Freddy Gray

At last, at last, President Donald J Trump has a big win. After the humiliating failure of his attempt to re-re-reform American healthcare, he has now passed his enormous $1.5 trillion tax overhaul through Congress. It is his first significant legislative accomplishment and it is, as he would say, yuge. The Republican splits that emerged over the Obamacare repeal bill threatened to stop his tax plans too. In the end they didn’t. Trump, keen to stress his own generosity, has called it a ‘an incredible Christmas gift for hard-working Americans’ — he’s even posted a little Christmas Tax Cuts video gif on Twitter — and no doubt, with the flush of the Yuletide spirit, lots of hard-working Americans will believe him.

These really are wild times in American politics. A Democrat, Doug Jones, just won the Senate Race in Alabama. A Democrat hasn’t won a Senate seat in the Heart of Dixie since 1992 – and that was Richard Shelby, who was so conservative he then became a Republican, and still is the senior GOP Senator for Alabama. The victory gives the Democrats a clean sweep in statewide elections in 2017. The party won the special elections in Virginia and New Jersey in November, and success in Alabama now gives them great momentum going into the mid-term elections of 2018. Trump can keep pointing at the economy and saying he is making America great again. The Democrats can keep pointing to what’s happened at the ballot since his inauguration and say he’s losing.

It’s Hanukkah next week, and President Donald J Trump has decided to give the state of Israel a big present. He will today recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and it is understood that America will shortly move its embassy from Tel Aviv to the Holy City.  This is something that Israeli diplomats have long hoped for but did not think possible before President Trump entered the White House this year. His kindness will go down very well with most Israelis and supporters of Israel. However, the Arab world sees it as a deep affront.  Jared Kushner, the president’s 36 year old son-in-law, himself an Orthodox Jew, has been handling Middle Eastern talks for his wife’s father’s administration.

President Donald J Trump likes nothing better than winning, and he has just had the first major legislative win of his presidency. An enormous $1.4 trillion tax cut has now been passed by the Senate. No Democrat voted for the bill, yet still it passed by 51 to 49 votes. This avoided the anticipated legislative deadlock that would have meant Vice President Mike Pence having to break a 50-50 tie. The bill will now be voted on in the House of Representatives on Monday, where the Republicans have a much larger majority. By getting his tax cut through Congress, Trump answers one of the most stinging critiques of his presidency so far — that he hasn’t actually achieved anything. Now it appears that he has.

It’s been a miserable two weeks for our Foreign Secretary. Not only did Boris Johnson trip up over the British woman held in Iran; not only did he find himself accused of puppeteering Theresa May to further his and Michael Gove’s Brexit ambitions; he also committed the most grievous PR sin any politician can commit: he praised Donald Trump in public. ‘What you’ve got to realise is that the American President is just one of the huge, great global brands,’ Boris told Fox & Friends. ‘He is penetrating corners of the global consciousness that I think few other presidents have ever done.’ That made people very cross. The Labour MP David Lammy called Johnson an ‘odious arse-kisser’ and countless others echoed that sentiment.

Donald Trump’s statement to the nation about Las Vegas was platitudinous. Speeches by leaders in the wake of such horrors tend to be. But it wasn’t bad. He did the necessary: he called the slaughter ‘pure evil’, he thanked the Las Vegas police and protection services for their professionalism, he offered comfort and condolences to the families of the victims, and he called for America to unite in grief. ‘In moments of tragedy and horror America comes together as one, and it always has,’ he said. ‘It is our love that defines us today, and always will, forever.’ Schmaltzy stuff, but exactly what America wanted to hear. His speech was explicitly Christian, too, in a way that President Obama’s responses to mass shootings tended to avoid.

Ignore the usual bleating about Trump having 'lost control' and not being 'fit' for the presidency following his attention-grabbing speech in Arizona. Trump has never been fit for the presidency, if we accept that ‘fitness’ for high office means anything at all. His political career has never really been controlled by anything other than wild ego. We all know this, but we sometimes pretend not to. In fact, Trump's speech in Arizona shows he is still aware of what makes his movement tick. His speech demonstrated a political nous that has been lacking of late -- an awareness that a president needs supporters. In recent days, the Trump administration appears to have lost touch with the movement that put him in power.

Ding dong Steve Bannon is gone – and all the liberal world order is cock-a-hoop. As Democrat congressman Tim Ryan said, ‘Good. He had no business being there to begin with.’ Or as Nita Lowey, D-N.Y. put it, ‘Steve Bannon should have never been a White House official.’ Maybe it is a good thing that Steve Bannon, an apocalyptic thinker better suited to Breitbart and Talk Radio agitation than real power, is gone. And yet and yet – in the craziness that is Trumpland, Bannon was the closest thing to a coherent strategic thinker in the White House. Who is there now? Bannon had principles – mad ones, perhaps – but a thought-through worldview. I'm not convinced anybody else in the White House does.

Donald Trump has a yuge problem in special prosecutor Robert Swan Mueller III. The American president’s anger at having this legal thorn in his administration’s side explains much of his recent erratic behaviour, as Daniel McCarthy explained in the magazine this week. Now we learn that Mueller is using a grand jury – a group that meets in secret and has the legal power to compel testimony – and that can only be an aggravation for Trump. He can keep saying it’s a 'Witch Hunt'  – maybe it is – but a witch hunt could bring down his presidency, or at least make it impossible for his administration to function.

Give it to the scriptwriters of the epic comedy that is The Decline and Fall of the American Empire, they know how to keep an audience going. The blockbuster farce starring Donald J Trump – ‘the greatest show on earth’, even to its harshest critics – had begun to tire a little, of late. The Russia stuff goes on and on, but in our age of non-existent attention spans, the twists and turn are getting a bit exhausting. We all know that American health reform is important, but, let’s face it, the fate of Obamacare legislation and talk of ‘skinny bills’ doesn’t get the juices flowing. It’s not good for ratings, as Trump himself would say.

These days nobody much bothers denying that the Trump administration is chaotic, aside that is from the Donald's inner circle and a few hardcore loyalists who believe that the 45th president really is Making America Great Again. The Trumpists say that reports of strife and discord in the White House are elite media spin. But what to make of the news that Sean Spicer has stood down as White House Press Secretary? Perhaps it's not that significant – press secretaries come and go – but the briefing wars surrounding Spicer's departure suggest once again that Team Trump may be tearing itself apart. Spicer, it's said, has gone because he was unhappy at the arrival of Anthony Scaramucci, a big hedge funder who has previously hosted the Skybridge Alternatives (SALT) Conference.

Reactions to each development in the Trump-Russia scandal tend to follow the same pattern. At first, journalists express incredulity and then horror. It doesn't matter if the Team Trump member under suspicion is Mike Flynn, Jared Kushner, Donald Trump Junior, even big daddy Trump himself, everybody agrees this is big news. Dots are connected and then, click, we all conclude that Russia 'hacked' the election. Then, once the initial flush of excitement, passes, everybody says 'where is the actual evidence?' Or 'is it really that bad?' And the Trump-Russia scandal subsides for a few days. People who are inclined to accept Trump's presidency say that the media has gone mad over the Russia thing.

What fun the internet is having now that Vladimir Putin has finally met Donald Trump. Social media is teeming with jokes, gifs, and memes about the two big dawgs of global politics finally coming together. It’s the great bromance of the populist age.  Underneath the hilarity, however, there remains intense suspicions about the relationship between Trump and Putin – it is now widely accepted, even if the evidence is still hotly disputed, that Russia ‘hacked the election’ in order to ensure Hillary Clinton’s defeat. Trump’s meeting with Sergei Lavrov in May was considered highly nefarious, especially after Trump accidentally gave away a state secret, apparently just to show off.

What are we to make of Donald Trump’s intervention in the case of Charlie Gard, the desperately ill boy whose painful story has been in the news so much in recent weeks. Earlier today, the President took to Twitter – where else? – to say: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/881875263700783104 The President’s generous albeit somewhat vague message sends a clear signal to the world: Donald Trump has a heart. For that reason, it will invite cynicism.