This is , a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper normally written by Patrick Cockburn. As Patrick is away, journalist and author Nick Bryant pens this newsletter.
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For a President fixated with television – even more than he is with social media – the summer has proven to be a season of repeats. In these dog days of August, the content-provider-in-chief appears bereft of new content.
The former reality TV star who reportedly told aides at the beginning of his first term to treat each day like an episode of in which he would always end up the winner appears to be losing his knack for programming.
The Iran war drags interminably on, with exit ramps looking more like one of the painter MC Escher’s endless staircases. The Trump administration has been trapped in what has felt like a forever trade war with Canada. This week, up against one of those Trump deadlines which never feels like a real deadline, the two sides reached agreement on what the President claimed was a “very good deal”. The fine print, though, has yet to be finalised, a familiar storyline of deal-making in Trump 2.0 where little truly gets resolved.
Even the weird AI slop Trump pumps out on Truth Social – the President as Elvis, or showing George Washington around his new ballroom, or placing himself alongside war heroes, such as Generals Douglas MacArthur and George Patton – looks old hat. We’ve seen this sort of guff before. Recently, his critics have been winning the meme game, with mock-ups showing Trump hiding in a catering trolley – “The Cart of the Deal” – and being gifted a gleaming gold-plated catering truck by Qatar.
Trump, the executive producer of his own presidency, has lost control of the plot lines. This week that became glaringly obvious after the Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff, who is running for re-election in Georgia, baited the President over his relationship with a 35-year-old White House aide, Natalie Harp. Trump “wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar,” quipped Ossoff during a campaign speech, a line which inevitably went viral and gave venerable news organisations, such as the and , an excuse to run profiles of the blonde staffer. This brought a furious response from the White House. “Jon Jackoff,” fumed Trump’s director of communications Steven Cheung on X, “has to be the biggest cuck loser in politics.”
Trump 2.0 has stalled. There is no coherent strategy to reboot this presidency, either from Trump or from senior West Wing aides. Engrossed by the here and now, he rarely seems to think beyond the latest news cycle.
Just 19 months into his second term, there is little in the way of a legislative agenda. This week, Trump was pushing a pet project “NO MORE CHANGING THE CLOCKS ACT”, to provide more sunlight in the evening by making daylight saving time year-round. But spelling that out in all-caps on Truth Social hardly makes it a big reform. Certainly, it feels small when placed alongside the gargantuan national debt, which this week passed the $40trn threshold for the first time.
The Save America Act, proposing proof of citizenship to register to vote, is another legislative priority. But the bill is stuck in Congress, with no chance of passage in the Senate where Democrats argue it could potentially disenfranchise more than 21 million US citizens ahead of the midterm congressional elections.
The stream of executive orders, through which Trump has tried to bypass Congress with the flourish of his Sharpie pen, is now more of a trickle. Many of those he has signed, such as his attempt to single-handedly rewrite the Constitution by banning birthright citizenship for newborns where neither parent is a US citizen, have been blocked by the Supreme Court. In July, he added his seismograph-like signature to just two executive orders, compared to 15 the same month last year.
Trump has been reduced to showing off his latest home improvements. This week it was the new helipad constructed on the South Lawn of the White House – boasting in the process that “I am very good at flagpoles” – and the restoration of the Thomas Jefferson columns which he reckoned had “turned out beautifully”. But even in his backyard, his writ does not extend that far. Not even to the East Wing of the White House, in fact, where a federal appeals court this month halted above-ground construction of Trump’s $400m giant ballroom.
Symbols of a stalled presidency abound. That messy construction site at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The Reflecting Pool on the National Mall, which is not yet problem-free after its new paint job flaked off and algae bloomed. The nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS , whose beleaguered sailors have been on a nearly nine-month deployment because of the Iran war. Now, finally, after a voyage likened to the travails of Odysseus and reports of rations and morale running low, the aircraft carrier is heading home. Small wonder Trump’s approval rating this week sunk to a new low of just 33 per cent, according to Reuters/Ipsos.
The President’s sagging approval ratings have themselves become a monotonous storyline. They have been sinking not just since the start of the Iran war, but actually since the day he announced his Liberation Day tariffs as far back as April 2025. For many voters, Trump’s early successes, such as dramatically reducing the number of unauthorised crossings at the southern border with Mexico, have been displaced by the chaos in Washington.
September is when the US networks roll out their new autumn seasons. Post-Labor Day, the traditional end of the American summer, Trump will presumably try to regain lost initiative, and demonstrate he is no lame duck. But a large part of Trump’s problem is that he appears blind to his own unpopularity, and listens too much to the encomiums of sycophantic Cabinet officials and White House aides.
This week saw yet another illustration of the fantasyland he seems to occupy when he boasted about making the Strait of Hormuz a US territory. But voters are tiring of his fictions. This shrinking President can no longer bend reality to his will.
I’ve often wondered how cinema combats high-quality TV, which has weeks to develop characters and plot lines. Come up with a filmic blockbuster, as Christopher Nolan does in ? Or simply film a play? That’s what director Olivia Wilde did with , and it’s the best movie I’ve seen this year.
This sex comedy set in San Francisco is a remake of a Spanish movie, , which was adapted from a Spanish play. It’s clever, claustrophobic, cringe-making in parts and brilliantly acted by Seth Rogan, Olivia Wilde, Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton who play couples toying, painfully, with the idea of partner swapping over the course of a single, chaotic evening.