Trump in trouble with his new friends

President George W Bush said Iraq, Iran and North Korea represented an axis of evil. By contrast Donald Trump has made it clear he has three new friends on the world stage who form part of his, shall we say, axis of friendshp. They are, or were, Kim Jong-un of North Korea, Xi Zinping of China and Vladimir Putin of Russia. In each case he sought their friendship and declared them to be good guys whom he wanted to do business with and settle longstanding disagreements. But since then, since his session with Zinping at his Florida golf resort home, his day with Kim in Singapore and his long chat with Putin in Helsinki, it all seems to have gone wrong. Trump is waging a trade war with China that seems to be never-ending, he has approved new sanctions against Moscow for ordering the nerve agent attack in Salisbury and his sweet talks with Kim have fallen to dust because of the North Korean's apparent refusal to start doing anything that smacks of denuclearisation. So much for personal friendship. How much longer will Trump stick with his axis of friendship? Zinping must be furious with him, Putin will feel betrayed - ah there there - and Kim.....well Kim was photographed wearing a sort of vest because it's hot in North Korea. He probably doesn't care what Trump thinks. I have a good idea, Mr President. Why don't you start courting people like the leaders of America's closest allies in Europe? You just might get a better return.

Iran and the EU versus Trump

Iran is trying to put a brave face on the reimposition of US sanctions, warning Trump that the US is isolated and that other countries who signed the 2015 nuclear deal intended to carry on lifting sanctions and doing trade with Tehran. Trump has warned that he will take action against any country which continues to do business with Iran. The truth is Trump simply cannot stop other countries from trading with Iran and buying its oil, but he can certainly make life difficult if, for instance, the EU refuses to oblige him by barring trade with Iran. But it is also true that Iran cannot rely on life continuing as normal, with the EU and others stepping in to help where the US axe has fallen. Already some of the world's biggest companies have pulled out of deals done with Iran after the 2015 nuclear agreement was signed, allowing for the phased lifting of sanctions. These companies know what's best for them, and trying to carry on as if nothing had happened, with Trump breathing down their necks, makes little business sense. Deals are done in US dollars, that's the way the world is, and any attempt by European companies to get round this will be seized on by the US Treaury sanctions-busting specialists and Trump revenge will not be far away. It's too risky. So EU plans to thwart Trump by putting a blocking measure into the system to prevent Trump from taking retaliatory action will make a fortune for lawyers but will do nothing to improve relations between Europe and the US. Relations are bad enough as it is. Leaders need to come to their senses. There has to be a sensible arrangement somewhere. But Trump's style is to go all out for what he wants, no compromise. The EU stands no chance.

Not much love around in the world and it's not all Trump's fault

There is so much division on this planet that it seems to leave little room for love, loyalty, honesty, steadfastness and dignity. Donald Trump's arrival in the White House has definitely contributed to this era of antagonism, but it's not all his fault. Saudi Arabia and Canada are having a hateful spat right now over the arrest in Saudia Arabia of human rights protestors, some of them with Canadian links. The Canadian ambassador in Riyadh has been kicked out. So much for all those promising signs of a new more moderate, more modern Saudi Arabia with the promotion of Mohammed bin Salman to the Crown Prnce slot. Then there's the increasing exasperation, frustration and hatred being shown between the UK and Brussels over Britain's departure from the European Union from March next year. We're rushing headlong into a doom-laden situation of a no-deal Brexit, and who the hell is really doing anything about it? You see, I'm getting angry now! In Washington friends and colleagues are turning against each other to avoid going to prison. Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign chairman who faces the serious possibility of a prison sentence for alleged fraud and money-laundering, is being betrayed wholesale by his one-time friend and business associate Rick Gates. He is spilling all kinds of nasty stuff in the trial about how Manafort allegedly broke the law. Heaven knows what we're going to hear when Mike Flynn reveals what he has told Robert Mueller, special counsel, about his time as national security adviser to Trump. But it won't be nice. Trump hates anyone who opposes him. Look at his tweet earlier today warning the EU that if they so much as dare do trade deals with Iran he will ban them from any deals with the US. Hate hate hate, ultimatums, warnings. That's what politics is all about now. Perhaps it's the heat that's doing it, but I doubt it. Heat or cold, we all have a future of division and verbal battering, thanks to the way politics is going.

Everyone does political muckraking, says Trump. He's right but....

In a remarkable new development in the Russia collusion affair, Donald Trump has admitted that his "wonderful" son, Donald Junior, did talk to a Russian lawyer during the presidential election campaign about potential dirt on Hillary Clinton. But there was nothing wrong or illegal about that, he said. Everyone sought dirt on their opponents in the political world. Strictly speaking he is right, politicians with much at stake in their careers will always dig deep for skeletons in their opponents' cupboards because there is nothing like a bit of scandal to liven up a campaign. With all the focus on the Trump campaign and whether the Russians played a crucial part in getting Trump into the White House, the "secret" deeds done on behalf of the Democratic Party to find dirt and filth on Trump - the infamous Christopher Steele dossier - have been largely pushed to one side. It has to be said, however, that even though allegedly Hillary knew nothing about the commissioning of Steele, the former Russian specialist MI6 intelligence officer, and even though the British ex-spy, allegedly, did not know where his research was going to end up, the fact is that the dossier which contained salacious stuff about Trump in a Moscow hotel room (the notorious and massively Trump-denied "golden shower moment")was explosive material. It was dirt, dirt, dirt, and the FBI was aware of it. The company that commissioned Steele, Fusion GPS, had been contracted by the Democratic Party to investigate Trump once he had won the Republican nomination. A natural thing to do, you would argue. But Fusion GPS chose Christopher Steele to do the dirt-digging, and his speciality was Russia. They chose him because they wanted a simple question answered: why did Trump as a businessman seek to do deals in Russia when others avoided the country judging it to be a bad and unwise investment? Fusion GPS and the Democratic Party and, therefore, the Clinton campaign, got more than it bargained for. The Steele dossier remains a highly controversial issue. If any of it is true - and General James Clapper, Obama's director of national intelligence, has claimed more and more of its contents have proven to be accurate - then it could still be deadly for Trump's continuing presence in the White House. Certainly, it provided juicy morsels for Robert Mueller, special counsel investigating the collusion affair. But Hillary claims she knew nothing about its contents until BuzzFeed published the 35-page document in full ten days before Trump's inauguration as president in January 2017. People seem to forget that it was actually the American magazine Mother Jones which broke the Steele story, publishing the details about Trump's links with Russia in a massive scoop article on October 31 2016 - a few days BEFORE the election date. David Corn, the driven and highly competent journalist who broke the story, revealed that the dossier had been drawn up by a British ex-spy. He did not name the intelligence officer who was clearly his source for the story, although the name emerged eventually. Nor did Corn include in his article the salacious Golden Shower stuff. That only came out in the BuzzFeed blockbuster. Despite all the above which supports Trump's statement that everyone digs dirt on their political opponents, there is still one distinct difference. Trump Jr met this vivacious-looking Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, and had a chat about what she (and presumably her Kremlin friends) could provide to knock Hillary out of the race. Nothing came of it, says Trump Senior. But the mere fact that the son of the soon-to-be president of the United States was talking to a RUSSIAN about getting dirt on Hillary must surely go down in history as catastrophically stupid, unbelievably risky and potentially unlawful. Ok, so Steele's stuff was all Russian based. In other words, he got all his material from his sources in Russia. So he could easily have been unwittingly duped by his sources, although if Moscow wanted Trump in the White House this is difficult to square. But it was Steele digging dirt on behalf of his client. It was a hired ex-intelligence doing the bidding of his paymaster. In the Trump case, it was a Russian woman with highly dodgy links offering free gratis to provide the Trump campaign with deadly stuff on Hillary. There is definitely no like-for-like here. Trump's casual acknowledgment about his son's involvement and the president's dismissal of anything remotely untoward do not wash.

Trump and the media

Trump should stop his war with the media. The New York Times head honcho has given this advice but Trump simply isn't interested in being nice to journalists unless they ask him pathetic flattering questions. He does actually give interviews a lot, especially to Fox News and CBS but he basically hates the media because when they do their job properly and ask intelligent questions he just dismisses them as fake news merchants. In the end, this will do him no good. The best presidents know that it is far better to have the media on your side or at least to treat them with respect so they respect back. There's a way of doing this. Not kowtowing to journalists, that would be a huge mistake, but just being prepared to answer questions in a reasonable way. No ranting! Obama was terrific at it, so was Bill Clinton until he had all his troubles with Monica Lewinski. The press loved Ronnie Reagan because he gave such brilliant one-liners and was always charming. George W Bush had a tricky relationship with the media but survived, and his father George HW Bush was good at developing relationships with journalists, although his classic "read my lips" statement when he said there would be no tax rises brought him a helluva lot of trouble in the media when he then raised taxes. But Trump is so anti-media that in his most recent rallies he seemed to spend most of the time raging against the fake news merchants. He should get a life and start winning the media more to his side. For a start, stop this ridiculous war with CNN. The trouble is, Trump's press team are obviously too scared to suggest he starts winning friends in the media. All they do is amplify Trump's prejudices. It's a kind of vicious circle and it's becoming excessively boring.

Trump thwarted by Congress

Congress probably feels that it has a president in the White House who is there to undermine them at every opportunity. Trump's latest ploy is to threaten to close down the government if Congress fails to pass the federal spending bill which includes money for his Mexico wall. But Congress, both Republican members and Democrat members, have ways of getting their own back. For example, in the huge $717 billion defence authorisation bill which has just been approved there is something in there which will irk Trump. Congress has decided to include in the bill a total ban on two Chinese telecom companies from doing any business with the US government. They are ZTE and Huawei, mammoth conglomerates who have done well out of exporting to the US. But ZTE was punished earlier this year when it was discovered the company was selling electronic components to Iran and North Korea, breaching sanctions imposed by America. As a result the company was on the brink of collapse and President Xi Zinping himself appealed to Trump to save thousands of jobs. Trump agreed to see what he could do. But he met with stony faces in Congress, and now they have underlined their opposition to helping the Chinese by reemphasising the ban on any form of business deals with the two companies. The Pentagon had ordered all retail outlets on military bases to stop selling Huawei smart phones because it judged them to be a security risk. In other words, the Chinese government could use Huawei to gain access to personal information carried by US military personnel on their phones. Huawei denied any such possibility but the Pentagon thought otherwise. Now Congress has firmly placed its support for banning ZTE and Huawei which, for Trump, means a slap in the face after his promise to Xi to help out. Mind you, with Trump raising the stakes by imposing more and more tariffs on Chinese goods, there can't be much good will around these days between the two leaders.

The tweet king should watch his step

Donald Trump knows, because we all now know, that Robert Mueller, special counsel or "witch hunter supremo" in the president's mind, is currently investigating the Trump tweets to see whether any of them represent an obstruction of justice. But then up pops Trump and in one of his many tweets today he calls in no uncertain terms on the Attorney General, the much besieged Jeff Sessions, to sack Mueller and stop the investigation into collusion with Russia. Trump says there was no collusion between his campaign team and Moscow and that's that. So sack Mueller, says Trump. Well, the White House hastily said the president was NOT ordering Sessions to fire Mueller, he just wanted Mueller gone because the whole thing was rubbish fake news. But if Mueller has turned his attention to whether the president is guilty of obstruction of justice, Trump's latest tweet was a godsend. But I'm not sure why Mueller is examining the Trump tweets. First of all, it will take him days if not weeks to go through them all and second, what has this got to do with the allegations of collusion with Moscow? Perhaps Rod Rosenstein, deputy attorney general and in overall charge at the Justice Department of the Mueller inquiry, should tell the former FBI director to narrow his lines of inquiry and stick to the main theme. For example, much is being made of the trial of Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman, but he has not been charged with a single offence that relates in any way to the collusion affair. He is charged with money laundering and other offences. That doesn't mean he should be let off, he is accused of a serious federal crime. But Mueller's first scalp sent for trial is unrelated to the issue which he was supposed to be investigating. Shouldn't someone else in the FBI be involved in dealing with stuff like this? Mueller is getting bogged down in a mass of legal investigations when he should be focused on the one story. Did Trump and co do a deal with the Russians to undermine Hillary Clinton's chances of winning the White House? That's all we and the American voters want to know, surely. It's time you delivered your report, Mueller.