Jacob Heilbrunn

The US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s press conference yesterday was moronic. Earlier this week, NBC News broke the story that Tillerson, exasperated by Donald Trump’s shenanigans, called him a `moron’ during a meeting in July at the Pentagon. It took the intervention of vice-president Mike Pence, in the role of Trump administration life coach, to counsel Tillerson to remain in his post. Now, months later, Tillerson appeared at the State Department, which he has been steadily working to denude of any remaining diplomats or civil servants, to engage in a self-rectification session, pledging his fealty to Trump as well as his devotion to making America great again. Even Tillerson, however, was unable to pull off the full Road to Canossa.

Beware the Moore. This is the doctrine that establishment Republicans such as the Senate Majority leader, Mitch McConnell, who poured in millions of dollars to try and defeat Judge Roy Moore’s bid for the Republican Senate primary nomination in Alabama, were preaching in recent months. For good measure, President Trump also backed the current Senator Luther Strange, who was crushed yesterday by Moore. Trump has hastily deleted his tweets supporting Strange, including one declaring that 'Big Luther,’ as Trump likes to call him, was 'shooting up' in the polls after he endorsed him. Now, Trump is tweeting that Moore 'sounds like a really great guy who ran a fantastic race. He will help to #MAGA!’ For Trump, this primary is a mere flesh wound.

While Donald Trump seeks to cut a deal with the Democrats on immigration, his detractors on the right are starting to resemble the sinister clown Pennywise in the popular new horror movie It, who terrorizes a small town in Maine by living in a sewer and snacking on children. ‘Trump base is blown up, destroyed, irreparable, and disillusioned beyond repair,’ writes Rep Steve King from Iowa, a longtime foe of illegal immigration. Trump’s specific sin? He’s wavering on booting out the so-called Dreamers, about 800,000 undocumented children under the age of 16 who crossed the border with alone or with their parents, in many cases as toddlers.

Donald Trump has become the Conor McGregor of American politics. For weeks tensions have been mounting in the capital of the free world as Republicans and Democrats prepared to square off over the debt ceiling and a government shutdown. The climactic showdown was supposed to take place at the White House yesterday. But in the end, Trump never put up much of a real fight. For all the huffing and puffing that preceded the meeting, Trump acceded to the demands of Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer and House minority leader Nancy Pelosi for raising the debt ceiling for a mere three months. Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse tweeted: 'The Pelosi-Schumer-Trump deal is bad.

Steve Bannon is out. H.R McMaster is in. It's now starting to dawn upon some of Donald Trump's most ardent admirers that they've been had. The main accomplishment of the Trump revolution has not been to forward populism. It has been to devour its own children. Trump entered office declaring that 'this carnage ends now'. Not so. He's been producing it in the form of lopping off the head of one adviser after another. Bannon is now promising 'war' against the 'New York Democrats' that he says are running the White House. If so, it will be a fratricidal one. Bannon was of course the brains behind Trump's defeat of Hillary Clinton, something that the president could never entirely forgive. Trump wants all the credit for himself.

On Sunday morning the White House, in an unsigned statement, came out swinging against 'nephew-nazi and all extremist groups.' Leave it to the Trump administration to bungle even the wording of neo-Nazi in its belated attempt to distance itself from the sanguinary events that took place on Saturday in the bucolic town of Charlottesville, Virginia, where the radical right gathered to chant 'blood and soil' and carry Nazi flags. Their mission was to decry the impending removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, who lost the Civil War to Ulysses Grant. The odious David Duke, a leading neo-Nazi who speaks worshipfully of Donald Trump, had slithered out of the swamps of his home state Louisiana to make a cameo. All that was missing were lederhosen and a beer hall.

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.

Today is the 72nd anniversary of the America atomic bombing of Nagasaki, a lovely port city that also served as a Japanese naval base during the second world war. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki prompted Emperor Hirohito to announce in a radio address Japan’s surrender, though fanatical war hawks tried to stop him. The atomic bombings saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of American soldiers, but they remain the only time that a country has actually deployed these fearsome weapons. Donald Trump’s implicit threat to unleash an unprecedentedly devastating nuclear attack on North Korea that would apparently eclipse Hiroshima and Nagasaki offers a reminder that in this regard America remains unique. Nuclear weapons are the great taboo—or at least they have been.

Poor Reince Priebus. Or maybe not so poor. A munificent book deal surely looms in which he can chronicle his serial humiliations at the hands of Donald Trump who, as is his wont, made the announcement on Twitter that retired general John Kelly, the director of the Homeland Security, will now become White House chief of staff. Given the leaking that has been taking place in the Trump administration, Kelly may discover that it was easier to track down illegal immigrants than to catch the leakers. Trump himself waited until late Friday until he revealed the latest changes to his personnel, presumably to outwit the press corps. Anthony 'the Mooch' Scaramucci had already supplanted press secretary Sean Spicer, like Priebus an establishment figure.

Here we go again. NBC News is reporting that Donald Trump Jnr. somehow forgot to mention that a former Soviet counterintelligence officer was also present at his pow-wow with a Russian lawyer. The man in question, Rinat Akhmetsin, has denied ever being affiliated with Russian spy agencies. But as NBC politely put it, “the presence at the meeting of a Russian-American with suspected intelligence ties is likely to be of interest to special counsel Robert Mueller and the House and Senate panels investigating the Russian election interference campaign.” Indeed it is.

Let there be no doubt: it’s turning into the political equivalent of Defcon 1, the highest level of nuclear alert, for the Trump administration. There can be no greater irony than that Donald Trump, who thundered about Hillary Clinton’s secret email server during the election campaign, could be undone by an email disseminated by his own son. Donald Trump Junior, who has recently hired a former mob lawyer to represent him, revealed on Twitter (shortly before the New York Times ran a story detailing his efforts to gather dirt on Hillary Clinton) the lengthy email chain between him and the publicist Rob Goldstone.

Donald Trump is now referring to himself in his copious Twitter messages as 'T'. Unlike the real Mr. T, who starred in the popular 1980s American television series The A-Team, however, President Trump is unable to muscle his way to victory. Quite the contrary. Thanks to majority leader Mitch McConnell’s sudden decision yesterday to abandon a vote on the Republican health care bill that would strip some 22 million Americans of coverage, Trump is maintaining a perfect batting average of zero on passing any major legislation. After seven years of huffing and puffing about the perfidies of ObamaCare and of promising to repeal Obama’s signature initiative immediately, it’s starting to look like Groundhog Day for the Republican party.

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.