Jacob Heilbrunn

In January 1934, Franklin D. Roosevelt held a toga-themed birthday party at the White House to mock the accusation that he was an incipient dictator. Donald Trump is doing him one better. The President celebrates his 80th birthday today. As such, his plans for Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) bouts today in an octagon on the South Lawn of the White House are reminiscent of the extravaganzas of the Emperor Commodus, whose rule prompted Gibbon to warn: Of all our passions and appetites, the love of power is of the most imperious and unsociable nature, since the pride of one man requires the submission of the multitude.

Over the past few months, there has been much prognostication over the flight of young American conservative women from the Republican party. Are young women leaving the 'new right'? Have they become 'disillusioned' – as one news outlet put it – with the politics of the second Trump administration? This weekend, the conservative organisation Turning Point USA hosted its annual women's leadership summit in San Antonio, Texas. There, I saw none of the rumoured divide between being 'Maga' and 'America First' said to be fissuring young supporters of the GOP. The summit represented the consolidation of a counter-counter-culture Far from abandoning Donald Trump, the conference-goers in San Antonio appeared to channel the defiant spirit of the fabled Texas cry, 'Remember the Alamo!

As President Trump travels to China today, his original plans for the visit have been upended. He wanted to arrive as a triumphant conqueror but increasingly resembles a supplicant. Will he strike a 'Two T’s' deal – a grand bargain that trades Taipei for Tehran? Trump has periodically voiced his irritation with China, but at bottom he respects – and even admires – President Xi Jinping as the kind of tough guy that he can do business with on a variety of fronts. The most important one has become Iran, which is threatening to increase its nuclear enrichment programme and successfully defying Trump’s threats to blow it into oblivion. China is Iran’s biggest backer. It previously pushed Tehran into ceasefire talks with Washington.

King Charles and Queen Camilla were at their most emollient in Washington, where they exchanged a flurry of presents with Donald and Melania Trump. The King’s gifts to President Trump included a framed copy of the design plans for the Resolute Desk, which was originally given to President Rutherford B. Hayes by Queen Victoria in 1880. Trump appeared to shelve his hostility toward the United Kingdom for declining to participate in the Iran war, but he quickly made up for his forbearance by pummeling another Nato ally. After speaking with Russian president Vladimir Putin yesterday for 90 minutes, Trump dispensed with his previous bonhomie.

Has the dustup between Washington and Tehran come to an end? 'They’ve agreed to give us back the nuclear dust that’s way underground because of the attack we made with the B-2 bombers,’ Donald Trump proclaimed on Thursday evening. 'So we have a lot of agreement with Iran, and I think something’s going to happen, very positive, very important.’ Trump indicated that he himself might fly to Pakistan this weekend to participate in negotiations with Iran. If Iran were to hand over its enriched uranium stockpile, it would represent a startling development indeed. No previous American president, whether George W. Bush or Barack Obama, came close to accomplishing that goal.

Might Donald Trump travel to Tehran this spring to open an American embassy and declare that he’s fallen in love with the new Iranian leadership? His volte-face on Tuesday night – announcing a two-week ceasefire with Iran – suggests that Trump is embarking upon a new course in the Middle East. After threatening to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age, Trump announced that it’s time to call the whole thing off: “We received a 10-point proposal from Iran, and believe it is a workable basis on which to negotiate.”  What that negotiation will look like is an open question.

During his remarks in Budapest, Vice President J.D. Vance, who is trying prop up Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán as he runs for reelection, appeared to think the unthinkable. Vance, who has been a hero for MAGA anti-interventionists, went all-in on attacking Iran. He indicated that America might resort to “tools” in its arsenal that “we so far haven’t decided to use.” Now the White House is denying that it plans to deploy nuclear weapons against Iran, after frenzied social media speculation that it might. Negotiations with Tehran are ongoing – and Trump told Fox's Bret Baier that "if negotiations move forward today, and there is something concrete" that tonight's 8 p.m. deadline "could change.

The surprising thing isn’t that Donald Trump fired his attorney general Pam Bondi and appointed Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche her temporary successor. It’s that he waited as long as he did. After exercising what is for him unusual restraint – his cabinet was in a state of perpetual upheaval during his first term as president – Trump is going on a firing spree. 'He’s very angry, and he’s going to be moving people,' one top administration official told Politico yesterday. Next on the chopping block could be a host of Trump loyalists – Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Labour Secretary Lori Chzvez-Remer, FBI Director Kash Patel, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard – whom the US President has found wanting.

Donald Trump, who will deliver an address from the Oval Office tonight, isn’t giving up on his aims for his war in the Middle East. This time his target isn’t Iran but Nato. 'You don’t even have a navy,' he declared about Britain before going on to denounce the North Atlantic alliance. 'I was never swayed by Nato. I always knew they were a paper tiger, and [Russian president Vladimir] Putin knows that ​too, by the way,’ Trump told the Daily Telegraph. There hasn’t been such a loony interview since Kaiser Wilhelm II created an international furore in 1908 in the same paper by denouncing the English as 'mad, mad, mad as March hares' for their alleged hostility to Germany.