ALTHOUGH SPECULATION CONTINUES about whether an octogenarian President of the United States, one increasingly prone to drifting off to sleep in front of the cameras, is slowing down, Donald Trump is undeniably difficult to keep up with. A ban on CNN, MSNOW and Politico journalists from the White House at last engendered a show of solidarity from other networks and was swiftly undone by Judge Timothy Kelly.

A typically rambling, bravado-laden and menacing address at the United Nations was met with stony silence from fellow heads of states and their diplomatic teams. A summit with China’s President Xi Jinping evidently is revolving around the AI race. According to experts, it mightn’t prove all that consequential. And there has been lots more – an allegedly productive and encouraging meeting between US envoys and Iranian officials in New York, some sort of “deal” with Denmark and Greenland, etc – only recently.

Just to focus on the attempted press ban for a minute, it has been noted that this is definitely not the first time that an American president determined that certain members of the media had it in for him and sought to get them off his case. Indeed, politicians of all stripes have nearly always taken a dim view of those whose job it is to hold them to account.

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My own great-uncle Frank Kelly, a Democrat, Boston City Councillor and Attorney General of Massachusetts in his day, was fond of telling his backers who fretted about negative coverage that “a cup of coffee and a slice of pie will buy you a newspaper........

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