AS MARION MCKEONE has outlined in her column, President Donald Trump seems to be most concerned at the moment with a gaudy 80th birthday celebration in parallel with the marking of the 250th birthday of the United States, the construction of monuments to his greatness in Washington, DC and permanently immunising himself and his family from future Internal Revenue Service audits.

Those of us whose analysis of this unlikely president has presumed that his self-interest would always trump – sorry! – everything else have clearly been misguided, at least in one sense. From that date in 2015 when he came down the escalator in Trump Tower to announce before a supposedly paid crowd of fans that he would pursue the Republican nomination for the highest office in the land, we believed that his self-interest was necessarily inseparable from his political self-interest.

Yet precious little of what he has said and done in recent months, will benefit either President Trump, whose approval rating is below 40% in the aggregated polling data, or GOP standard-bearers in the upcoming midterms. From the aforementioned excesses to indicating that he wasn’t worried by the financial predicament of the American people, which has been exacerbated by a foolhardy war on Iran, it has been a masterclass in political malpractice.

Accordingly, it can be cogently argued that he doesn’t really care what fate befalls his conservative colleagues. In turn, he apparently thinks that whoever controls the US Congress is pretty immaterial to how the final two years he has left in the White House go.

That said, with a........

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