This is Dispatches, 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 The Apprentice 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.
