Jacob Heilbrunn

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.

Give Donald Trump credit for being sporting about the fresh revelation in the New York Times that he racked up a cool $1 billion in losses during the 1990s, a sum that earned him the distinction of being the number one financial loser in America. ‘It was sport,’ he announced on Twitter. Indeed it was. Not everyone gets to play with the sums of money that Trump has splashed about in for decades. Unlike Scrooge McDuck, however, who wallowed in his swimming pool, Trump has followed a rather different ethos. He’s spent his way into bankruptcy repeatedly, only to be bailed out of his predicament by...who?

William Barr took paternity of the Mueller report during his testimony before Congress today, declaring ‘It’s my baby.’ All that was missing was him breaking out into song, ‘I’ll say yes, sir, that’s my baby/No sir, I don’t mean maybe/Yes sir, that’s my baby now.’ Indeed it is.Barr may be Attorney General, but there was no Solomonic splitting of the baby. Barr fought a battle with an invisible Robert Mueller for possession, claiming that his old pal’s letter to him complaining about ‘public confusion’ as a result of the rollout of the report was, in fact, ‘snitty.

During his speech today at the NRA convention in Indianapolis, Donald Trump shot himself in the foot. ‘Now we’re going after the rest,’ he announced about Obamacare. ‘We had it done except for one vote,’ he added, in another swipe at John McCain. It’s a pronouncement that will surely feature prominently in forthcoming Democratic political ads about Trump’s relentless efforts to target healthcare. He also signaled that he has a proclivity for indulging in conspiracy theories, claiming that ‘Democrats are obsessed with hoaxes, delusions, and witch hunts. That’s what they’re obsessed with, that’s what they wanna do. And we can play the game just as well, or better, than they do.

Total exoneration? Pshaw! The Mueller report makes it clear that Trump, to use his own evocative language, was and remains a bad hombre. But whether any more voters conclude that he’s one than already had is an open question.If you like, you can read the efforts of the New York Times reporters reading the Mueller report. There are some nice salacious tidbits. Informed by Jeff Sessions about the appointment of a special counsel, Trump slumps in his chair in the Oval Office and announces, ‘Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked.’Not quite.