Latest from Coffee House

When I heard that President Trump had pardoned Dinesh D’Souza, I sought the opinion of an alumnus of the Dartmouth Review who has yet to do a stretch in the big house.‘His nickname at Dartmouth was ‘Distort D’Newsa’,’ my source whispered, and then hung up before National Review could trace the call.In 2014, D’Souza pleaded guilty to federal charges that in 2012, he had routed $20,000 through two associates, as funds for his friend Wendy Long’s run for the New York Senate. Long lost the race to the incumbent Democrat, Kirsten Gillibrand. D’Souza denied the charges at first, but then pleaded guilty. The prosecutors added a second charge, making false statements to the government.

Donald Trump got bad reviews in the press — no surprise — when he announced that Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and federal prosecutor, would join his legal team in the Trump-Russia special counsel investigation. The 74-year-old Giuliani is not as sharp as he was, some said, and isn’t really a practising lawyer any more. How can you effectively defend the President by slipping out of fatcat dinners at New York steakhouses for quick hits on Fox News?That was then. Now, it appears hiring Giuliani was a key part of a new and effective Trump strategy. Just a few months ago, Trump was cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller, mostly refraining from attacking him directly, and hoping the investigation would somehow go away.

If the BBC really is, as Steve Bannon says, a communications department of the global elite, they messed up badly last night. Emily Maitlis’s 20-minute long interview with Bannon on Newsnight was mesmerising television — even, or especially, if you can’t bear the subject. It was also the longest advertisement for economic nationalism yet delivered to British viewers. No doubt Raheem Kassam, the close Bannon associate who’s just left Breitbart and has been on Newsnight a few times himself, had something to do with it.By airing the discussion, the Beeb disproves the Bannonite idea that it is part of an elite conspiracy to silence populist points of view on immigration.

An actual sinkhole has developed on the north lawn of the White House. It might serve as a good metaphor for the state of the Trump presidency, which is being engulfed by the very Washington swamp that it once vowed to eradicate. The latest revelation comes courtesy of the BBC’s indefatigable Paul Wood, who reports today on a corrupt bargain that apparently took place between the White House and Ukraine. It seems that Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko, who bet on the wrong horse during the 2016 campaign by releasing some information about the sordid financial machinations of Donald Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort to the New York Times in August 2016, was desperate to make amends.  He wanted to butter up Trump.

Lawyers representing the ex-spook-turned-private-investigator Christopher Steele were in action yesterday at London’s High Court. In a rather convoluted turn of events, BuzzFeed, who published Steele’s leaked dossier on links relating to Trump and Moscow, is now seeking to question the author “on the dossier as a whole” because of the document’s importance in the “public’s understanding of the ongoing federal investigations”. In other words, BuzzFeed wants Steele to spill the beans on some of his claims. And they’re right. Steele’s dossier is one of the keystones of the Mueller investigation.

On June 12 Donald Trump will meet Kim Jong-un in Singapore. Trump is ebullient. “World Peace” is what he will seek, according his Twitter account. Singapore’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs is sounding a more cautious note: “We hope this meeting will advance prospects for peace in the Korean Peninsula." Trump’s euphoric tone is more reminiscent of Woodrow Wilson than the America First rodomontade that he was peddling to his followers during the 2016 campaign. It’s prompting a volte-face in Washington, not the first Trump has created. Hawks are becoming doves and doves hawks. Conservatives are talking peace, love and understanding. Liberals are fretting that Trump will give away the store to the North.

John McCain is a victim of hypocrisy. His allies in Washington and admirers in the national media praise him as the conscience of the nation, even as they betray him in his last desperate battle against the normalisation of torture. After a White House communications staffer, Kelly Sadler, joked that McCain’s views don’t matter because “he’s dying anyway,” the senator’s pretend friends called for her firing. Her tasteless joke, badly received even among colleagues, provoked a degree of outrage from wonks and commentators unmatched by any such umbrage at the nomination of a woman implicated in torture and the destruction of evidence to head the CIA. For elite Washington, disrespectful words are worse than waterboarding.

The only time I met Donald Trump was at a small event for politically mature journalists at the White House last April. After milling about with my fellow scribes in the press room—it’s a lot smaller and shabbier than it looks on TV, like Jim Acosta—we were ushered into the Roosevelt Room near the Oval Office. The President, secretary of commerce Wilbur Ross, and a few aides (Steve Bannon, Michael Anton, Reince Priebus: wot larks!) soon joined us. After a brief presentation, the President took questions. Mine was about Iran.   During the campaign, I noted, the President had regularly decried the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, i.e, the 2015 Obama Iran deal in which the U.S.

Donald Trump is not known as a champion of women, but he thinks he should be.  The President wants the deputy director of CIA, Gina Haspel, to succeed Mike Pompeo in the top job, and the Democrats are raging against her appointment. Predictably enough, Trump is enjoying the irony, tweeting on Monday morning:  “My highly respected nominee for CIA Director, Gina Haspel, has come under fire because she was too tough on Terrorists. Think of that, in these very dangerous times, we have the most qualified person, a woman, who Democrats want OUT because she is too tough on terror. Win Gina!” Needless to say, it isn’t quite the fact that Haspel is a woman which is bothering the Democrats about her appointment.

‘Honour,’ the French poet Nicholas Boileau wrote in 1666, ‘is like a rocky island without a landing place; once we leave it, we can’t get back.’ Especially, Donald Trump might add, when the outlook is Stormy. But Trump’s concept of honour is perhaps closer to that of Stormy Daniels’ fellow artist and near-namesake, the Elizabethan poet Samuel Daniel, who in 1592 called honour an ‘empty sound’, an ‘idle name of wind’. These early modern attitudes still define how we think about honour. Either it’s a unique defence against life’s ethical challenges, or it’s an instrument, a luxury—an affectation that is, as Trump is alleged to have found Stormy Daniels, desirable but negotiable.

John McCain is dying, and with him is dying a Republican Party that was never born. The Arizona senator has to be understood in relation to the GOP because he has never really been the “maverick” that pundits made him out to be after his first White House bid eighteen years ago. Before then, he was seen as a reliably conservative Republican, albeit a more hawkishly internationalist one than was the norm for the GOP in the Bill Clinton era. Those were the days when Republicans like George W. Bush swore on an oilman’s bible that they were against “nation building.” McCain was more honest about his interventionism, which made him the neoconservatives’ first choice in 2000.