Donald Trump's erratic week as his polls plummet and he screws Ukraine over

Donald Trump's erratic week as his polls plummet and he screws Ukraine over This week, among other things, Trump has failed to get his Attorney General pick confirmed, done his best not to get drawn into Gianni Infantino's nonsense and blamed a cyberattack that almost everyone believes was perpetrated by Iran on...Minnesota. Here's your weekly catch-up With just 95 days until the Midterm elections, Donald Trump's polling numbers hit an all time low this week. But instead of making any real effort to rally and focus on the task at hand, he's been perhaps more erratic than at any time in his second Presidency. Reeling from the backlash to his disastrous, racist and cruel speech at the White House Correspondents Dinner, he gave a decidedly odd eulogy at the funeral of Lindsey Graham - one of the most useful allies he had left. Since then he's failed to get his Attorney General pick confirmed, done his best not to get drawn into Gianni Infantino's nonsense and blamed a cyberattack that almost everyone believes was perpetrated by Iran on...Minnesota. Here's your weekly roundup of the wild, weird and unhinged goings on in Trumpworld this week. 'Bing bing bing, bing bing. Bing bing bing bing bing' Donald Trump and his cabinet decamped to Camp David on Thursday, so they could go through the same roundtable glazing routine they go through at every cabinet meeting, just in a log cabin. And Trump was in a weird mood, which was apparent for a number of reasons, but most obvious in this little anecdote about US forces shooting down missiles fired by Iran. "The other day you read that 5 missiles were shot," he said. "They were going 8,600 miles an hour. Think of it, eight thousand, six hundred. Now a car, if you go 60, it gets to be a little faster if you go 100. 8,600 miles an hour, and they were big missiles and they were shot at Jordan. "And our guys were there, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. Five. Bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. Right?" Perhaps realising he was now talking gibberish, he said: "I don't want to be Biden. I have to be very careful. That woulda been a great soundbite." Yes, Mr President. Infanti-no your honour Trump was asked whether he had spoken to FIFA boss Gianni Infantino about his bonkers plan to flog off the World Cup. This is not an unreasonable question for a number of reasons. For most of the last few weeks, Trump and Infantino have been joined at the hip - most publicly watching the World Cup Final together. Prior to that, Infantino has been on a lovebombing campaign so shameless it culminated in a made-up "peace prize." There's also the fact that Infantino's cunning plan involves spinning off its commercial operations in a new $20 billion subsidiary 20% owned by private investors - and the core investor would be a New York investment firm created by Joshua Kushner, the brother of Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner. "No, I never spoke to him about it," Trump insisted. Just didn't come up. They spoke about Infantino maybe becoming the Secretary General of the UN. But not this. Trump goes head to head with Hannity at funeral With the death of Lindsey Graham, Trump lost one of his closest friends in politics. I mean, they hated each other to start with...but as time went on, they softened. And friends in Washington are hard to come by, especially when your poll numbers look like Trump's do. More on that in a moment. But before Graham was laid to rest, there was a brief, awkward moment between the President and Fox News blowhard Sean Hannity over the late South Carolina Senator's legacy. Trump, in his eulogy, had said Graham "never saw a war he didn't like." But following Trump, Hannity contradicted the President, saying Graham's reputation as a "warmonger" had been overstated. "I've heard that false criticism a lot. It's not true. The truth was the opposite. Lindsey desperately wanted and talked to the president about a lasting peace in the Middle East. He wanted every region, every country in the region on that path to peace. That was Lindsey's dream, if people would only listen to what he had been saying." But Hannity, weirdly spent an unusual amount of time sucking up to Trump in his speech, which was weird given it was at someone else's funeral. "Lindsey, Mr. President, probably has a heavenly version of Mar-a-Lago," Hannity said. "It may even be a little bigger. He may have a little more gold in the Oval Office in his mansion in heaven. And I wouldn't be surprised if he added one big beautiful ballroom and an arch somewhere on the property, because he would want to, obviously, duplicate his dearest friend in life, you, Mr. President." Trump admits defeat in Blanche confirmation It became clear this week that Trump has almost no chance of getting Todd Blanche confirmed as his permanent attorney general. Not this side of the midterms anyway, and it will almost certainly get harder after that. The vote, which was due to take place on Thursday, was scuppered by two Republican holdouts on the Senate Judiciary Committe: John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina. Both men will leave office in January, and both have fallen out with Trump quite spectacularly. Cornyn was defeated in a primary election after Trump backed his challenger, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Tillis didn't get primaried, but chose not to seek re-election after breaking with Trump publicly. And these two lame ducks have decided to stand on principle against Blanche, over his involvement in and refusal to roll back Trump's insane settlement with the Internal Revenue Service. Cast your minds back a few months to the brazenly corrupt situation farce where Trump sued a branch of his own government, and despite him clearly being on both sides of the case, they settled out of court. The resulting settlement had two parts - the 'slush fund' to payout damages to people who had been "wronged" by the government (mainly January 6th rioters), and a sweet deal where Trump and his family would be immune from being audited by the taxman over historic claims of underpayment allegedly worth millions of dollars. Now, the slush fund provoked such a backlash that it was almost immediately walked back - but not before causing Trump incalculable political damage, both with the public and his own party. But the IRS deal stayed in place, something many "moderate" Republicans feel deeply uncomfortable with. And given they're already leaving office in January, there's nothing stopping Cornyn and Tillis causing a stink about it. In the end Trump admitted he wasn't going to get the nomination through while the pair are still sitting, and he vowed on Truth Social to bring it back once they leave office in January. But by then, who knows if Trump will have the control of the Senate that he would need to get his former personal lawyer confirmed. Speaking of the slush fund Trump is still whining about his nifty scheme to pay millions of dollars to people willing to mount a violent coup to keep him in office getting scuppered. Asked about a post on Truth Social, where he said "victims" of "weaponisation" should be paid back, Trump said: "I'm talking about the weaponisation against large numbers of people in our country by the Biden administration, and by Obama, but by the Biden administration in particular in this case. Large numbers of people their lives have been ruined, they've been destroyed...they've gone to prison for no reason whatsoever. There's never been a group of people ...I can think of a couple that have been treated pretty badly, groups...but there's essentially never been a group of people treated so badly as these people." Erm, we can think of a few too...but go on... "And there's this fund, this fund was not for me, this fund was for the people who have been weaponised, that have been abused. Now...I was abused. They attacked my house, Mar A Lago, where I live. And big damages should have been given to me. I don't want anything, I'm not talking about myself." He went on: "I think there's a big group of people in this country, history will show, that have been treated like nobody else has ever been treated. So badly. So horribly. Their families have been ruined. Many, many suicides. People that were very successful that wanted to go to a rally, or an event...and ended up spending the rest of their lives in horror." To be clear, the "rally" or "event" he's talking about was the violent attempted coup d'etat that Trump encouraged on January 6th 2021. The "very successful" people he's talking about includes members of racist militia including the Proud Boys and the Oathkeepers. And the reason people ended up in prison was because they tried to forcibly overthrow the government, in many cases assaulting more than 140 police officers who stood in their way. Asked if he still wanted the fund to go ahead, Trump said: "It's dead, but I wish it weren't....I'd like to see them compensated for the pain...they went down for an innocent journey..." Iran didn't target America's water system...Minnesota did Cyberattacks targeted more than 30 water systems in Minnesota - and six other states - on Sunday and Monday. Most people, including US and state officials, think Iranian hackers were behind the attack. Trump isn't so sure. He said at the Cabinet meeting: “I think that Minnesota is behind it. You know who's behind it? Minnesota. Because they're grossly incompetent. I think the governor is behind it. I don't think there was an Iranian cyber attack.” Trump offered no evidence for blaming Minnesota, including Governor Tim Walz in particular, who have been at odds with the White House on immigration enforcement and other issues. Asked for evidence to support Trump’s allegations, the White House referred to his comments at the Cabinet meeting. Which is just what you want at a time of war, isn't it? The President defending the enemy. Trump walked back his deal with Ukraine A couple of weeks ago, when he met with Volodymyr Zelensky in at the NATO summit in Turkey, Trump said he had agreed to grant a license to manufacture Patriot missile interceptors to help Ukraine defend against Russian bombardment. "One of the things we're going to be talking about is, we're going to give a license to you to make Patriots. That's pretty cool, right?", Trump said to Zelensky in Ankara. So, obviously, he's now screwed Zelensky over. He said in an Oval Office Q&A on Wednesday: "You have to be very judicious, but you have to be very careful. Now we have not agreed to that. We're talking about it, but it's a hard thing to give away that kind of technology. And I don't think this would ever happen but, you know, there's people that you give that technology, they can someday turn on you." And at the Cabinet Meeting, he repeated his walk-back. "I don't think this would ever happen, but, you know, there's people that, you give that technology, they can someday turn on you," Trump said. "You look at war, that's happened a couple of times over the years, right? So we have to be very careful." Republicans fumed over Fauci's fifth...but they're forgetting something Some of Trump's biggest supporters in Congress were among the committee members who organised a show trial of former health chief Dr Anthony Fauci - America's Chris Whitty - for the terrible crime of having inconvenienced people in a bid to save lives during a global pandemic. Fearing he was being set up for a perjury charge, Fauci invoked his fifth amendment right to silence in response to every question - even though he's already been pre-emptively pardoned by Joe Biden, who correctly predicted they'd try this kind of nonsense. Senator after senator ranted at Fauci, repeatedly suggesting his refusal to answer questions 111 times during the interrogation indicated guilt in one or other of their wacko conspiracy theories. But they may have forgotten that in 2022, one Donald J Trump took the fifth no fewer than 440 times during a deposition investigating the finances of the Trump Organisation. Awkward. And oh yeah, the Gaza thing is weird Many people woke up this morning baffled by Trump's announcement that his "Board of Peace" had somehow managed to talk Hamas into laying down their weapons to pave the way for the end of the war in Gaza. And by the end of the day there was little to assuage that bafflement. Hamas officials said the group has agreed to the disarmament agreement. Israel has not commented. The Board of Peace, Trump's bizarro United Nations, will apparently have a major role in overseeing the deal's implementation, which has supposedly been brokered with the help of Qatar, who gifted Trump a free jumbo jet a few months ago, and Turkey. We're going to file this one in "believe it when we see it"