Daniel DePetris

There was a time not too long ago - less than three years to be exact - when German Chancellor Angela Merkel was at the very top of her game. She dominated German and European politics for over a decade with her clear, effective, but cautious leadership, watching as the German economy solidified its place as Europe’s economic engine. When Merkel decided to open Germany’s doors in August 2015 to hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing war and persecution in Syria, she became much more than the steward of Berlin’s economic power - she transformed overnight into the moral beacon of the European continent.

If there is anything in this world Donald Trump enjoys (other than needling his political opponents and making money), it’s getting on the stump and campaigning. For better or worse, the president draws tens of thousands of people to his rallies, a fact Trump frequently brags about when he’s addressing his adoring fans. It’s a big reason why Republican lawmakers desperately clinging to their seats are so excited when Trump comes into town on their behalf — even a small dose of Trumpian energy can get loyal Republican voters off their couches on Election Day. All of this barnstorming across the country — in a span of six days, Trump held rallies in Florida, Pennsylvania, and Ohio — serves a dual purpose for Trump.

When European leaders met earlier this month to thrash out an agreement on  migration, they succeeded in rescuing German Chancellor Angela Merkel from the precipice. But it is already becoming clear that the deal they struck was more a temporary papering over of ideological differences on migration than a permanent solution. While the EU agreed on the possible establishment of migrant transit centres on European soil, disembarkation platforms in north Africa, and a general statement that illegal migration was a European problem, the detail of how all this would work in practice was ignored.

When Italy's interior minister, Matteo Salvini, refused to let the rescue ship Aquarius – which was carrying 629 men, women, and children – land, the European Union was presented with yet another migration emergency. The vessel was stranded for days in the Mediterranean looking for a place to dock, with an EU-wide solution nowhere to be found. Eventually, Spain's newly-installed socialist government stepped up and allowed the boat to dock. Madrid’s act of statesmanship was a win for everybody: it allowed Salvini to claim that his tough immigrant policy was working; Spain's prime minister, Pedro Sanchez, could burnish his credentials as a humanitarian; and it solved a problem for the EU, which has been pathetically ineffective on the migration question.

Jim Jordan of Ohio may not be a household name in the United States, but rest assured that he has turned himself into a disruptive force in Washington, D.C.  The seven-term congressman is a Donald Trump kind of guy: he hates the status-quo and wants to take down the political establishment of both parties. He relishes making mincemeat of any government official who has even the slimmest connection to former President Barack Obama. He is a sanctimonious loudmouth. Just as Donald Trump sees the value of unpredictability and unconventionality, Jim Jordan sees political value in using the allure of congressional oversight and transparency to mask what are undeniable political vendettas against anyone who happens to reek of the swamp. But it is now Jordan who is under the microscope.

There was a time not long ago when Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions were best of buds. Well, not friends in the normal meaning of the word, but about as close as two such public figures can be. Trump and Sessions shared views on immigration, criminal justice, taxes, and military spending. Sessions even loaned one of his’ senior aides (a guy named Stephen Miller) to the Trump campaign at a time when his freewheeling operation was in desperate need of staffing. When the four-term U.S. Senator from Alabama announced to a crowd of Trump supporters on February 28, 2016 that he would be endorsing the uncensored billionaire for president, you got the sense that it wasn’t a hard decision for Sessions to make.

May 17, 2017 started out as any other day in Donald Trump’s Washington. Men and women in suits with briefcases walked into work, ready to meet clients or do business. The day, however, proved to be the very beginning of Trump’s troubles, with the appointment of a special counsel to look into allegations of collusion between the president’s campaign and Russian operatives in the Kremlin. The White House, like everybody else in the country, was caught off guard; Trump found out about the Justice Department’s decision when he was meeting with candidates for FBI Director (Trump threw James Comey out of the building a week earlier). As one administration official told CNN at the time: "It's still sinking in. We were told about it. Not asked about it.

The midterm elections this November are bound to be a rough slog for a Republican Party desperately trying to keep its congressional majority. As former President Barack Obama would say, the Democratic base is “fired up, ready to go.” Democrats are giddy about their prospects; Republicans are for the most part gloomy.The GOP will need all the help from the heavens to pull this one off. A primary win by coal baron and provocateur Don Blankenship in West Virginia, however, wouldn’t be one of those gifts. There is a reason why Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the Republican political establishment threw $1.

When it comes to military action against the Assad regime, the United States again confronts one of the most fundamental questions of the American constitutional republic: does the president have the authority to order U.S. military force without the expressed authorisation of Congress? If you ask most executive branch officials, you would probably hear an affirmative “yes.” Generally, the case rests on a baseline argument: as Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Armed Forces, the president has the inherent power under Article I of the Constitution to protect and defend the United States. While Congress has the authority to declare war, they claim, the president also has the authority to deploy the U.S. military when it is needed to promote the U.S. national interest.

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.

Robert Mueller, the former Director of the FBI and special counsel in the soap opera that is the Russia collusion investigation, has been on the case for ten months now. His team of attorneys and Washington prosecutors has interviewed dozens of witnesses, scanned hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, sent an unknown number of subpoenas to members of Donald Trump’s campaign for information or testimony, and is in the process of scheduling an interview with President Trump himself. Through it all, Mueller’s camp has shown impressive self-discipline; unlike Kenneth Starr’s inquest against President Bill Clinton two decades ago, the special counsel’s office is keeping its work in-house.

Only very rarely in today’s Washington, D.C. is a cause so strong that it brings together America’s most famous progressive with one of the country’s most ideological conservatives. But the nasty, bloody, and intractable proxy war in Yemen - and the U.S. military’s involvement in it - is one of those causes. Yesterday afternoon, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and Utah Senator Mike Lee held a press conference on Capitol Hill to unveil the introduction of a resolution that, if passed by both houses of Congress, would compel a withdrawal of all U.S. military assets from the Saudi-led campaign against the Houthi rebels.