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’Twas the night after Thanksgiving 2028, and all the White House was dark, except for the kitchen. President Trump leant against the range, sipping from a can of Poland Spring cranberry seltzer as she watched the First Husband scraping the last of the stuffing from the cavity of the giant turkey. ‘Harder,’ she ordered. ‘Ivanka, I’m trying,’ Jared said. He was glad MBS and Kanye had already left. Thanksgiving 2028 had been just like Thanksgiving 2018, except for the moment at the table when they had been taking turns to say what they were grateful for, and Jared’s electronic ankle bracelet had gone off.

According to a document obtained by the transparency initiative Property of the People, the FBI now regards the Proud Boys (the self-styled ‘pro-West fraternal organization’ founded by right-wing provocateur Gavin McInnes) as an extremist group linked to white nationalism. As someone who’s met similar groups (I’ve stayed with anti-government militias in Kansas and California), I’m not convinced. In my experience, Proud Boy-style groups aren’t racist – if I had to define them, I’d say they’re obnoxious pro-Trumpers whose politics seem less about making America great again and more about antagonizing the other side. Sure, they tend to be strongly anti-immigration and un-PC more generally – but white nationalist?

Holy Schitt! Just when you think there isn’t anything for Donald Trump to add to the lexicon of insults, he finds a new way, this time with the jejune epithet aimed at California lawmaker Adam Schiff, who is poised to become chairman of the House Intelligence committee. Trump’s tweet about him may be taken as an index of his inner apprehension about Schiff, not to mention Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who continues silently to stalk Trump, immune, at least so far, to his brickbats. The main reason for Trump’s turmoil is that he lost the midterm elections even if, as he explained to an alternately bemused and incredulous Chris Wallace of Fox News on Sunday, ‘I wasn’t on the ballot.’ So he was on the ballot until he wasn’t?

For all the good news 2018’s midterms have given Democrats — a House majority, a Senate seat from Arizona, seven more governorships, and an all-blue congressional delegation from Orange County — they have also shown that President Trump has a clear path to re-election in 2020. Midterms historically maximize the relative turnout for the opposition party. More voters overall will go to the polls in 2020 than did so this year, just as more people voted in 2016 than did so this November. But the ratio of Democrats to Republicans will be narrower, if the past anything to go by.

The exact scale of Democratic victory in the US midterms remains unclear, but a shortage of numbers has not prevented many media outlets proclaiming a historic shift, a stern rebuke to Donald Trump, and above all, a key augury for the 2020 presidential contest. Some polls imagine Trump in 2020 losing to any number of a wide range of hypothetical Democrats. I will differ. I have now lived long enough to see so many elections that were portrayed at the time as historic, decisive and/or transformative, but most of these supposed watershed contests were nothing of the kind. In several electoral cycles over the past half-century, we have supposedly seen the imminent extinction of Party X, or at least a near-death experience.

So much for small favors. Judge Timothy J. Kelly just came down hard on the administration that appointed him to the federal bench in September 2017. He granted CNN a temporary restraining order, ruling that the White House did not follow due process in depriving CNN reporter Jim Acosta of his right to a ‘hard pass,’ which permits him to enter White House grounds when pleases. He also noted that the doctored video that press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders disseminated about Acosta performing a karate chop on a hapless intern who was trying to retrieve a microphone was ‘likely untrue.’ The judge’s verdict further demonstrates that Trump is the best thing to happen to Acosta and, by extension, much of the media.

Ivanka Trump holds rather more sway in the White House than a First Daughter should — that much is well-established. Yet this week we see that it is her step-mother, Melania, who calls the shots in her husband’s administration. Mrs T is the real force behind the throne, as Mira Ricardel has discovered to her cost. Palace intrigue doesn’t get more intriguing. Ms Ricardel, a close ally of National Security Adviser John Bolton, made the mistake of clashing with Melania over her ‘Be Best’ trip to Africa. Ricardel allegedly insisted a member of the security council should accompany Mrs Trump as she posed her way around Ghana, Malawi and Kenya in a pith helmet, cream jacket and trousers, and black-neck tie. Melania disagreed. https://audioboom.

We’re all Trumpologists now. Like the Kremlinologists of the Cold War, monitoring the line-ups at missile parades to see who was in or out of the Politburo, we track the president’s Twitter twitches and off-the-cuff quips, then guess which way he’s going to go next. The Soviets were rational actors, and so was Donald Trump when he responded to the midterms. He called the split Congress a ‘beautiful, bipartisan-type situation’ — beautiful because the situation places Trump at the fulcrum of power, bi-partisan because no legislature will pass without both sides on board. Trump is the president who spent his first few days in the White House annulling Barack Obama’s executive orders.

It’s beginning to look as though Michelle Obama does not like Donald Trump. In her new memoir, Becoming, she explains why. Her beef with Trump centers on his embrace of the birther controversy about her husband, who was supposedly born in Indonesia or some other far off country — anywhere but America: ‘The whole thing was crazy and mean-spirited, of course, its underlying bigotry and xenophobia hardly concealed. But it was also dangerous, deliberately meant to stir up the wingnuts and kooks. What if someone with an unstable mind loaded a gun and drove to Washington? What if that person went looking for our girls? Donald Trump, with his loud and reckless innuendos, was putting my family’s safety at risk. And for this I’d never forgive him.

George Conway, the husband of Kellyanne, is putting on warpaint. ‘President Trump’s installation of Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general of the United States after forcing the resignation of Jeff Sessions is unconstitutional. It’s illegal. And it means that anything Mr Whitaker does, or tries to do, in that position is invalid,’ Conway together with former acting US Solicitor General Neal K. Katyal wrote today in the New York Times. Obviously, the fact that George is Kellyanne’s helpmate supplies an extra frisson to the op-ed, but the arguments that he and Katyal advance are wholly persuasive.