Jacob Heilbrunn

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.

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.