Freddy Gray

Trump caved, Trump caved, Trump caved. That’s the incantation, and if you repeat it long enough, the words begin to feel right. The president’s capitulation was ‘total’, say the media heads. He has been ‘humiliated.’ Nancy Pelosi ‘took him to the cleaners’ and ‘kicked his behind.’ This, apparently, qualifies as high-level political analysis. The trouble is, it isn’t true. Trump didn’t cave. He backed off. He may have folded, temporarily, but what journalists and many Democrats struggle to understand is that elections are not won and lost in news cycles. The irony is that many of Trump’s opponents accuse him of having ADD, of being a Twitter addict who watches too much 24-hour rolling news.

Government shutdown stories aren’t sexy, everyone can see that. Nevertheless, it is curious that the journalists who most loathe Trump are so willing to distract their audiences from a political crisis which polls show is hurting the President, in order to focus again on the exhausting Russia conspiracy, which isn’t. This weekend, we saw another flurry of noisy Trump-Russia scoops. These latest feel thinner than usual. Still, they dominated the airwaves and Twitter feeds of media VIPs. On Friday, the New York Times related that the FBI ‘became so concerned’ about Trump’s firing of FBI director James B. Comey that they began investigating whether the President was indeed working for Russia.

Ding, dong, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly’s gone, and Trump loyalists are pleased. For months now, Kelly has been a thorn in MAGA’s side. He’s reportedly clashed with the President’s agenda, and perhaps most importantly, fallen foul of Melania Trump, who is an increasingly powerful force in the administration. Now, he’ll have left the White House by the end of the year, and the President is expected to pick somebody who will focus on his re-election campaign for 2020. On Thursday, at All Purpose Pizza in DC, former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski told me, ‘I am 100 percent certain John Kelly will not be the Chief of Staff when Donald Trump is re-elected as President of the United States.

Donald Trump has always been consistent on Brexit. He admired the spirit of the vote, a freedom-loving people defying their elites, as his deplorables would go on to do. He likes Britain. He dislikes the EU, which he has always regarded as a sort of protection racket for German manufacturing and an institution that gets in the way of his golf course development. Ever since Trump’s inauguration, he has made it clear that America is ready to give Britain the ‘beautiful’ free trade deal that so excites Brexiteers. But he and his advisers have been consistently disappointed by May’s insistence that she must stick by E.U. terms and regulations at the expense of improving and deepening the UK-US relationship.

Oh how the anti-Trump media licks its lips at news that Ivanka, the precious First Daughter, may have breached federal rules by using her private email for government work. It seems a perfect rebuke to the President, who has made such a fuss about Hillary Clinton doing exactly the same thing. As endless Twitter bores pointed out last night, Trump still obsesses over Clinton’s server issues in his tweets and encourages his crowds to chant ‘Lock her up!’ What’s he going to say now? That media schadenfreude file is so huge it could overload your inbox. But the Washington Post’s latest Ivanka scoop should come as no great surprise.

Ivanka Trump holds rather more sway in the White House than a First Daughter should — that much is well-established. Yet this week we see that it is her step-mother, Melania, who calls the shots in her husband’s administration. Mrs T is the real force behind the throne, as Mira Ricardel has discovered to her cost. Palace intrigue doesn’t get more intriguing. Ms Ricardel, a close ally of National Security Adviser John Bolton, made the mistake of clashing with Melania over her ‘Be Best’ trip to Africa. Ricardel allegedly insisted a member of the security council should accompany Mrs Trump as she posed her way around Ghana, Malawi and Kenya in a pith helmet, cream jacket and trousers, and black-neck tie. Melania disagreed. https://audioboom.

Seven days before the Brexit referendum, the Labour MP Jo Cox was out campaigning for Britain to remain in the European Union, when she was shot, stabbed and murdered by a far-right maniac shouting ‘Britain First’. People were shocked, and shock instantly turned to rage. This is what happens, they said, when you fan the flames of right-wing extremism. Pundits pointed at a provocative UKIP poster that showed a queue of migrants from the developing world and said, in Trumpian capitals, BREAKING POINT. That was a clear incitement to violence, they said. The whole political/media class thought that was that. The staff at Vote Leave (the official, pro-Brexit campaign, who hadn’t put out that poster) were despondent.