It was a quieter week for the Russia investigation. A potentially significant piece from CNN, saying investigators were searching for links between the Trump campaign digital team and Russian operatives flooding the Rust Belt with fake news, failed to make much of a ripple. But there was plenty more on the president’s plate.

Last weekend

Last week on Tracking Trump we left you with the US president appearing to confirm that he was under investigation for firing FBI chief James Comey. On Sunday his lawyer toured the TV shows to say that nothing could be further from the truth. “The fact of the matter is the president has not been and is not under investigation,” said Jay Sekulow. But he also admitted that actually he didn’t know one way or the other. So that cleared that up.

Monday

Gossip continued to swirl around the role of the accident-prone White House press secretary Sean Spicer, who was said to be attempting to recruit a successor so he could move to a less visible role. By Friday night, that hadn’t happened. Elsewhere in the administration, Donald Trump’s son-in-law and key adviser Jared Kushner, reportedly now among those under investigation in Robert Mueller’s Russia inquiry, brought Washington to a halt by speaking in public for the first time anyone could remember. He had a diffident, rather uncharismatic voice, as underwhelming in its way as that of David Beckham.

Tuesday



At his first on-camera press briefing in more than a week, Spicer refused to say if Trump believed that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, despite the conclusion of US intelligence agencies that it did. He and the president hadn’t discussed the matter, Spicer said, reassuringly. Asked about the status of his own job, the press secretary joked “I’m right here”, telling reporters, in a belligerent line that could have been uttered by his impersonator Melissa McCarthy: “You can keep taking your selfies.” The president was busy sowing confusion by trying a new passive-aggressive tone on Twitter, musing: “While I greatly appreciate the efforts of President Xi & China to help with North Korea, it has not worked out. At least I know China tried!” It’s Xi’s translator I feel sorry for.

Meanwhile, the US broadened sanctions against Russian companies and officials over Moscow’s military intervention in Ukraine. But, in what is becoming a typical part of the administration’s foreign relations, there were mixed messages from the president and other parts of the executive branch, with Trump failing to condemn Russian aggression against Kiev (he has never done so), while defense secretary James Mattis told Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko: “The United States stands with you. We support you in the face of threats to sovereignty, to international law or to the international order.”

The night ended with a boost for Trump and the Republicans, as Karen Handel won a special House election in Georgia at which Democrats had thrown everything and the kitchen sink. It was the latest in a series of races in which the Democrats had fallen short … or as Trump put it on Twitter: “Well, the Special Elections are over and those that want to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN are 5 and 0! All the Fake News, all the money spent = 0.”

Wednesday



In Britain, there were further indications that a state visit by Trump had been put on hold, with the government’s legislative programme for the next two years failing to mention it. The Guardian reported earlier this month that the president did not want to make the trip if there was a likelihood of large-scale protests – which the White House denied. Russia cancelled a planned round of talks with the US in protest at the new American sanctions, and the Congressional Black Caucus also declined a proposed meeting with the president, citing its conviction that his policies “will devastate black communities”. Trump rounded off his day with a campaign-style rally in Iowa, where he told the crowd he wouldn’t want a “poor person” to hold an economic role in his administration. “I love all people, rich or poor, but in those particular positions I just don’t want a poor person. Does that make sense?” The same day, Bloomberg News reported that Trump’s own net worth had slipped to $2.9bn, down from $3bn a year ago.

Thursday



After weeks of secret negotiations, Senate Republicans released their draft of a bill to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, following a similar House bill that passed amid huge controversy last month. Trump said he thought the final legislation would be “very good” after “a little negotiation”, but the GOP’s difficulties were immediately made apparent when at least four Republican senators came out against it. The Republicans can only lose two and still pass the bill, which would cut programmes for the poor and lower taxes for the rich. Barack Obama attacked “the fundamental meanness at the core of this legislation”.

Perhaps conscious he was being overshadowed by the drama on Capitol Hill, Trump spent the morning tweeting about the Democrats and the Russia inquiry before exclusively revealing that – contrary to the implication of a menacing tweet he had sent in May – he did not, in fact, possess any tapes of his conversations with Comey. Asked if he now regretted that first “tapes” tweet, spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said: “Uh, I don’t think so.” Meanwhile CNN reported that director of national intelligence Dan Coats and NSA director Mike Rogers had told Mueller’s team, and Senate investigators, that Trump asked them to state publicly he had not colluded with Russia in its meddling in the 2016 election.

Friday

New details of that Russian election interference reported by the Washington Post on Friday raised questions about the forcefulness of the Obama administration’s response. “He clearly moved too slowly, and I think failed to appreciate the magnitude of what was going on,” said Daniel Drezner of the Brookings Institution. The Obama team, the Post said, were worried about triggering an escalation from Vladimir Putin that might threaten the credibility of the election result, and also about being seen to be weighing in on the side of Trump’s Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.

At the Glastonbury festival in the UK, Johnny Depp made a useful contribution to the coarsening of political discourse in the US by joking about assassinating the president. Spicer linked those comments to the rightwing uproar over a recent New York production of Julius Caesar in which the Roman leader was dressed to resemble Trump, and, as in every production since 1599, assassinated. “When these actions are depicted ... I’m not sure that’s a smart thing to do. We either all agree that violence should be called out and denounced or not,” the press secretary said.

Join us for more denunciations of fictional acts of violence next week.

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