Matt Purple

Imagine the gale-force political winds that it takes to make Donald Trump do something he doesn’t want to do. Yet that’s what happened earlier this week when the president grudgingly approved a new suite of sanctions on Russia passed overwhelmingly by both houses of Congress. That he signed the bill in private signalled his extreme reluctance—this is the man who threw a soiree in the Rose Garden after doomed GOP health care legislation made it through just the House. Trump, the former reality show star, only turns away the klieg lights under the most bitter circumstances, and that’s what this was.

How are things in your country? In mine, we’ve spent the last week and a half being governed by a mid-aughts buddy comedy named 'Donald and The Mooch'. That latter sobriquet belongs to Anthony Scaramucci, Donald Trump’s erstwhile PR man who went on a 10-day profanity-laden bender across Washington proper before even the President realised this probably wasn’t a good idea and headed off to Vegas without him. Scaramucci was sacked on Monday. His official start date wasn’t until mid-August, which makes him the shortest-serving White House comms director in history at negative 15 days. Yet he made quite an impression during his non-tenure. The Mooch was given his job following the resignation of White House press secretary Sean Spicer, hated by every scribbler in D.C.

I’m not sure how it is with the BBC and Sky, but here in the United States the news channels prefer to cover a few stories obsessively rather than many stories thoroughly. Things have become even worse since Donald Trump was inaugurated, as that already-myopic keyhole view has narrowed into a monomaniacal focus on Russia. MSNBC and CNN discovered they could boost their ratings by catering to liberals with a 24-hour potboiler about Trump’s alleged collusion with the Kremlin, and proceeded accordingly. An establishment conspiracy industry took hold, detecting Russian fingerprints everywhere, led by your former MP Louise Mensch.

Am I the only one who was hoping Donald Trump would skip the State of the Union address? The annual harangue to Congress, vernal solstice on America’s civic calendar, is provided for in Article II of our Constitution, which requires the president 'from time to time' to 'give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union'. That briefly meant a presidential speech, until the gloriously terse Thomas Jefferson dismissed it as too monarchical and began submitting a written update instead. This tradition, admirably low-key, persisted for more than a century until Woodrow Wilson revived the verbal address in 1913, one of the many reasons to curse his presidency.

Well there you have it. After almost two weeks of braying and spluttering about Donald Trump’s immigration plan, it turns out the public supports the proposed visa ban after all. Here in the United States, a poll by Morning Consult and Politico last week revealed that 55 per cent of voters back Trump’s executive order, while only 38 per cent oppose it. In Europe, the results are even more jarring: when asked whether immigration from mainly Muslim countries should be halted entirely, 55 per cent of the 10,000 people asked by Chatham House agreed.

Among Donald Trump’s many neologisms is the 'What the hell is going on' evidentiary standard. It was introduced by Trump during his presidential campaign as his biggest dare yet: 'a complete and total shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on'. A high hurdle to clear, no doubt, and a controversial idea. Whether it would ever be implemented was unknown—after Trump’s election the Muslim ban was scrubbed from his website, then restored, with a spokesman blaming a technical glitch. Now we have our answers. Fleshed into public policy, figuring out 'what the hell is going on' means the government reviewing the security of America’s immigration system.

Of all the specimens in the Donald Trump menagerie—Charming Trump, Vicious Trump, Soapbox Trump—Subdued Trump may be my least favorite. It is true that the restraint my president showed during his press conference with Theresa May is in both our countries’ interests, but it is also uncomfortably artificial, like watching a space alien trying to cheer for a football game. Trump is who he is, an energetic insult comic at his most natural when he’s dissing the size of his political opponents’ hands. Watching him strain to appear statesmanlike always leaves you with the impression that he’s been pumped full of Valium.

Washington, D.C. is a police state even in good times. Unique in the land of the free, only there do you find officers casually toting assault rifles outside of Union Station as though Amtrak has just staged a coup within, or vast swaths of road abruptly shut down because the secretary of agriculture has decided he wants a deep tissue massage on the other side of town. And during presidential inaugurations, the tight security becomes Orwellian. Even without the deluge of visitors that Barack Obama attracted in 2009 (only to discover that being witnesses to history meant watching it on a Jumbotron two miles away), there will still be enough hassles during Donald Trump’s swearing-in to make it best observed on our incoming president’s most natural medium: television.