Jacob Heilbrunn

Forget Russia. Georgia, as the song has it, should be on Donald Trump’s mind. A special election for the House of Representatives takes place there on June 20. The state’s 6th district congressional seat has been comfortably in Republican hands for decades. A hitherto obscure Democrat by the name of Jon Ossoff is leading by seven points in the polls and has raised a record 24 million dollars. He is thirty-years old and has never held office before. In 2013 he earned a Master of Science degree from the London School of Economics. If he wins, Republicans across the nation will be profusely mopping their brows in anxiety.

When Donald Trump announced he was pulling the United States out of the Paris climate agreement, he fulfilled what is presumably the dream of George F. Will, one of America’s pre-eminent climate change deniers. Yet Will is not fond of Trump. In fact Will, America’s Tory manqué, is manifestly unhappy about the ascension of Donald Trump to the White House, where he is rapidly rubbishing everything that the modern conservative movement has stood for in recent decades. At least this is what Will would have you believe in his latest column in the Washington Post, entitled 'Conservatism needs another Buckley'. Will means William F. Buckley, Jr.

In 1981, when President Reagan lifted the grain embargo on the Soviet Union, Washington Post columnist George F. Will went on to complain that the Reagan administration 'loved commerce more than it loathed communism'. Well, yes. American conservatives have, more often than not, put commercial interests before ideological ones. Sometimes the two even coincide. For all his bluster about the dangers of Islam, Donald Trump seemed to have a dandy time in Saudi Arabia these past few days before he jetted on to Israel. The $110 billion arms deal that he signed with the Saudis, coupled with their promise to invest in Blackstone Group to boost American infrastructure projects, offers the Saudis a way to buy influence in Washington directly.

On Wednesday John Kerry managed to attract more attention with what amounted to a declaration of failure than any success he has achieved during his tenure as Secretary of State. In his speech blasting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which came on the heels of US abstention on a United Nations resolution condemning settlements, Kerry all but conceded that a two state solution is as dead as the Dodo bird. Leading Democrats such as Senate minority leader Charles Schumer criticised the speech and want nothing to do with anything that might drive traditionally Jewish Democratic voters to the GOP. Obama himself had long washed his hands of any attempt to broker a grand Middle East peace, humouring Kerry's diligent but Sisyphean efforts of the past few years.

Former State Department official Eliot A. Cohen is a prominent neoconservative who has led the 'Never Trump' faction of the Republican party. After Trump was elected, he suggested that younger Republican national security wonks might consider working for him. But it didn’t take long for Cohen to rescind that advice: 'After exchange [with] Trump transition team, changed my recommendation,' Cohen said on Twitter. 'Stay away. They're angry, arrogant, screaming 'you LOST!’ Will be ugly.' The battle between Trump and the GOP national security establishment has now been joined.

Once upon a time Republicans routinely accused Democrats of being soft on Russia. Irving Kristol, writing in Commentary in 1952, famously allowed that Joseph McCarthy was a 'vulgar demagogue' but emphasised that 'there is one thing that the American people know about Senator McCarthy: he, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesmen for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing.' It seems likely that the grand old man of neoconservatism might well rub his eyes in disbelief were he to observe the ideological somersault that has taken place in the 2016 presidential race.

Poor Donald Trump. Even Utah, which has voted for Republican presidential candidates with metronomic regularity since 1964 and which I'm visiting for a few days, looks like it's about to turn its back on the New York tycoon. There are no ‘Make America Great’ or Trump signs in Salt Lake City, the citadel of the Mormon religion. Nor is there any fervour for Trump to be discerned in neighbouring towns like Provo. On the contrary, former Republican candidate Mitt Romney made plain his revulsion for the libertine Trump months ago. It had a real effect. Many Mormons are looking elsewhere than Trump. The winner of Utah's electoral votes may thus turn out to be neither Trump nor Hillary Clinton but Evan McMullin. His credentials?

The American election cycle is beginning to resemble the 1993 comedy Groundhog Day. In the film, you may recall, Bill Murray plays an egomaniacal Pittsburgh weatherman named Phil Connors who discovers that he’s stuck in a time loop in which the same day repeats itself over and over. He goes bonkers, driving a truck over a cliff in a suicide attempt, only to wake up again the next morning. Substitute the American public for Connors and you have a sense of the prevailing political atmosphere in the US. Ever since 9/11 shattered its illusion of omnipotence, the United States has been unable to escape its troubles. Instead, it has been subjected to a series of psychic blows, large and small.

When an earthquake hit Washington DC last August, it seemed a freakish event. But in retrospect the damage caused to national symbols such as the Washington Monument seems to have been a portent of the literal collapse of America. The monument will be enshrouded in scaffolding until at least 2014. Even if the cenotaph were in pristine condition, however, tourists might find it rather difficult to see. Washington’s subway system, formerly one of the glories of American public transport, is experiencing breakdowns and deadly derailments as its ageing tracks buckle. Such episodes are not limited to the capital: dismal scenes are being replicated across the country, as bridges collapse and bankrupt states such as California close universities, prisons, hospitals, and libraries.