The president reprised his dance with ‘Chuck and Nancy’ as the three held talks to protect the Dreamers, while Hillary Clinton’s election memoir hit shelves

There had been some doubt last week about how significant or long-lasting Donald Trump’s sudden overtures to the Democrats actually were. But after his debt-ceiling and disaster-relief deal with the Democratic leaders he calls “Chuck and Nancy”, Trump decided to repeat the trick this week with a different issue.

Last weekend

Just as he had for Hurricane Harvey during its march towards Texas last month, Trump spent the weekend tweeting out warnings about the latest forecasts for Hurricane Irma, which rampaged through the Caribbean and was due to strike Florida imminently.

In Russia news, the Washington Post reported that special counsel Robert Mueller had notified the White House that his team would try to seek interviews with six current and former Trump aides as part of the investigation into Moscow’s alleged meddling in the 2016 presidential election, including former press secretary Sean Spicer, former chief of staff Reince Priebus and interim communications director Hope Hicks.

Another former White House fixture, ex-chief strategist Steve Bannon, continued a post-government media offensive with a warning that China – his bête noire – was “Germany in 1930 … It could go one way or the other.” Bannon was fired last month during chief of staff John Kelly’s ongoing attempts to get a grip on a dysfunctional White House, but some observers suggest the Breitbart chief still exerts a strong influence over the president.

Chuck Schumer, who along with his fellow congressional Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi struck an unlikely legislative deal with Trump the week before, revealed the president’s reaction to media coverage of their pact. “I got a call early this morning,” Schumer said. “He said, ‘This was so great!’ Here’s what he said: ‘Do you watch Fox News?’ I said, ‘Not really.’ ‘They’re praising you!’ Meaning me. But he said, ‘And your stations’ – I guess meaning MSNBC and CNN – ‘are praising me! This is great!’”

Monday

Trump commemorated the 16th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington with a speech at the Pentagon “making plain to these savage killers that there is no dark corner beyond our reach, no sanctuary beyond our grasp, and nowhere to hide anywhere on this very large earth”.

Also on the warpath was Bannon, who, in a TV interview in which he wore two shirts, accused the GOP establishment of trying to “nullify” last year’s presidential election and called on those in the administration who disagreed with the president to step down. He singled out economic adviser Gary Cohn, who had denounced Trump’s equivocating on neo-Nazis in Charlottesville. “If you don’t like what [Trump’s] doing and you don’t agree with it, you have an obligation to resign,” Bannon said.

Tuesday



At the risk of turning this column into Tracking Steve, it was notable that Bannon popped up again in Hong Kong, repeating his contention that stopping China’s road to world domination is the defining issue of our era, but more unusually taking care to heap praise on the country’s president Xi Jinping. “I don’t think there’s a world leader that President Trump respects more than the president of China,” Bannon said. “Xi is very impressive.” He added that a “very aggressive” Trump would arrive in China in November determined to “avoid a trade war, which is detrimental to both countries”.

As Hillary Clinton’s election memoir hit the shelves, White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders dismissed her criticisms of the president as an attempt to boost sales and called this a “sad” end to her political career. In the book, What Happened, the former Democratic presidential candidate draws parallels between Trump’s “war on truth” and the Soviet Union and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

In a rare dyspeptic outburst during what was generally a calm week on Twitter, the president lashed out at “people writing books and major articles about me and yet they know nothing about me & have zero access”. (He probably didn’t mean Clinton.)

And there were reports the Trump campaign had begun to hand over documents to Mueller, as the special counsel’s investigation continued to tick away.

Wednesday



The Guardian reported that US congressional investigators were examining whether Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser who is one of the key figures being investigated by Mueller, secretly promoted a plan by private business interests to build US-Russian nuclear power plants in the Middle East while he was serving in the White House. They were also examining whether the proposal was still being promoted by the Trump administration, months after Flynn was forced out of his role.

That evening Trump’s newfound love of bipartisanship seemed to bear fruit once more, with Chuck and Nancy leaving a White House dinner to say they had struck a deal to protect the so-called Dreamers the president had plunged into insecurity last week when he cancelled the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) programme that gave them the temporary right to live, study and work in America.

In exchange the Democrats had agreed to unspecified border-security measures, they said – but that did not include support for a wall on the Mexican border.

Not so fast, interrupted Sanders, tweeting that there had “certainly not” been an agreement excluding the wall.

Thursday



But before long her boss was awake and contradicting her in true Trump style.

On his way to visit Florida, the president told reporters he was “fairly close” to a deal with Democrats along the lines Schumer and Pelosi had suggested the night before. And he confirmed: “The wall will come later.”

The reaction from Trump’s most vocal hard-right supporters was furious, with conservative commentator Ann Coulter tweeting: “At this point, who DOESN’T want Trump impeached?” and Bannon’s Breitbart website running the critical headline “Amnesty Don”.

It remained to be seen whether Trump’s rank and file supporters were similarly exercised. They may not be. The American public is divided on the issue of immigration, but there is widespread sympathy for the Dreamers, who were brought to the US illegally as children. A Politico-Morning Consult poll last week showed 54% wanting Congress to give them a path to citizenship, while 73% wanted to protect them from deportation.

Any deal on Daca would still have to win considerable Republican support to pass, something the neglected Republican leader Paul Ryan pointed out. And the notoriously fickle Trump could always take umbrage at some perceived slight from Chuck and Nancy, or sense that the Democrats had not conceded enough ground, and back out. But for now, at least, it seemed Trump had calculated that he could gain more from reaching across the aisle on popular issues such as Daca and flood spending than from continuing with the frustrating experience of working with his own dysfunctional and disunited party on rightwing issues such as repealing Obamacare.

Friday

British prime minister Theresa May rebuked Trump for suggesting the people responsible for an explosion on a London tube train were known to the Metropolitan police.

Early Friday morning, Trump tweeted: “Another attack in London by a loser terrorist. These are sick and demented people who were in the sights of Scotland Yard. Must be proactive!”

The perpetrators were as yet unidentified and it was not clear whether they were known to authorities. “I never think it’s helpful for anybody to speculate on what is an ongoing investigation,” May said.

Trump was also sighted congratulating an 11-year-old who was invited to mow the White House lawn. The child runs a lawn service in a nearby neighborhood and had offered to clip the Rose Garden. A mirthful scene ensued when Trump failed in an attempt to greet him owing to the boy’s laser-like mowing focus.

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