Last weekend

Donald Trump spent the week bouncing around Asia, his mood swinging wildly from deferential and complimentary to, well, fiery and furious. After dropping in on Hawaii – “See you in Pearl Harbor!” he had told the press cheerfully on Friday – he quickly picked up the theme of the North Korean nuclear menace, telling dictators at a US base near Tokyo not to “underestimate American resolve” but also suggesting he would be happy to sit down with Kim Jong-un at some point. Trump made sure he got in a round of golf with one of his best friends on the world stage, the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, along with the five-time PGA Tour winner Hideki Matsuyama, who elicited a rare show of self-awareness and perhaps even modesty from Trump: “If I come back and say I was longer than him, don’t believe it.”

If that defied one stereotype, Trump seemed happy enough to indulge in another when he reportedly asked why Japan, “a country of samurai warriors”, had not shot down the missiles North Korea has fired over its territory. Ever the businessman, he pressed Abe to buy more military equipment from the US to counter this threat from Pyongyang.

Monday

Mourners visit a memorial to honor the Texas church shooting victims. Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images

Back home, another mass shooting had taken place on Sunday, in Texas, and by Monday many were quick to point out the contrast between the thoughts and prayers to which Trump confined himself in response, and his rush to implement harsh new policies when a killer was Muslim, as appeared to be the case last week in New York.

Tuesday

In over his head in South Korea? Photograph: Andrew Harnik/AP

Arriving in South Korea, Trump went further in rejecting calls for stricter gun laws in the wake of the killings in Texas, suggesting gun control might in fact have made the incident worse. But he struck a more conciliatory tone in international relations, suggesting in Seoul that “we’re making progress” in resolving the issue of Pyongyang’s nuclear programme. And he found time to plug the Trump golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey, where he escaped for more than a few weekends this summer.

Wednesday

Ralph Northam, the next governor of Virginia, was among the big Democratic winners during Tuesday’s elections. Photograph: UPI / Barcroft Images

By Wednesday, Trump had changed his tune again on North Korea. Speaking in front of lawmakers at South Korea’s national assembly, he told Kim: “Do not underestimate us.” But it was the US president who seemed to have underestimated the difficulty of organising a trip to the DMZ, between North and South Korea. Despite the White House press secretary, Sarah Sanders, getting dressed up in some army clothes for the occasion, heavy fog meant that the American helicopters could not land. The South Korean president, Moon Jae-in, had prudently flown in earlier, but he waited for his guests at the front line in vain.

A political fog had rolled in back on the home front, too, with Republicans losing a string of races for governor, state legislature, and mayor across the country, one year after Trump’s 2016 presidential victory. The president made it quite clear that he personally could not be expected to shoulder any blame, attacking the failed Virginia gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie because he “did not embrace me or what I stand for”.

Thursday

Hillary Clinton: ‘The fever has broken.’ Photograph: Lisa Lake/Getty Images for Geisinger Sympo

While Trump strode the world stage in China, his erstwhile opponent Hillary Clinton took her book tour to Wisconsin, a state she infamously failed to visit during the 2016 campaign, and lost. She hailed Tuesday’s election victories, saying: “The fever has broken,” while on the other side of the globe, Trump continued his charm offensive towards Xi Jinping, blaming his US predecessors for the “huge” trade deficit between the world’s two largest economies. “Your ancient values bring past and future together into the present,” Trump noted. “So beautiful.” It was all a far cry from his rants about “China!” on the campaign trail, and the Chinese press duly gave the US president what he would probably refer to as “great reviews”. By contrast, the US media were less than impressed when the White House bowed to a Chinese insistence on gagging reporters during a supposed press conference, in defiance of much past US precedent.

Friday

Headed to Vietnam. Photograph: AFP Contributor#AFP/Getty Images

Trump infamously dodged the Vietnam war draft due to a letter from his doctor – ”a very strong letter on the heels” – and once mused to the shock jock Howard Stern that trying to avoid sexual transmitted diseases amounted to his own personal Vietnam. But on Friday, he finally made it to the real Vietnam, for an Apec leaders’ summit.

Hot on his heels (thank you) was an old friend – Vladimir Putin, who received a friendly handshake from Trump and signalled his alignment with the American president by copying the multi-shirt style made famous by Trump’s ally Steve Bannon.

But Trump had harsh words for the rest of the group, with an attack on their trade policies, and he even delivered some coded criticism of Beijing’s regional ambitions: Asian nations were “each a bright star, satellites to none”, he said.

Trump presses on to another of those bright stars this weekend, where he will meet probably the only world leader more aggressive and offensive than himself: Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, who claimed on Friday that he had once stabbed someone to death, decisively outdoing Trump’s infamous boast that “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters”.

This isn’t a competition, guys.