Donald Trump's wild week as he embraces his autocratic madman era

Donald Trump's wild week as he embraces his autocratic madman era Trump appears to have acknowledged the impending doom facing Republicans in the Midterms and begun to distance himself from them - meanwhile testing autocracy on for size Donald Trump appears to have started his autocrat madman era early. For a while I've been concerned that once the midterms are out of the way, with the Republicans expected to be given a pummelling, and he had nothing to lose, his unhinged behaviour be markedly less restrained. But this week he appears to have acknowledged the impending doom facing the party of which he is nominally the leader - and started to distance himself from them publicly. And after boring snoring meetings with Andy Burnham and the like at the UN, he spent most of the week getting despotic leadership tips from an expert in the field. Here's how Trump started to unravel this week. 'However you look it's clear to see, I love you more than you love me.' Andy Burnham finally got his half-hour sit-down with Donald Trump and it was all about channeling his guitar hero Johnny Marr and ..."getting away with it." Burnham's body language in the on-camera spray after the meeting did not look particularly relaxed. But it could have gone a lot worse. Nobody said anything openly racist. There were a few oblique jabs at Keir Starmer from former bestie Trump, still sore over their falling out about Iran. Burnham didn't speak up when Trump defended his press ban, but he also didn't get drawn into agreeing with Trump's white nationalist-coded view of immigration in Europe. In fact, it's worth noting something subtle that Burnham pulled off. Trump said a few very complimentary things about our new PM, comparing him favourably with his predecessor. In return, Burnham said...the meeting was good. There was no showering of Trump with compliments. 'I hate to bug you in the middle of dinner' Burnham's opener was a marked contrast with Starmer's first visit, where he was a lot more gushy, and came with a letter from the king to pump up Trump's ego. And what did that humiliating spectacle get him? Well, the other night, former White House Press Secretary went on Fox News and told an eyebrow raising anecdote about how bromantic the pair were behind closed doors. "I sat in on a lunch with the president and Starmer and we're sitting around the table, and we're all enjoying lunch," she said. "We were in this beautiful place. And the President just starts ripping into him for his policies. "He's like, 'Your policies here are so stupid. You need to close your borders.' 'You need to deport these people you have in your country. I know your country, I know your people, they hate what you're doing.'" Leavitt said she couldn't remember where the exchange took place, but from context clues, it sounds like the visit to Chequers during Trump's state visit. "And this is in his house, in his country. We're not even at the White House. We're not even in our own territory and he's just..." She said. Asked by host Sean Hannity if she found it entertaining, Leavitt added: "Of course." It's worth noting that Leavitt, a longtime Trump acolyte, lied to the press on a daily basis, so there's no reason we should take this at face value. 'If there's somebody calling me on, Xi's the one' Trump, of course, started the week with a pretty dark speech to the United Nations - which had a number of moments in it that may prove consequential. There was the repeated admission he'd got away with what probably amounts to crimes under international law - the blockade of Cuba, which prompted the Cuban delegation to walk out of the General Assembly, the lethal targeting of "drug boats" in waters around Venezuela in the run-up to America's invasion and the pillaging of the same country's oil, which Trump excused by bragging: "To the victor belong the spoils." He suggested a few others he might commit in the future, like the indiscriminate destruction of Iran. And the speech held a warning for Iran - don't get the idea that I'll make a deal after the midterms, he implored. "What they don't realise is that I'm not running. The Republicans are running, I'm helping." It was one of a few signals from Trump lately that increasingly indicate he's given up on November's elections already. And it's similarly clear that he doesn't care who succeeds him as President - assuming he leaves the White House when he's supposed to. And we shouldn't assume that. Think about the things Donald Trump has done in the last two years when he had the midterms and succession planning to worry about. Now imagine how unhinged he's capable of being once he's liberated of those concerns. Before he even got to the UN he'd excluded three media outlets from covering him on White House grounds, revoking their passes and branding them "fake news." The move has been reversed by a court order, yet Trump is still finding every way he can to make the vital work of observing his descent into further depths of despotism even harder. And on Wednesday, right on schedule, he welcomed his latest autocratic hero to the White House - Chinese premier Xi Jinping. The visit itself was largely unproductive from a diplomatic perspective. Little progress was made on issues of trade or human rights. And they both agreed they'd rather turn AI into an arms race than stop it destroying the human race. It was notable only for how fawning he was, and how brazenly he tried to impress his counterpart with his own dictator-adjacent tendencies. 'Or should we blame the images on TV?' Speaking of which, a TV ad started to run on Fox News, CBS and elsewhere somewhere around the middle of the week - and there are a number of unusual things about it. To describe it in basic terms, it's a highly produced series of images of Trump looking presidential and energetic, soundtracked first by Trump vowing to stop Communism taking hold in the United States. Manic Street Preachers-style propaganda slogans declaring "LARGEST TAX CUTS IN HISTORY", "REIGNITING AMERICAN MANUFACTURING" and "DEFEND LAW AND ORDER AND POLICE" are shown in red, intercut with the same sentence repeatedly: "AMERICA WILL NEVER BE A COMMUNIST COUNTRY". Over the top, a song by the R&B artist JMSN - whose work was used without permission - with a singer repeatedly intoning: "Love me. Love me." It's already one of the most unsettling political ads I've ever seen produced in a nominally free country. And then there's the kicker - at the bottom of the screen it says: "Paid for by the U.S. government." Suddenly the viewer realises it's not a campaign ad, but a propaganda broadcast - and moreover, that they paid for it. Challenged over the 1984-adjacent TV spot, the White House insisted it was a "public service announcement", and was totally normal. Then a second ad later started airing. Less confrontational in tone, but just as craven. This one cribbed segments from Trump's speech at Mount Rushmore to celebrate America's 250th anniversary, ending with one of his campaign slogans declaring the "golden age of America." Again, it's paid for by American taxpayers. So yeah, buckle up, it's going to be an interesting couple of years. Well done for making it to the end. First person to email me correctly identifying all the song lyrics in this piece gets a shout out next week. (Pub quiz rules, no phones, no Google. Honour system.)