Jacob Heilbrunn

It’s getting Stormy for Donald Trump. In a lengthy message on his TruthSocial site on Saturday morning, Trump announced that he expects that the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, will indict and arrest him on Tuesday for his hush money payment scheme to his former, if brief, inamorata Stormy Daniels. “Protest, take our nation back,” he urged. But Trump’s urges may not be widely shared. It's hard to avoid the feeling that Trump misses the shock and awe of January 6, when his loyal followers stormed the Capitol to try to overturn the election of Joe Biden. That rebellion turned Trump into the ultimate Washington outsider, a revolt against the very government he was supposed to lead.

Search’s up at the Biden beach house. President Biden’s personal attorney Bob Bauer explains, “Today, with the President’s full support and cooperation, the DOJ is conducting a planned search of his home in Rehoboth, Delaware.” A bevy of black SUVs and sedans swarmed around the Biden property, once the site of happy days where the Biden clan congregated, now the target of the FBI. My heart goes out not to Biden, who was obviously lax in his handling of classified documents, but to the poor slobs in the FBI who have to tromp through his various homes in search of papers that he was supposed to have handed over to the National Archives in January 2017. It’s difficult to think of a more tedious task.

Donald Trump has caused something of a hugger-mugger over his last supper with Kanye West, or Ye, and Nick Fuentes. A variety of Jewish organizations are either wringing their collective hands (if they’ve been supporters of Trump) or outright denouncing him (if they’ve long viewed him as an odious figure). A few Republican leaders, including former vice president Mike Pence, who said it was “wrong” for Trump to break bread with the duo, are voicing their disapprobation. Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie tweeted on Saturday: “This is just awful, unacceptable conduct from anyone, but most particularly from a former President and current candidate.” Unlike previous Trump controversies, this one does not appear to be subsiding after a 24-hour news cycle.

Tabloid conservatism is the felicitous phrase that Sam Tanenhaus, one of our most astute analysts of the modern right, gave to the approach that Donald Trump, who faces various possible indictments, and Steve Bannon, who has just been sentenced to four months in prison and a measly $6,500 fine for failing to testify before Congress’s January 6 Committee, concocted as an alternative to the stuffy establishment mode that had prevailed in the GOP. A self-proclaimed populist, Bannon turned the website Breitbart.com into a juggernaut on the right and propelled the Trump campaign to victory. Absent his hard-edged approach, which included bringing various former Bill Clinton inamoratas to a debate with Hillary, it seems doubtful that Trump would have won in 2016.

Poor Donald Trump. The 6 January committee has subpoenaed him. The New York attorney general is seeking to put the kibosh on his new Trump II organisation. The Supreme Court has rejected his bid to stymie the Mar-a-Lago investigation. What next? Will it turn out that Jared or even — gasp! — Ivanka has been ratting him out to the feds about his hoarding of secret documents at Mar-a-Lago? Far from ending with his ousting from the White House, the Trump show has become an unending pageant of new plot twists. The central actor remains Trump and Trump alone, intent on hogging the spotlight in one way or another.

It almost seems worthy of the opening scene in a Bond film. Vital Russian gas pipelines running beneath the Baltic Sea close to Denmark and Sweden are the victims of sabotage. The two countries have warned of leaks from both Nord Stream 1 and 2 after seismologists suggested there had been underwater explosions. No one wants to claim credit for the deed – yet. Who is the Blofeld behind this dastardly scheme? Former Polish foreign minister Radek Sikorski, no fan of Russia, sardonically declared on Twitter, ‘Thank you, USA’. That set the conspiracy theorists off. As has a video resurfacing of Joe Biden in February promising America would put an end to Nord Stream 2.  Who is the Blofeld behind this dastardly scheme?

So the big guy wants a donnybrook then. It began with Lindsey Graham announcing on Fox News a day or so ago that there will — not may — be “riots in the streets” if Donald Trump is indicted by the Justice Department. Trump then reposted Graham’s remark on his badly failing social media outlet Truth Social, which, like most of his ventures, appears to be headed for bankruptcy, only this time there’s no Papa Trump to show up at the casino to buy a stack of chips to bail out the scapegrace son. Now, Trump has gone on something of an internet bender, indulging his thwarted Twitter impulses by posting over sixty times on Truth Social. If the venture goes belly up, it won’t be because Trump ignored it. As Trump tries to seize the spotlight, the GOP is squirming.