Donald trrump

Throughout the course of the inquiry on Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, White House lawyers have attempted to drill a message into the president’s head. It is a simple one: whatever you do, don’t go after Robert Mueller personally or suggest in any way that you will shut down the investigation.  You can go after the probe’s integrity, attack the congressional Democrats making political hay over the probe, and push your own counter-narrative about the silliness of it all, but leave the special counsel alone. It is smart, conventional advice that most conventional politicians would take into serious consideration. But Donald Trump, to state the obvious, is not a conventional politician. He does not respond well to being told to be restrained.

Michael Barbaro, host of the New York Times podcast The Daily, opened Wednesday’s episode with the story of the sacking of the Secretary of State: ‘His relationship with President Trump was rocky from the start, but in the end, nobody was more surprised that Rex Tillerson was fired than Rex Tillerson’. Really? If that’s true, then Tillerson was even more out of touch than anyone realised. American functionaries on the other side of the globe knew last month that a Rexit was imminent. I was in Seoul for the tail end of the Olympics and met with some U.S. Forces Korea officials. One spoke - almost in passing - as though Mike Pompeo was going to replace Rex Tillerson rather soon. He referred to Pompeo by name and his colleagues didn’t contradict him.

When Donald Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, went to Moscow in 2006, she did all the usual tourist things: walked around Red Square, visited the Kremlin... sat in Vladimir Putin’s private chair. At least she did according to Trump’s broker and business partner Felix Sater. ‘I arranged for Ivanka to sit in Putins private chair at his desk and office in the Kremlin,’ Sater said in an email, which was later leaked. Ivanka put out a statement more or less confirming this, saying that she ‘might have’ sat in Putin’s chair, but couldn’t exactly recall. The rest of Sater’s emails were more important as they gave details of his efforts to fix a deal for a Trump Tower in Moscow. ‘I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected...

President Trump continues to shake up his White House team. As early as tomorrow he plans to name Larry Kudlow, a senior contributor to CNBC, to replace Gary Cohn as his National Economic Council chief.  Kudlow is an old chum of Trump’s and an inveterate supply-sider whose gospel is that the more you lower tax rates, the more money the government will receive in overall revenues. At the same time, former United Nations ambassador John Bolton remains in play to replace national security adviser H.R. McMaster, though a stumbling block could prove to be whether or not he is willing to shave off the moustache that Trump apparently finds so offensive.

Sometimes it’s almost as if Donald Trump wants the world to think he’s a Russian patsy. Yesterday, Rex Tillerson, as Secretary of State, warned Putin that Russia’s alleged assassination attempt on British soil would trigger ‘a response’. Today he’s been sacked. Mike Pompeo, Director of the CIA, will become our new Secretary of State. He will do a fantastic job! Thank you to Rex Tillerson for his service! Gina Haspel will become the new Director of the CIA, and the first woman so chosen. Congratulations to all! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 13, 2018 But the firing almost certainly isn’t about Russia. It seems Trump asked Tillerson to go on Friday, a day after Trump agreed to meet Kim Jong-un.

For two years we’ve been hearing that Donald Trump is an 'isolationist', whatever that word is supposed to mean. Only now two op-ed writers in the New York Times have discovered that he isn’t — instead, Thomas Meaney and Stephen Wertheim write, 'Let’s call Mr. Trump’s vision what it is: radical American imperialism.' Let’s not, because it isn’t true. On the contrary, Donald Trump is the most anti-imperialist president in a generation, even if he is also far from being a mythical 'isolationist'. North Korea is isolationist, and perhaps Meiji Japan was, too. But Great Britain had a world empire when 'splendid isolation' was a maxim of Conservative leaders’ foreign policy in the 19th century.

I can understand some people not liking the current president of the United States. As Conrad Black put it recently, ‘Donald Trump is a strange cat and an acquired taste.’ What I don’t understand is people who should know better being afraid of Donald Trump. For example, how can it be that among all the experienced, eccentric and supposedly visionary denizens of Silicon Valley, only Peter Thiel recognised that Donald Trump is cut from the same cloth as the most celebrated tech titans: a disruptor, an innovator, a maverick, and an up-and-coming ‘crazy one,’ in the mould of the myth-makers to whom the famous 1980s Apple ads paid homage?

Not many world leaders can claim to be on friendly personal terms with Donald Trump. There are fewer still who would regard a visit to this particular president’s White House as a crowning achievement, and one which would increase their popularity at home rather than being seen as a moral failing. So the lesson of Benjamin Netanyahu’s triumphant meeting with the US president deserves particular scrutiny for having jumped all these hurdles. Admittedly, it helps to be a right wing Israeli Prime Minister at a time of Republican ascendancy. Netanyahu’s relationship with Barack Obama was famously abrasive. Any successor was bound to be an improvement, even if the strong US-Israel relationship goes far deeper than the Presidential level.

If accounts in the press are to be believed, President Trump has reached a fresh nadir. “These are the darkest days in at least half a year,” reports The Washington Post. “Sources close to President Trump say he is in a bad place,” chimes in the impressively-sourced Axios. Buried in the Post story is a contradictory take from close friend Chris Ruddy, the Newsmax chief: “I’m bewildered when I see these reports that he’s in turmoil. Every time I speak to him he seems more relaxed and in control than ever. He seems pretty optimistic about how things are shaping up.” At the end of the day, only the top man himself knows how he’s feeling. But read between the lines, and a compelling antithesis emerges.