John Boehner

A scandal-prone president of tepid popularity and questionable health sits in the White House. The Republicans hold a majority in the House of Representatives, but a dissident faction of 20 opposes the establishment candidate for speaker and demands greater powers for the party conference. For the first time in living memory, the favored candidate loses election on the first ballot, then on the second, then the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth. Yes, Washington certainly was a messy place in 1923, exactly a century ago. That was when the GOP was mired in a predicament similar to the one Republican leader Kevin McCarthy finds himself in this week. Back then, the troubled candidate for speaker was Massachusetts Representative Frederick H. Gillett.

Is Donald Trump riding a rubber ducky into alligator-infested waters, as a former aide to House Speaker John Boehner suggests to Politico? It’s hard to avoid the impression that an increasingly unmoored Trump seems to groping for assistance wherever he can find it. This morning, for example, Trump, in between playing weatherman about Hurricane Dorian, retweeted the real estate tycoon Sam Zell, one of whose great accomplishments was to bankrupt the Tribune Company. Zell declared that the notion that America shouldn’t impose tariffs on countries like China is a canard: '....We can’t have a system where we run our entire economy for the benefit of other countries, which have long charged us big tariffs. Don’t keep ducking the reality.