Donald Trump has resumed his attack on George Conway, the husband of White House counsellor Kellyanne Conway, after the latter questioned the president’s mental health.
In response, Mr Trump called the lawyer “a stone cold LOSER & husband from hell!”
Mr Trump has also been accused of “punching at a person that can’t fight back because he’s dead” over his feud with recently deceased Vietnam War hero and Republican senator John McCain.
“I was never a fan of John McCain and I never will be,” Mr Trump said yesterday during a press conference at the White House with Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, prompting the comment from CNN anchor Anderson Cooper on the disrespect being shown to a long-serving American public servant who passed away of brain cancer last August, aged 81.
The ongoing attacks on the late senator has led many to express support for the famed Arizonan, even as the president has continued to double down on his criticism of the war hero.
On Wednesday afternoon, Mr Trump took a trip to Lima, Ohio, where he visited a tank manufacturing plant and expressed admiration for the "patriotism" he said was on full display in the company.
Before boarding his plane to leave Washington, Mr Trump told reporters that he expects special counsel Robert Mueller's report on Russian meddling in the 2016 election to be released publicly.
Mr Mueller's report is expected any day now, with many reports indicating the investigation is winding down or already finished up.
The report would first be sent to the Justice Department, at which point Attorney General William Barr would determine what form of a report he would pass along to Congress for further review.
Hello and welcome to The Independent's rolling coverage of the Donald Trump administration.
Donald Trump reignited his "feud" with the late John McCain yesterday, the Republican 2008 presidential candidate and Vietnam veteran who passed away on 25 August 2018 from brain cancer, aged 81, after a life of public service.
“I was never a fan of John McCain and I never will be,” Mr Trump said yesterday during a press conference at the White House with Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro.
This came after a series of tweets last weekend in which the president attacked McCain for handing over the Steele Dossier, alleging relations between his inner circle and the Kremlin, to the FBI in 2017.
And, of course, Mr Trump's famous mockery of McCain - a pilot during the Vietnam War who was shot down, captured and held prisoner in Hanoi for six years by the North Vietnamese - for not being a true American hero (having never served himself due to "bone spurs"): "He is a war hero because he was captured? I like people who weren't capture."
The attacks provoked an angry but supremely dignified response from McCain's daughter:
And yesterday a sharp rebuke from CNN's Anderson Cooper:
Here's Andrew Buncombe on a controversy as surreal as it is unedifying.
Trump doubles down on dislike of John McCain saying he 'was never a fan'
President and late senator never hid mutual dislikeThe president has also continued his wild recent run on Twitter, following up attacks on Joe Biden, the media and adviser Kellyanne Conway's husband George ("A total loser!") by retweeting this:
The video appears to show a ludicrously laborious search procedure being carried out on a barefoot teenage boy in shorts (posing no clear threat whatsoever) by a security official.
The post comes from comedian and musician Larry the Cable Guy via right-wing Hollywood actor James Woods, who appears to have got it from a conspiracy theory account called Deep State Exposed.
Welcome to the New Weird.
What is currently on the president's mind (or it was at midnight in Washington, at any rate) is Democratic calls for electoral reform and, particularly, the removal of the Electoral College, which allowed President Trump to win the 2016 campaign despite losing the Popular Vote to Hillary Clinton.
Earlier in the day, he had already served up some thoughts on the matter based on his experiences in 2016:
2020 presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren had started the conversation during a speech at a CNN Town Hall event in Jackson, Mississippi, on Monday night.
Here's Tom Embury-Dennis on President Trump's midnight rant.
Trump rages about Electoral College reform and lowering voter age to 16 in midnight tirade
The Independent'The brilliance of the Electoral College is that you must go to many States to win,' president says, having visited fewer than half during presidential campaignTrump ally Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator for South Carolina, represents a conflicted figure these days.
He's torn between his need to "stay relevant" at the side of the president and his friendship with the late John McCain, a mentor whom he has defended on Twitter against Mr Trump's attacks, albeit without daring to call out the slanderer.
Mr Graham has found his voice to join in with Mr Trump's dispute with the Democrats about the merits of the Electoral College, however.
Other lines to come out of his meeting yesterday with Jair Bolsonaro - the "Trump of the Tropics, a fellow right-wing populist known for his love of social media and denouncing "fake news" - was an exchange of football shirts and Mr Trump dangling the possibility of Brazil joining Nato, as though that were something in his immediate power to grant.
There was also this peach on the "twilight of socialism", which is at least a poetic turn of phrase.
Also coming during his address from the Rose Garden was an attack on the supposed anti-conservative bias prevalent on social media: "There's discrimination, there's big discrimination... Something's happening with those groups of folks that are running Facebook, and Google, and Twitter, and I do think we have to get to the bottom of it."
The line followed up on this tweet:
Given that he himself has 59m Twitter followers and sets the international news agenda on a near-daily basis with his frothing tweets about whatever's currently on his mind (or on Fox and Friends), the argument is scarcely credible.
Conservatives like to complain their free speech is under duress whenever an alt-right speaker is banned from a university campus or booted off Facebook, Twittter or YouTube for delivering offensive rhetoric but, coming from President Trump, who makes regular attacks on the press, such concerns hold little water.
Here's Andrew Buncombe again.
Trump says 'something must be done' about Facebook and Twitter's alleged anti-conservative bias
'We have to do something about it'All of that might just have been revenge for Facebook embarrassing the Trump administration by mistaking its social media director Dan Savino for a bot.
"AMAZING. WHY ARE YOU STOPPING ME from replying to comments followers have left me - on my own Facebook Page!!?? People have the right to know. Why are you silencing me???" Mr Scavino had complained to the site on Monday after a number of features on his account were disabled.
In a statement, the social media giant said its automated systems had misidentified his account for a fake due to the "repetitive" nature of his activities.
"In order to stop automated bots, we cap the amount of identical, repetitive activity coming from one account in a short period of time, such as @mentioning people. These limits can have the unintended consequence of temporarily preventing real people like Dan Scavino from engaging in such activity, but lift in an hour or two, which is what happened in this case," a spokesman for the Silicon Valley giant said.
"We've been in touch with him and have apologised for the inconvenience."
Not content with making life difficult for Mr Trump over the Electoral College, Elizabeth Warren is also going after the issue of Confederate flags and statues in southern towns, a hot-button issue for many conservatives.
She says monuments to generals who fought for the Old South in the Civil War belong in museums, an interesting, measured compromise that will nevertheless not be well received by the right.
Here's Clark Mindock.
Elizabeth Warren calls to remove Confederate monuments ‘and put them in museums where they belong’
Ms Warren is running for the Democratic nomination for presidentAnd she's not the only Democratic 2020 presidential hopeful going after Donald Trump.
California senator and former state attorney-general Kamala Harris told talk show host Jimmy Kimmel last night she intends to "prosecute the case" against Mr Trump.
Here's Chris Baynes.
Kamala Harris promises to 'prosecute the case' against Trump
Democrat senator vows to 'articulate the evidence that makes the case for why we need new leadership'Following Meghan McCain's stout defence of her late father against Mr Trump's slings and arrows, another daughter of a leading light of the GOP has criticised the current administration.
Patti Davis, daughter of the 40th president Ronald Reagan, told Yahoo News's Through Her Eyes with Zainab Salbi her father would "be horrified" by the Trump presidency.
"I think he would be horrified. I think he would be heartbroken," she said. "Because he loved this country a lot and he believed in this country."
"If you stir up fear in people, you weaken them. If you divide people, you weaken them... Everything [Trump] says is divisive. Look at his rallies."
She also called on people to "speak up and stand up," warning that "we are going to lose this country" if they don't.
President Trump is visiting the bellwether Midwestern state of Ohio today, awkward in that it comes just days after he lambasted an autoworkers' union over the closure of a General Motors plant in Lordstown.
"Perhaps no state has better illustrated the re-aligning effects of Trump's candidacy and presidency than Ohio, where traditionally Democratic-leaning working-class voters have swung heavily toward the GOP, and moderate Republicans in populous suburban counties have shifted away from Trump," Zeke Miller of the AP says of the significance of Ohio.
This is why Donald Trump is making his 10th visit to the state since taking office.
"Nationally, Democrats have placed less of an emphasis on the traditional battleground state. Ohio was conspicuously absent from the list of key 2020 states - Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Florida - that are receiving a share of a $100 million [£75.6m] investment by the Democratic super PAC, Priorities USA. The state doesn't even make the PAC's 'phase two' roster, which includes Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and New Hampshire," Mr Miller adds.
President Trump is up and repeating his attacks on George Conway, having yesterday branded him "a total loser" after the lawyer had questioned his sanity on Twitter, tweeting definitions of narcissistic personality disorder from a psychology textbook.
This was went down yesterday:
Here's Tom Embury-Dennis to explain this latest excursion down the rabbit hole.
Trump calls senior aide's husband a 'total loser' after he claimed president's mental health is deteriorating
The IndependentGeorge Conway responds by tweeting diagnostic criteria for narcissistic personality disorderHere's George's response:
The "husband from hell" told The Washington Post yesterday his anti-Trump tweets stop him screaming at his wife, White House adviser Kellyanne Conway.
"It's so maddening to watch," he told the newspaper. "The mendacity, the incompetence, it's just maddening to watch. The tweeting is just the way to get it out of the way, so I can get it off my chest and move on with my life that day. That's basically it. Frankly, it's so I don't end up screaming at her about it."
In among the mud-slinging, there's a serious allegation from Donald Trump here:
Meanwhile, here's a picture of their marriage from Jim Carrey, fast becoming the planet's foremost political cartoonist.
All this and we haven't even gotten around to Donald Trump Jr's thoughts on Brexit, as expressed in The Daily Telegraph.
"Mrs May ignored advice from my father, and ultimately, a process that should have taken only a few short months has become a years-long stalemate, leaving the British people in limbo," Don Jr says.
With the deadline fast approaching, it appears that democracy in the UK is all but dead.
"The battle for independence isn’t over; it has only just begun.
"The elites will not surrender their power lightly, and we shouldn’t expect them to. But we need to keep fighting to reclaim it for the people."
It hasn't gone down well in Westminster.
Here's Will Gore for Indy Voices on Don Jr and Brexit.
Opinion: Trump Jr's remarks about Brexit are astonishingly hypocritical
He remains closely involved with his father's political plans and his article in the Telegraph has to be seen as an intervention by the US administration, not a disinterested private individualMore from George Conway, who is angry indeed:
FAO Kellyanne Conway.
Famously understated conservative radio host Glenn Beck told Fox's Sean Hannity yesterday that a Donald Trump defeat in 2020 would mean “we are officially at the end of the country as we know it.”
Here's Clark Mindock.
Glenn Beck warns Trump loss in 2020 would be ‘end of US as we know it’
The 'radicals, the anarchists, the Islamists, the socialists would all gather together' to destabilise the US and Europe, Beck saysPlease allow a moment for our liveblog to load
