Jacob Heilbrunn

No sooner did Donald Trump announce the resignation of Dan Coats than the handwringing began in Washington. Coats, an establishment Republican, was the only man who could stand up to Trump. He was tough on Russia. He wouldn’t water down intelligence reports. Almost overnight he was converted into a wise man whose wisdom made him a model of rectitude and probity. In reality, Coats is something of a hack who was occupying a position that should never have been created in the first place. George W. Bush capitulated to conventional wisdom in Washington by vastly expanding the national security bureaucracy after September 11. Trump’s apparent instinct to gut the agency has been put on the back-burner. Now he’s substituting an even worse hack in the form of Rep.

Call it the Art of the Seal. When he spoke before several hundred youthful supporters at Tuesday's Turning Point USA Teen Action Student Summit at the Marriott Marquis in Washington, Donald Trump delivered a rousing talk with a large presidential seal looming behind him on a jumbo-tron. There was only one problem: the seal was fake, the creation of a 46-year-old NeverTrump Republican named Charles Leazott who is a graphic designer living in Richmond, Va.  His puckish seal was loaded, as the Washington Post noted, with phony symbols, including a Russian imperial eagle that is holding a wad of cash in its right talon and golf clubs in the other. Instead of 'E pluribus unum,' the seal states '45 es un titre — '45 is a puppet.'No one seems to know how it happened.

It wasn’t even that laborious a process. Two days after he gave a prolonged self-exculpation masquerading as a press conference to defend the sweetheart deal in Florida that he vouchsafed to billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein 12 years ago, labor secretary Alex Acosta threw in the towel. For Trump the prospect of having Acosta remain was a nonstarter with the 2020 presidential race looming large. Trump was quick to note today that he will miss Acosta, whom he deemed 'a tremendous talent, he’s a Hispanic man.' Indeed Acosta was the lone Hispanic member of his cabinet. Trump even singled out an elite school as evidence of Acosta’s bona fides: 'He went to Harvard.' According to CNN, this will make for high-level vacancy 261 for the Trump administration.

H. Ross Perot issued colorful and sweeping statements, including the claim that a 'giant sucking sound' of jobs whooshing abroad would occur after passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement. He promised that he, and he alone, could fix what ailed America. He promised that as an outsider, he could clean out the Washington establishment and set wrong aright in both political parties. The fiery and paranoid Texan embodied American exceptionalism. Perot, who died on Tuesday, never reached the White House. But the Texan businessman and presidential candidate left a lasting mark on American politics. He paved the way for the presidency of another brash business tycoon, Donald Trump. A shrewd businessman, he evinced an interest in politics early on.

Are both Donald Trump and Joe Biden going to run to the center? Yesterday Trump delivered a fairly anodyne speech about American military valor that was totally bereft of his sizzling asides. Now fresh rumors are percolating about whether Trump really is preparing to dump Vice President Mike Pence for his former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley. Trump explained today that Pence had to cancel his trip to New Hampshire because of an 'interesting problem' but would not say what it was other than that all would be revealed in a couple of weeks. Another person who may get the heave-ho is national security adviser John Bolton.

The Washington, DC city council is having none of it. 'Tanks, but no tanks', it tweeted at Donald Trump. Trump may shy from actual warfare but he has arranged a military extravaganza masquerading as a July 4 ceremony. While there may be no 'brand new Sherman tanks,' as Trump promised — they were retired after the Korean War — the Pentagon is furiously trying to figure out if it can safely transport the 60-ton M1 Abrams tank over Memorial Bridge without collapsing it. A thunderstorm might also cause any tanks to sink into the ground of the National Mall. It would be awkward symbolism for the man who promised to drain the swamp.

At first it looked as though the Democratic debate in Miami last night was going to be sickening. Candidate after candidate described their personal illnesses or medical traumas, ranging from car accidents to prostate cancer, to try and demonstrate their sympathy for the healthcare challenges that ordinary Americans face. But then the debate took a fiery turn as Kamala Harris targeted Joe Biden for destruction, zeroing in on his conciliatory remarks about working with segregationist senators and his past opposition for school busing. John Cassidy observed, 'Considering the debate over all, Biden’s performance raised fresh doubts about his preparation, age, grasp of the environment in which he is operating, and basic political skills.

Are the Democrats running against Mitch McConnell rather than Donald Trump? McConnell’s name was invoked several times last night as a synonym with malice and treachery. And Trump? Not so much. The candidates seemed to want to deal with Trump by elision rather than confronting him directly. But Trump himself weighed in on the proceedings from Air Force One to blow a loud raspberry: 'BORING!' This wasn’t quite fair. The differences between the candidates, who amounted to a warm-up band for tonight’s main performance, was a study in the contrasts that mark the Democratic party. Tim Ryan and John Delaney sought offer up the unadulterated old time gospel of the Democrat of yore.

Donald Trump is on the skids. It won’t take much to knock him out. So far, Democrats appear to be sticking with Joe Biden rather than casting more than flirtatious glances at other, more left wing candidates. Not so fast. As Henry Olsen reminds us in the Washington Post today, Trump is far from finished. The heck with the popular vote. The only votes that count are getting to 270 in the electoral college. Trump squeaked by in 2016. He could do it again. Trump, after all, may be most dangerous when he appears to be on the ropes. Tomorrow night Trump will kick off his re-election campaign in Orlando, Florida. He’ll be pumped. Fox News says that his supporters are already lining up to see the great man. Trump has a lot to prove.

Donald Trump can no more remove Kellyanne Conway from his administration than the Louvre could banish the Mona Lisa. She has been a stalwart defender of Trump both during his campaign and presidency. There are few members of the Trump camp that possess her talent for the zinger. While the old fighters like Jeff Sessions, Steve Bannon and Corey Lewandowski fell by the wayside, Conway has proven the supreme survivor. Even Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump announced on Thursday afternoon on Twitter, is headed back to Arkansas.

They warn generals not to fight the last war. The same admonition might apply to presidential races. Donald Trump was out on the White House lawn attacking Joe Biden with his usual battery of epithets — ‘dummy,’ ‘loser,’ and so forth — and it sounded like déjà vu all over again. Even as he derides Biden as ‘slower than he used to be,’ it is Trump who is starting to look as though he’s losing his mojo. In 2016, Trump ran a guerrilla campaign in which he was able to sneak up on the enemy, first the Republicans vying for the nomination, then Hillary Clinton. No one took Trump that seriously.

Japan has a new emperor, and so do we. Donald Trump isn’t merely president. He wants to be America’s shogun. Already Trump has repeatedly made his contempt for his Cabinet officials and staffers plain as he routinely forces them to line up and sing his praises. Now, in an episode that is more redolent of H.M.S. Pinafore than Top Gun, TVSG, or The Very Stable Genius, is enmeshed in an embarrassing brouhaha over the USS John S. McCain, which was inconveniently parked off the shores of Japan, where Trump might see it. Klaxons apparently started sounding in the White House over Trump’s Memorial Day visit to Japan. It was time to clear the decks. Under no circumstances could Trump be allowed to espy the dreaded name ‘McCain.’ It would harsh his mellow.

The Wolff is once more at the door. The Guardian reports that Michael Wolff, the author of Fire and Fury, has written a new tome. It’s called Siege: Trump Under Fire. It alleges that special counsel Robert Mueller drafted a three-count obstruction of justice indictment that he then decided to discard. The Mueller team says that Wolff’s report is bogus. But Wolff himself writes that his assertion is ‘based on internal documents given to me by sources close to the Office of the Special Counsel.’ He’s also got some eyebrow-raising quotes. ‘The Jews always flip,’ was apparently Trump’s verdict on the cooperation agreements of Michael Cohen, David Pecker and Allen Weisselberg.

It was a maiden moment in the annals of the White House yesterday. Kellyanne Conway is claiming that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ‘treats me as she might treat her maid or her pilots or makeup artists or her wardrobe consultants’ because she refused to discuss infrastructure with her yesterday. Conway went on to play the elitist card, asserting that Pelosi is apparently too ‘rich’ to bother talking with the hoi polloi. The only problem being, of course, that Conway is herself no piker when it comes to accumulating the green stuff — she lives in a $7.

Inquiring minds want to know: should Nancy Pelosi, who has hitherto prudently fended off calls from her left flank for impeaching Trump, adopt the lesser tack of launching an impeachment inquiry? Progressives want progress, which is to say they’re intent on ousting Trump from office by any means necessary. Their thinking is that starting an inquiry may not be tantamount to impeachment, but will help erode Trump’s defiance of Congress, thereby allowing it to inform the public of his various transgressions. Trump has instructed his former White House counsel Donald F. McGahn II not to meet Congress, an edict he obeyed this morning to the vexation of Jerry Nadler, the head of the House Judiciary Committee.

Granting a full pardon to Conrad Black is the first sensible thing that Donald Trump has done. Black is being depicted as a ‘fraudster’ by his detractors but I see something entirely different — a brave, fearless, and audacious intellect that has refused to truckle to the dictates of political correctness. When it comes to the verdicts against Black, as Matt Gurney observes in the National Post, Black’s adversaries never even stop to contemplate whether or not they were just. Ever since Trump was elected, I’ve been waiting for him to efface this lamentable stain on Black’s escutcheon. The surprising thing is not that he did it, but that it took Trump this long.