Harold Evans

At weekends in our summerhouse at Quogue on Long Island, we go out to buy the newspapers and paper-cup coffee at the busy 7-Eleven in Westhampton. Several brisk young Hispanic women serve the long line of customers. Nobody mentions Donald Trump, though his latest vomit about deporting everyone like them is often on the front pages of the papers they hand us. The hurt and angst it must inflict may be mitigated somewhat in New York by the moral clarity of the city’s Daily News editorials blasting Trump as ‘un-American’, and the music video ‘Amnesty Don’, a spoof western mocking his talk of ‘going soft on immigration’.

Days ago, I’d have bet that even the most bitterly partisan Congress in generations would jib at humiliating their commander-in-chief. More than two thirds of the population, according to the polls, demanded he go to Congress before firing Cruise missiles against the Syrian regime. Well, he did, didn’t he, but appeasing the people hasn’t cut much ice with Senators of both parties to judge from the hearings this week which have provoked Secretary Kerry to wag a schoolmasterly finger. In the hour their country calls on them to make a stand against the ‘moral obscenity’ of gassing 1,429 Syrians, 426 children among them, the querulous tribunes of the people seem to have learned their lines from Rick in Casablanca: ‘I stick my neck out for nobody.