Jacob Heilbrunn

Donald Trump has stopped going to the dogs. Now he has landed upon rodents. White House counsel Donald McGahn, he tweeted early this morning, would not be a ‘RAT type’ like John Dean, the Nixon aide who fessed up to felonious White House activities before Congress to avoid being the fall guy for the administration’s misdeeds. It seems, according to a New York Times report, that McGahn was intent on avoiding a similar scenario and spoke for some 30 hours with the Mueller investigation. This revelation predictably sent Trump into a Twitter frenzy. Among other things, he’s claiming that Special Counsel Robert Mueller, or Councel, as Trump apparently likes to spell it, is Joseph McCarthy reincarnated.

If Donald Trump, as Susan Glasser shrewdly notes in her New Yorker column today, is running an ‘unreality show,’ then the latest installment arrived with his cancellation of a military parade in November on Pennsylvania Avenue. He blamed, as he always does, someone else. In this case it was Washington mayor Muriel E. Bowser who says that she ‘finally got thru’ to Trump about the exorbitant expense of his little parade. Trump stated on Twitter that the $21 million bill that the city wanted to submit for the cost of hosting the event would have amounted to a ‘windfall’ that he was unprepared to disburse.

The Senate made a major discovery today. By unanimous consent, it passed a non-binding resolution affirming that the press is ‘not the enemy of the people.’ Who knew?The spur for this senatorial effusion of support for the press was, of course, the recent temper tantrums of El Jefe. Fresh from stripping former CIA director John Brennan of his security clearance and professing to be thunderStrzok about the misbehaviour of the FBI, Donald Trump, who has always enjoyed a love-hate relationship with the press (New York Times columnist Gail Collins reminisced today about how Trump once called her a dog and a pig), was in full attack mode against the Boston Globe, which urged newspapers around the country to stick up for press freedoms in editorials.

Donald Trump wants to bring Omarosa Manigault-Newman to heel. This morning he declared, “When you give a crazed, crying lowlife a break, and give her a job at the White House, I guess it just didn't work out. Good work by General Kelly for quickly firing that dog!" In tweeting this sentiment, Trump, who has been vehemently denying that he ever used the N-word, not only revived suspicions about his racism and misogyny, but also did Omarosa an enormous favour. Trump’s mission should have been to let the Omarosa saga peter out. Instead, he has further inflamed it. Today, her release of a tape in which three Trump campaign staffers apparently discuss how to try and spin his use of the N-word add heft to her contentions.

If there is one that American industry President Trump is helping to revive again, it’s book publishing. The latest author to profit from this trend is Omarosa Manigault-Newman whose Unhinged, a memoir of her brief time in the White House, will soon appear. Her account, if the advance excerpts are anything to go by, is not the usual morose lamentation of a true believer who complains that the boss failed to adhere to the policies he enunciated during the campaign. She doesn’t appear to have any ideological concerns about Trump.Instead, she has launched a purely personal attack on Trump. Omarosa’s account has all the fury of a betrayed lover.

The to-ing and fro-ing between President Trump and Special Counsel Robert Mueller over an interview is starting to look like Groundhog Day, the movie in which Bill Murray plays a weatherman who wakes up to the same day each morning. Today, the Trump team apparently rejected Mueller’s proposed parameter of questions and Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani observed, “We’re restating what we have been saying for months: It is time for the Office of Special Counsel to conclude its inquiry without further delay.” It could, he said, be Mueller’s “last, best chance” to speak with Trump.

Beware the intern. Rick Gates first met Paul Manafort in 1995 when he was an ambitious young man. Soon he ascended to become partners in crime with him. The end of the affair was abundantly on evidence in the trial of Manafort today, where Manafort's former deputy and Trump campaign official Gates took the stand to testify. Asked whether he had committed any crimes together with Manafort, he responded, “Yes.” At least he didn’t reply, “Da.” Manafort fixed Gates with a steely gaze, but it didn’t deter his old chum from explaining that they had established no less than 15 foreign bank accounts in an effort to avoid paying taxes to the U.S. government. He also divulged that he had pilfered several hundred thousand dollars from Manafort along the way.

It’s a tale of two Trump scions. Ivanka is trying to wall herself off from the old man whose behaviour often seems to border on madness. Don Junior, by contrast, is doubling down on the lunacy.On Thursday Ivanka declared that she disagreed with her father’s depiction of the media as the “enemy of the people”— a statement, incidentally, that White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders refused to make yesterday — and that she was “vehemently against” plucking migrant children from their parents as they crossed into the U.S. from Mexico. But she has not been able to avoid the taint of working for her father. The brand may be soiled beyond repair. Already she’s had to shutter her eponymous fashion line.

Only a few months ago he was an “honourable man.” Now honour has apparently been replaced by dishonour. “The man is a pathological manipulator, a liar,” Rudy Giuliani declared on “Fox News Sunday.” For good measure, he also referred to him as a “scoundrel.” Ooh la la. How long before he goes on to describe Michael Cohen as the Bill Sikes of Trumpworld? Today, Giuliani has once more entered the lists for Trump in an apparent attempt to sanitise the Trump Tower meeting in June 2016 that had Kremlin-linked figures promising dirt on Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump Jr. declaring, “If it’s what you say I love it.” This meeting has become the fulcrum around which conspiracy theories about the Trump campaign revolve.

Uh-oh. It appears that Donald Trump’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame was destroyed last night by someone wielding a pickaxe. Could this act of wanton vandalism be a sign that Trump’s star is truly starting to wane?  Or was it a false flag operation to arouse sympathy for Trump?Trump is under attack on multiple fronts but it may be where he feels most comfortable. This morning Trump expressed his indignation at his former lawyer Michael Cohen’s taping of the duo discussing in September 2016—a few months before the presidential election—how to handle the ex-Playboy model Karen McDougal who has stated that she and Trump had an intense relationship about a decade ago.

In a recent, compelling interview with Edward Luce of the Financial Times, Henry Kissinger observes, “I do not think Putin is a character like Hitler. He comes out of Dostoyevsky.” It looks like Dostoyevsky will be coming to Washington soon. With his invitation to Vladimir Putin to visit Washington in the fall, Donald Trump is making it clear that he will not be deterred by the chorus of Russia hawks who are depicting him as the Kremlin’s stooge.

If there is one theme that Donald Trump has emphasised over the past decades, it is that American leaders have been weak and incompetent. But after his feeble performance in Helsinki it is Trump who looks like he lacked the cojones to take on Russian president Vladimir Putin who toyed with him at will during their joint press conference. The damage was compounded by a desultory statement that Trump recited on Tuesday. In it, he declared that he really, truly did trust his own intelligence agencies and their lapidary verdict that Russia interfered in the 2016 election. He misspoke when he expressed some dubiety about whether Russia had interfered; a would and wouldn’t, we were supposed to believe, had been interchanged.

Did Vladimir Putin finally become Donald Trump’s new best friend in Helsinki? Trump, who has been panting to meet with Putin, lavished his Russian counterpart with praise. His extraordinary performance is meeting with some hostile reviews, many of them centering on the suspicion that Trump truly is a creature of the Kremlin. Rather than confront Putin, he publicly cosied up to him, after remaining immured with him for about two hours with only a few translators, thereby nourishing the conviction that Putin has the goods on him. The summit, which was intended to smooth relations with Moscow, is having the reverse effect by heightening suspicions about his motives and rendering it even more difficult for him to dispose, in one fashion or another, of the Mueller investigation.

That was fast. Donald Trump moved to defuse the bombshell Sun interview he gave last night, which was recorded, by calling it “fake news” in his press conference with Theresa May this morning, who wore but apparently did not see red over his remarks. But even by the vertiginous standards of Trumpworld, this reversal set a new bar for redefining reality to comport with whatever suits the president’s needs. What might seem momentous when Trump utters it is really only the expostulation of a moment.The same rules will surely apply to his upcoming summit with Russian president Vladimir Putin. A diligent press corps is trying to force Trump to say what he will do or say when he meets his Russian chum. But Trump himself may not really know.