Marie Yovanovitch

Washington, DC At the end of March, about two weeks into the coronavirus emergency, I looked out my window onto the street below and saw something that made me uneasy about the future of the country. There was a commotion down there. Two white teenagers were standing in the street with their hands up. A man — who looked and sounded like an East African immigrant — had stopped his car in the middle of the road and sprung out. I squinted to see what it was he was holding in front of him that made the kids look so alarmed. It was a pizza. The kids had ordered it. The car was marked with a Domino’s insignia. ‘Whoa, whoa, man!’ said one of the kids. ‘Take it easy!’ He was grotesquely corpulent.

Democrats like to make out that Donald Trump is terrified of the impeachment juggernaut they are driving at his head. The president is dissembling on Twitter, they say, because he’s in deep trouble. He knows he’s cornered. He’s flailing. He’s spooked. Resistance to the resistance is futile. The problem is, Trump — and, even more so, his online persona @realDonaldTrump — seems to be relishing the impeachment saga. He does his phony melancholy routine, in which he says how sad it is because we should all be focusing on his many achievements. Don’t believe it. He is simultaneously courting the whole Ukraine brouhaha, dragging it out himself. Why else would he have live-tweeted it last week?

A grave matter — the future of American fashion — rests in the hands of President Trump. The foremost promoter of the drape cut, or soft shoulder suit, pioneered by Savile Row tailor Anderson & Sheppard, is Roger Stone, who was found guilty Friday of obstructing Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation and lying to Congress. If Stone heads to the hoosegow because of his Wikileaks shenanigans, then he won’t be able to wear his flamboyant A & S suits and cutaway collars, let alone maintain his fashion blog. It will be prison stripes, not pinstripes, for him as he prepares to join his former business partner Paul Manafort behind bars. So will Trump heed the pleas of Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones and pardon Stone, his chum since the 1980s?