, it’s the logical place to be. For their part, the Democrats, the erstwhile party of the workers, are happy enough to have him. After all, in 2016, Bloomberg loudly endorsed Hillary Clinton, and this year he has given the Democrats $100 million. And that’s on top of the many millions he has spent to advance liberal causes, notably gun control, climate change — and the dreaded super-sized soda. Still, that’s not the same thing as the Democrats’ being willing to pick him to lead anything — except perhaps their finance committee.

I can't actually believe that Democratic ‘It Girl’ Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a Republican mole, any more than I really believe that Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael What’s-his-name is. But is the idea really so far fetched? Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court seemed to be foundering, buffeted as it was by a tsunami of groundless charges reaching back into his high school days. None was ‘credible,’ pace the talking points of Senators Feinstein, Spartacus, et al. But what sent that narrative into a tail spin was the Julie Swetnick Show, brought to you by the latest casualty of the memory hole, Creepy Porn Lawyer Something Avenatti.

Black Mirror politics is coming to America, courtesy of a new Democratic initiative called Citizen Strong. Announcing their existence in Bloomberg this week, Citizen Strong claims to have assembled an army of 17,000 amateur secret police who have spent months looking for damaging material on dozens of vulnerable Republicans in Congress and state legislatures. The information - presumably embarrassing at least, career ending at worst - will be unleashed on them just in time for the midterms. Though this kind of dirt-digging is as old as politics itself, the direction the Democrats are taking opposition research through Citizen Strong reveals how it has been re-energised and refashioned by the communications technology of the early 21st century.

Donald Trump celebrated the confirmation of the second Supreme Court justice of his presidency at the Kansas Expocentre in Topeka on Saturday evening, in a typically boisterous rally meant to boost Republicans running in the state. But all is not well in the land of Oz. Kansas, thought to be a deep-red state which went for Trump in 2016 by more than 20 per cent, nonetheless is posing problems for GOP candidates running in November. The legacy of former governor Sam Brownback, one of the least popular governors in the nation, may be having an impact on the race, despite having left office in January to become Trump’s Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom.

Teachers Scotch used to run an amusing ad that read ‘In life, experience is the great teacher. In Scotch, Teachers is the great experience.’ Droll, what? But is it true? Or was T. S. Eliot’s mournful observation that ‘we had the experience but missed the meaning’ more pertinent to our situation? What happens in the aftermath of Judge — as of a few minutes ago, make that ‘Justice’ — Brett Kavanaugh’s bizarre confirmation process will tell us a lot about whether we have learned anything from the horrible experience of the last weeks. When the Senate voted 50 to 48 to confirm Kavanaugh, they drew a line under a battle that was not just bitter but insane.

Supreme Court Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor spoke for more than an hour on Friday evening at Princeton University about the importance of neutrality for justices and the struggles women face in the workplace without once saying the name ‘Kavanaugh.’ ‘It’s an incredibly important thing for the court to guard, is this reputation of being fair, of being impartial, of being neutral,’ Kagan said. ‘This is a challenge.’ Both justices spoke at length about the necessity of preserving the Court’s reputation for fairness and neutrality. Kagan noted that having a swing vote, such as Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy, has made the court seem more balanced.

The FBI’s additional background check on Brett Kavanaugh isn’t the only document regarding President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee being presented to the Senate today. On Wednesday night, the New York Times published online a letter headlined ‘The Senate Should Not Confirm Kavanaugh, Signed, 650 Law Professors.’ By Thursday, the number of signatories had jumped to more than 1,700. The letter comes as Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell set in motion events that will likely result in a final vote on Kavanaugh’s appointment early Saturday evening. Word had it that the FBI hadn’t found any additional evidence to corroborate Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation that Kavanaugh attempted to rape her when they were high school students.

Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona is a man on a mission. His goal: to turn back the clock and bring the Republican Party back to its roots, to a time before Donald Trump hijacked American politics and cloaked the GOP with a populist, anti-establishment veneer. Indeed, ‘make Republicans great again’ may make for a decent slogan in the event he tosses his hat in the 2020 scrum. Flake knows from experience how powerful and intoxicating the tribalism engulfing American politics has become. Relatively popular with his constituents with an immaculate record as a fiscal conservative, Flake has represented the state of Arizona in one way or another since the early 2000s.