Freddy Gray

Donald Trump had hoped to mark his first anniversary as president basking in surprisingly positive media headlines and enjoying a lavish party at his Mar-a-Largo estate in Florida. Instead he must contend with a government shutdown and another major political crisis in Washington, the political swamp he promised to drain. Congress has remained in session all weekend as Republicans and Democrats seek to resolve the shutdown -- and blame each other for having caused it. But who will Americans blame? The President? The Republican Party? Or the Democrats? The answer is everybody, probably.

Another week, another blow to the so-called Special Relationship. The latest sorry news is that Number 10 has been trying to orchestrate a meeting with President Donald Trump at Davos — but President Donald Trump reportedly isn’t interested. He’d rather hang out with President Macron of France instead. Oh dear. It looks as if the President wants us to grovel, and we probably will in the end. It’s hard not to feel for May. She spent a lot of political capital in being friendly to Trump in the early weeks of his presidency. While Macron got elected essentially by posing as ;'anti-Trump, she tried to present herself as a sort of middle ground between Trump's populist nationalism and Davos's neoliberalism.

Journalists can guffaw at the silliness of President Donald’s Trump’s Fake News Awards as much as they like. The truth is he’s right: the media is biased against him to the point of insanity. And the way Trump has presented the awards on Twitter, and whoever wrote the announcements on GOP.com, has been funny, perceptive, and social-media savvy. In the war that is Trump versus the media, Trump is winning. Through Twitter, Trump has turned media bias against him into his great political asset. Voters who aren’t pathologically anti-Trump can see that he has a point about how unfair the mainstream coverage of him is, and increasingly people tend to believe him not the press.

How quickly Steve Bannon's dark star has collapsed. Not so long ago, friends and enemies talked him up as a media genius. He was a political guerrilla operative you underrated at your peril. He was ‘Trump's Rasputin’, or ‘President Bannon’, the man who really controlled the White House.  Then he lost his job in said White House, fell out with Donald J Trump, and now, a few days after the publication of his comments in Michael Wolff's book, he has stood down as head of Breitbart news.  The power that Bannon represented turned out to have been the Mercer family, who had bankrolled Bannon, Breitbart and Trump's campaign.

Forget North Korea for a moment — President Donald J Trump today launched a devastating assault on Steve Bannon, his former chief strategist, and the man often credited as the architect of his success. Replying to bitchy comments Steve Bannon reportedly made in Fire and Fury, a new book about the Trump White House by arch-muckraker hack Michael Wolff, Trump exploded. His comments are worth reading in full: ‘Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind. Steve was a staffer who worked for me after I had already won the nomination by defeating seventeen candidates, often described as the most talented field ever assembled in the Republican party.

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.