Trump Notebook

The first election day since Donald Trump was elected president a year ago brought a funereal mood to Washington that you could feel on the streets. The swamp, apparently, remains undrained. Elections for governor in Virginia and New Jersey and for mayor in New York City cheered the locals a bit, producing the expected victories for Democrats. Virginia was the most consequential of these. It seemed a harbinger of the next presidential race. The moderate, decidedly un-Trumpian Republican Ed Gillespie was accused of making ‘ugly racial appeals’ — this for expressing the opinion that the statues of Virginia’s Civil War heroes should not be razed in a frenzy of revisionism. Fifty-seven per cent of Virginians want the monuments to stay up, too, producing a rough equilibrium. They are scared to death to say so, and the political class is scared to death of their power. There are signs that politicians’ fear is on the wane. The Latino Victory Fund, a group that opposes Gillespie, ran a television advert that showed a redneck driving a pickup truck with an Ed Gillespie sticker on it. He was speeding through a suburban neighbourhood after non-white children, as if to run them over.

The President himself missed the anniversary on his tour of Japan, Korea and China. In seeking a solution to the Korea crisis, Trump has lately been putting a lot of trust in China’s ability to influence the North. This week, Asia expert Orville Schell raised something Americans seldom think about: what if it works? What if Xi Jinping were to help bring about the collapse of the regime in the North, and the effacement of what Trump on Wednesday morning called ‘the line… between decency and depravity’? Surely Xi would want American missiles out of South Korea — and perhaps the Americans along with them.