Jacob Heilbrunn

For all the encomiums she delivered to Trump and his coterie today, Nikki Haley delivered an unexpected blow to the Trump White House by announcing her resignation. Her announcement caught Trump flatfooted, coming after the previous evening’s revelries at the White House, where he turned a ceremony for newly minted Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh into a political pep rally that is likely to further enrage his detractors and opponents. The sudden defection of one of his big stars is exactly the kind of television programming that Trump loathes, particularly on the eve of the November midterm elections, which Politico says look increasingly ominous for Republican control of the House of Representatives.

Senator Mitch McConnell was right. Brett Kavanaugh will become a member of the Supreme Court. Senators Flake and Collins are already making reassuring noises about the new FBI report. But will his investiture help the GOP?The investigation demanded by Flake and others has proven not to have investigated very much. Mark Judge and a few other of Kavanaugh’s high school cronies were interviewed. Kavanaugh himself was not. Nor was Christine Blasey Ford. Senator Charles Grassley says about the FBI report that ‘there’s nothing in it that we didn’t already know.’ That was by design. Federal gumshoes found what the White House wanted them to find.

Just when you think it’s all Brett Kavanaugh, all the time, up pops Stormy Daniels as a reminder that Donald Trump faces multiple perils that he can’t simply wave away with a magic wand. Today, it’s a story in the Wall Street Journal, a newspaper that is sometimes supposed by Trump’s detractors to be in the hip pocket of the president, but that is actually proving quite nettlesome to him. It reveals that Donald Trump has — surprise! — been much more enmeshed in trying to squash the Daniels story than he has acknowledged. Recall that when quizzed about whether he knew the payment to Daniels on April 5 on Air Force One, Trump responded with a flat ‘no.’ That turned out to not be true.

George Washington couldn’t tell a lie. Donald Trump can’t help telling a lie. At his press conference today Trump suggested that not only wouldn’t Democrats vote to confirm the father of our country to the Supreme Court, but that Washington may not have had a spotless record when it came to his private affairs. ‘He may have had some, I think, accusations made,’ Trump said. ‘Didn’t he have a couple of things in his past?’ Who will Trump exhume next to besmirch? Honest Abe? The Gipper?However outlandish, the presser was no laughing matter.  World leaders didn’t laugh at him, he said, but with him yesterday as he proclaimed that he was the greatest president in American history.

Here we go again. Another Trump administration official bites the dust. This time it was deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein who had supposedly submitted his resignation to White House chief of staff John Kelly, who reportedly is on the same glide path and views Trump, according to Bob Woodward’s new book Fear, as a 'professional liar.' Except that Rosenstein hadn’t. Or he did, but it wasn’t accepted by Kelly. Or something like that. As compensation, Rosenstein, we were told, got to attend an NSC principals committee meeting this afternoon. So it goes in Crazytown where, as the Atlantic’s Steve Clemons points out, things keep getting crazier.

Donald Trump has been handed a golden opportunity to turn the tables on his enemies. No sooner had he backed down on declassifying Russia-related documents from the Justice Department, citing the concerns of key allies, than the New York Times reports that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who appointed special counsel Robert Mueller, apparently talked about wearing a wire to tape Trump and invoking the 25th Amendment. He also suggested that other FBI officials could tape Trump. The revelation is sure to fortify allegations on the right about the depths of the deep state conspiracy trying to topple him from office. If Rosenstein, as seems likely, is Anonymous of Times fame, then his anonymity is blown.

Is Christine Blasey Ford stealing a page from Trump? She’s just pulled the kind of power move that Trump himself likes to make in dealing with the Senate Judiciary Committee. Told that she must respond by 10 a.m. Friday about whether or not she will show up, Blasey has now declared that she can’t appear to testify on Monday but would like to later in the week. A letter from her attorney to the committee states, ‘As you are aware, she’s been receiving death threats which have been reported to the FBI and she and her family have been forced out of their home. She wishes to testify, provided that we can agree on terms that are fair and which ensure her safety.

Donald Trump is not an overly bookish kind of guy, but he keeps getting slammed by ambitious authors, ranging from Michael Wolff to Bob Woodward. The latest entrant in this crowded field is Full Disclosure by Stormy Daniels, a ribald tell-all of her frolics with Trump. In it, she lodges the accusation that she enjoyed the ‘least impressive sex I ever had’ with him. Daniels’s book suggests, among other things, that Sen. Marco Rubio was onto something when he mocked Trump for his small hands. Daniels corroborates Rubio’s suspicions with what the New York Post calls a below-the belt blow.

It was a saturnine Manafort who appeared in court, but prosecutor Andrew Weissmann says that Manafort is already cooperating with the Mueller investigation, or, to use President Trump’s terminology, flipping. The likelihood is that Trump himself will flip out over this news. After all, he recently observed to Fox News, ‘It’s called flipping and it almost ought to be illegal.’ Now his decision to hire Manafort is becoming a case of the perils of Pauline for Trump. So much for hiring only the ‘best people.’ A week ago Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani proclaimed, ‘There’s no fear that Paul Manafort would cooperate against the president because there’s nothing to cooperate about and we long ago evaluated him as an honourable man.’ Yeah, right.

Donald Trump should be in high spirits. Yesterday, a Washington, DC liquor board assessed whether it should yank his license to sell beer, wine and spirits at the Trump International hotel (the lawyer representing the group, Byron York notes on Twitter, also has Glenn Simpson/Fusion GPS as a client). It decided that ‘The board does not agree with the assumption that a character and fitness review may be initiated at any time.’At issue was whether Trump, a lifelong teetotaler who has indulged in copious other vices to compensate for his one public act of self-restraint, is a man of low character who should not be permitted to sell alcohol. The complaint was funded by an Arizonan Republican named Jerry Hirsch who heads an organisation called Make Integrity Great Again.

It’s hard to avoid the impression that Donald Trump is being stalked by Anonymous, or anomious, as he mispronounced it twice at his rally last night in Billings, Montana (prompting another round of speculation about why he is slurring words). The proof came right as he was denouncing the Democrats for being nothing more than a bunch of lowdown, rotten ‘haters.’ Behind him stood an anonymous young man in a plaid shirt with a three-day stubble who became a sensation on Twitter as he made a bunch of animated facial expressions indicating a degree of skepticism and surprise in response to Trump’s complaints about everything from Bob Woodward’s character assassination to the assault by an op-ed writer in the New York Times.

Should President Trump be afraid of Bob Woodward’s new 448-page book Fear: Trump in the White House? Both CNN and the Washington Post are featuring scoops from the book which is slated to be released on September 11. So far, the White House itself has remained mum about the book, which is a major mistake that indicates it is as ill-prepared for Woodward’s assault as it was for Michael Wolff’s. But it seems likely to elicit further fire and fury from Trump, at least in the form of aggrieved tweets that will inadvertently serve to confirm the veracity of the very statements they are meant to impugn.

Donald Trump got his sugar high last night at a rally in Indiana for Republican Senate candidate Mike Braun. Trump issued his most blatant threat yet to monkey with the Justice Department, saying he’s ready to ‘get involved.’ By involvement he means denuding it of those conversant with Russian money laundering activities such as Justice official Bruce Ohr. Throw in some jabs at the Fake News media and the crowd was soon whooping it up. Mission accomplished. Or maybe not. It was back to reality this morning as the Washington Post released the results of a poll it conducted with ABC News about Trump. The results were not good. Trump’s popularity rating was a measly 36 per cent. Disapproval givers at 60 per cent. A majority support Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

Here we go again. Donald Trump is on a fresh Twitter orgy, around 20 or so in the last day, attacking everyone from ‘degenerate fool’ Carl Bernstein to CNN chief Jeff Zucker to Nellie Ohr. Believe it Ohr not, her sin is not only to be married to Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, but also to — gulp — be fluent in Russian. ‘She worked for Fusion GPS where she was paid a lot,’ Trump wrote. ‘Collusion!’ There are two theories circulating about Trump’s collusion effusions. The first is that he’s simply going bonkers. The poor fellow, so the thinking goes, is cracking up under the strain of the stream of revelations about his misdeeds, concupiscent and otherwise.

Is Donald Trump right about Google? His latest fusillade came early this morning as he kvetched about Google being ‘rigged’ against conservatives. The Week called it ‘rage-googling.’ In part he was probably peeved because the death of John McCain stole the spotlight from him. Like Norma Desmond, he is always ready for his closeup. His economic adviser Larry Kudlow promptly followed up Trump’s complaint by saying he would take a ‘hard look’ at the tech giant, a familiar target of obloquy from the left. Now the right is getting on on the game. For its part, Google piously announced that its search results aren’t biased toward any ‘political ideology.’ Surely not.

Oh, how Vice President Mike Pence must be licking his chops today. One by one, Donald Trump’s retainers are jettisoning their old boss. Yesterday it was David Pecker who apparently has a safe bulging with unflattering stories about Trump’s escapades. Today it is Allen Weisselberg, the chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, whose flip in exchange for immunity about his payments of $420,000 to Michael Cohen is perhaps the most damaging blow yet to Trump’s political fortunes. These defections suggest why Trump’s tried and true playbook of piling the Pelion of distraction on the Ossa of calumny will no longer work. Each day seems to bring another hammer blow.