Donald Trump has spent forty years telling us he's the greatest dealmaker alive, and the evidence is a book he didn't write. Armed with that, he marches into century-old conflicts with the preparation of a five-year-old at a chess tournament and the confidence of a man who's never lost anything except casinos, an airline, and the popular vote twice. The results speak for themselves. He's sold out America to Russia, pitched beachfront hotels on the rubble of Gaza, and signed a diesel deal with Moscow while the war it's funding is still going. He got Greenland, triumphantly, and never noticed he'd been handed the same 1951 defense agreement the US already had, rewritten in a bigger font. The best bit is what the actual author said afterwards. Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter, called the book lipstick on a pig, said he'd title it The Sociopath today, and admitted he invented the phrase "truthful hyperbole" to dress up the lying. The man has a black belt in lying, and it's the only one he's ever earned. The one deal Trump ever closed was getting someone else to make him sound clever.

The greatest intelligence failure in American history may not have been a foreign operation. It may have been America's inability to protect itself from its own president. For years, the evidence of Trump's extraordinary loyalty to Moscow has been mounting. His admiration for Putin, his attacks on NATO, his possession of highly classified American defence secrets, and his repeated willingness to advance Russian interests. Yet the most extraordinary part of this entire scandal is the American state itself. The FBI, the intelligence community, Congress and the entire national security apparatus have proved incapable of protecting the country from a president whose conduct has repeatedly raised profound questions about his loyalty. Russia spent decades trying to defeat the United States from the outside. Now Putin can watch an American president dismantle the Western order from within. And the institutions built to defend America have been unable to stop him. What an extraordinary national humiliation.