Jacob Heilbrunn

President Trump may be pulling out of Syria, but it’s bombs away in Washington. John Bolton’s likening Rudy Giuliani to a 'hand grenade' has now prompted America’s mayor to fire back that his old chum is an 'atomic bomb'. Both may be right.As the president complains about a lack of transparency in the House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry, enough information is surfacing to make it clear that the testimony of former National Security Council staffer Fiona Hill administered another body blow to Trump’s claim that his July telephone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky was fine and dandy. Hill apparently testified that Bolton wanted nothing to do with a Ukrainian scheme that he likened to a 'drug deal' and told her to speak with White House lawyers.

President Trump is feeling miffed. A new poll from Fox indicating that a majority of registered voters wants to see him depart the presidency sooner rather than later has apparently bruised his feelings. In his inimitable fashion, Trump dismissed the news as so much hooey. He declared, 'From the day I announced I was running for President, I have NEVER had a good @FoxNews Poll. Whoever their Pollster is, they suck. But @FoxNews is also much different than it used to be in the good old days. With people like Andrew Napolitano, who wanted to be a Supreme....' He concluded, '...

Oops. Donald Trump has another nettlesome whistleblower on his hands that he’s going to have to try and drown out.  The latest revelation: a career Internal Revenue Service official has filed a complaint alleging that a Treasury Department official sought to tamper with the annual audit of Donald Trump or Mike Pence’s tax returns. Which official do you think is more likely to have sought to intervene?According to the Washington Post, which broke the story, the whistleblower’s account focuses on 'the integrity of the government’s system for auditing the president and vice president’s tax returns.' Needless to say, the process is supposed to be inviolate.

She’s back. Hillary Clinton, who lost the 2016 election to Donald Trump, lashes into him in a CBS News interview that was released on Thursday, declaring that he’s an 'illegitimate president'. She also laced into him on Thursday night in an appearance before the National Abortion Rights Action League, not to mention an appearance on Friday at Georgetown University, where she said that Trump has transformed American foreign policy into 'an extortion racket' and 'stabbed in the back' career foreign service officers. Them’s fightin’ words! The ostensible purpose of her CBS interview was to promote her new tome, The Book of Gutsy Women, co-written with her daughter Chelsea.

Poor Joseph Maguire. The acting head of the intelligence agencies sure was in an awful predicament as he testified before the House Intelligence Committee. The former Navy SEAL was thrashing about to avoid becoming entangled in the net of the Democratic inquiry, swimming in murkier waters than he had ever encountered before. Indeed, at one point he confessed that he never would have accepted his post had he been aware of the whistleblower report that sounded an alarm about what Adam Schiff deemed the ‘nefarious’ activities about President Trump and his top aides.How different from Corey Lewandowski, who appears to be headed to the White House to help lead the defense of Trump!

Donald Trump’s true opponent is not Joe Biden or any of the other Democrats vying for the nomination. It’s Nancy Pelosi. Her announcement that a formal impeachment inquiry is beginning should come as a nasty shock to Trump. Pelosi is the one Democrat he has been unable to cow and bully. Instead, she has repeatedly outmaneuvered him. In her lapidary statement today she emphasized that 'no one is above the law'. That was basically it. The message was clear. She came across as calm, reassuring and understated. No doubt Trump may have inadvertently bolstered Biden’s chances to gain the nomination by targeting his candidacy for destruction with the help of the Ukrainian government. If he plays his cards right, Biden can go on the offense.

For several years Donald Trump has depicted himself as a kind of Roger Thornhill, the advertising executive in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest played by Cary Grant. Thornhill tells his secretary at the outset of the film that in his line of work there is no such thing as a lie only 'expedient exaggeration' and soon gets swept up in the machinations of the Cold War deep state as a gang of thugs mistakes him for someone named George Kaplan. An indignant Thornhill eventually manages to rescue himself, but Trump seems to get further enmeshed in his ongoing deep state saga by the week, and, in contrast to Thornhill, much of it is his own fault.

With the appointment of Robert C. O’Brien to serve as national security adviser, Donald Trump will once more disappoint his America First backers. They were hoping that Ret. Col. Douglas Macgregor would get the nod. Instead, Trump has gone with a Republican establishment figure who views China as the biggest threat to American national security. As always, Trump was bullish on his new hire: 'I have worked long & hard with Robert. He will do a great job!' As Trump national security adviser number 4, O’Brien is expected to bring some calm to the roiling waters of the NSC, where its heads have repeatedly capsized, whether it's Michael Flynn, H.R. McMaster, or John Bolton.

Donald Trump is declaring that he has fired John Bolton as national security adviser. Bolton is saying he offered to resign. It’s par for the course for the Trump administration where no one really gets to leave on their own terms. How long before Bolton writes his own tell-all? Or did he sign an NDA?Trump, who views staffing his administration as a kind of casting call, was never comfortable with Bolton’s 'I am the Walrus' mustache but after tiring of H.R. McMaster, he tapped him for the job of national security adviser. Now, Trump is declaring that he 'strongly disagreed with many of his suggestions.' This is probably the precursor to a future tweet declaring how Bolton was a loser and bum whom Trump never wanted on the premises in the first place but begged for a post.

Is Donald Trump riding a rubber ducky into alligator-infested waters, as a former aide to House Speaker John Boehner suggests to Politico? It’s hard to avoid the impression that an increasingly unmoored Trump seems to groping for assistance wherever he can find it. This morning, for example, Trump, in between playing weatherman about Hurricane Dorian, retweeted the real estate tycoon Sam Zell, one of whose great accomplishments was to bankrupt the Tribune Company. Zell declared that the notion that America shouldn’t impose tariffs on countries like China is a canard: '....We can’t have a system where we run our entire economy for the benefit of other countries, which have long charged us big tariffs. Don’t keep ducking the reality.

Has Donald Trump outfoxed himself? In the past few days Trump has been lashing out at the network for publishing a poll showing that his popularity is in the doldrums and that a variety of Democratic candidates would administer a thrashing to him. 'There’s something going on at Fox,' Trump announced on Sunday. 'Something' is one of Trump’s favorite words when he wants to signify that there is some vast conspiracy out there. The hunt was on. In between bashing the turncoat Anthony Scaramucci — 'nobody ever heard of this dope until he met me' — Trump assailed Fox personality Juan Williams, calling him 'so pathetic' and 'nasty and wrong!' He piled on, claiming that Williams had beseeched him for a photo, which Williams says is baloney.

Would the Democrats be better off losing the presidency in 2020 and winning the Senate? If you think that the economy is headed for a crash, then Democrats would prosper from having Donald Trump in office to shoulder the blame. In holding both houses of Congress, they could successfully stymie Trump and head towards impeachment. Winning the presidency but losing the Senate, by contrast, might well be an exercise in futility. The grandiose legislation that most of the Democratic candidates for the presidency, apart from former VP Joe Biden, are proposing would be snuffed out. But a trifecta would be even better, putting the Democrats in the same position that the GOP enjoyed for the first two years of the Trump presidency.

The Democratic party, mired in infighting only a week ago, has reunited over racial division. New Jersey senator Cory Booker stated in a speech on Wednesday in Charleston, S.C., that the recent acts of white nationalist violence received a stimulus 'from the highest office in our land, where we see in tweets and rhetoric, hateful words that ultimately endanger the lives of people in our country.' Joe Biden took direct aim at President Trump: in an impassioned speech in Burlington, Iowa, he declared, 'in both clear language and in code, the president has fanned the flames of white supremacy in this nation.' A day earlier, Fox News host Tucker Carlson tried to douse the controversy over white nationalism by averring that the phenomenon is a 'hoax.

Here we go again. Another Trump nominee bites the dust. This time it is Rep. John Ratcliffe, who tried to pass himself off as a seasoned practitioner in the secret world of intelligence. It turned out that the dour Texan didn’t even show for meetings of the House Intelligence Committee he served on, let alone prosecute any terrorists, as he claimed on his résumé. If there was ever a case of all hat and no cattle, Ratcliffe is it.True to form, Trump himself put out a lachrymose message on Twitter, bemoaning the hostility of the news media to his favored pick. Trump babbled, 'Our great Republican Congressman John Ratcliffe is being treated very unfairly by the LameStream Media.