Jacob Heilbrunn

Edward Luce warns today in the Financial Times that Donald Trump’s fusillades at Amazon and its proprietor Jeff Bezos are more than simply addled bluster. They represent, we are told, a coherent strategy to undermine independent media. “Trump,” Luce writes, “has already tilted the playing field towards his media allies.” Pshaw! Trump isn’t hurting Bezos. He’s helping him. Trump, of all people, should know the value of free publicity. No one has done more to rehabilitate the media than Trump.  As Jack Shafer astutely observes in Politico, “Every denunciation of the Post, the New York Times, NBC News, CBS News, CNN and other outlets serves to boost those outlets’ audiences and their corresponding revenues.

California, once a citadel of conservatism, now a bastion of liberal progressivism, continues to harbour a few intellectual redoubts on the right. Up north you can find the Hoover Institution, which is located on the Stanford University campus. And down south, near Los Angeles, there is the Claremont Institute, another scholarly outfit which also happens to view President Trump with general approbation. On Thursday I met one of Claremont’s leading lights, Charles R. Kesler, for lunch at an Italian establishment near Beverly Hills. Kesler was kind enough to supply me with a copy of the new issue of the Claremont Review of Books, which contains a spirited riposte by him to the Never Trump faction of conservatives.

Let’s face it: Donald Trump remains the best thing to happen to his enemies. Former FBI director James Comey’s forthcoming memoir is already an advance Amazon bestseller. Porn star Stormy Daniels is milking her standoff with Trump lawyer and all-purpose fixer Michael Cohen for publicity and earnings; this Sunday she’s slated to appear on CBS’ venerable 60 Minutes show. Cynthia Nixon, the former star of the cable series “Sex and the City” is following in his footsteps by trading on her celebrity and running for Governor of New York. But all of this is just a warmup to the Mueller investigation. Trump has been breathing fire about Robert Mueller for several days, declaring that the investigation should never have been started.

President Trump continues to shake up his White House team. As early as tomorrow he plans to name Larry Kudlow, a senior contributor to CNBC, to replace Gary Cohn as his National Economic Council chief.  Kudlow is an old chum of Trump’s and an inveterate supply-sider whose gospel is that the more you lower tax rates, the more money the government will receive in overall revenues. At the same time, former United Nations ambassador John Bolton remains in play to replace national security adviser H.R. McMaster, though a stumbling block could prove to be whether or not he is willing to shave off the moustache that Trump apparently finds so offensive.

Is Texas, the Lone Star State, about to get a little lonesome for the GOP? There’s been lots of talk in recent months that Senator Ted Cruz may face a stiffer challenge for reelection than he had anticipated. But now a wave of Democratic voter enthusiasm today in primary elections is adding further credibility to that notion. The Washington Post reports that of almost 900,000 ballots cast in early voting, over 52 percent were for Democrats, a substantial boost over the last primary election in 2014. The question that looms for Republicans is this: will Texas turn blue? Is it going to become another California? Republicans are sounding alarms. Texas Senator John Cornyn says it would be “malpractice” not to ramp up Republican efforts to ensure turnout in November.

With the drop in his poll ratings to around 35 percent, Donald Trump faces a fresh peril. A further erosion in his numbers would threaten his ability to maintain his hold on a Republican Congress that he desperately needs to ward off the threat of impeachment. His old fighters from the primary campaign such as Corey Lewandowski have been urging him to cut loose as he did this past weekend at the annual meeting of CPAC. Their credo is ‘let Trump be Trump.’ But that would likely be a recipe for disaster. Trump’s popularity is sagging because he has been visibly floundering in recent weeks, from his mismanagement of his side Rob Porter, who was accused of beating several wives, to serial national security clearances for a variety of other aides.

Wednesday marked the 72nd anniversary of the dropping of the bomb on Nagasaki. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki prompted Emperor Hirohito to announce Japan’s surrender in a radio address, though fanatical war hawks tried to stop him. After 1945, Japan developed a pacifist movement and a so-called peace constitution. No country has deployed these fearsome weapons since. Can it really be a coincidence that the day before this eerie anniversary, Donald Trump issued his implicit threat to unleash an unprecedentedly devastating nuclear attack on North Korea that would apparently eclipse Hiroshima and Nagasaki? ‘North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States,’ said the President.

'I can’t in all good honesty, in all good faith, just look the other way because my party is now complicit in the deficits,' Senator Rand Paul announced last night. Never were truer words spoken. The Republican party, once the standard-bearer of fiscal probity, has now become signed onto massive deficit spending. It first began to consume the deficit elixir during the Reagan years. But now it has become a full-fledged addiction. Today, Trump signed a half-trillion dollar spending deal that will ensure that America runs trillion dollar deficits in coming years. The self-described 'King of Debt' is on his way to becoming the emperor of it. The dangers are obvious: a rapid increase in inflation and the debauching of America’s currency.