The_Economist_15_12_2018_watermark

vk.com/id446425943

Britain

The Economist December 15th 2018 31

persuade fellow eu leaders to change the Brexit deal to make it more palatable at home is not succeeding. She has been firmly told that, although words may be added to the political declaration about future relations, there is no chance of amending the legally binding withdrawal agreement that fixes the principal terms for Brexit.

This matters because the main target of the ferocious attacks on Mrs May’s deal is the so-called Irish backstop, an insurance policy to avert a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic in all circumstances, which is part of the withdrawal agreement. The backstop would keep the United Kingdom in a customs union with the eu and align Northern Ireland with most eu single-market rules. Because it is an insurance policy, Britain cannot have a unilateral right of exit.

Mrs May’s critics want her either to junk the backstop or to amend it to give Britain the power to leave when it chooses. She has promised merely to seek reassurances from her eu colleagues that the backstop is not intended to be used, and is also seen by all as temporary. Such reassurances might even be given the force of a formal European Council decision. But that is far short of a change to the legally binding withdrawal treaty.

Does she have an alternative? Some mps want Mrs May to switch to a Brexit deal similar to Norway’s, which means staying in the single market and adding a permanent customs union. But it also implies keeping free movement of people, which Mrs May’s deal does not. Moreover, as she1

vk.com/id446425943

32 Britain

2points out, any Brexit deal requires an Irish backstop. And there is no sign of a Norwaylike deal (or the more distant Canada-like free-trade deal promoted by the hardliners) winning a majority among mps. Sarah Wollaston, a pro-European Tory, concludes that there is total parliamentary gridlock over any form of Brexit.

So what might the prime minister do? Her answer is to rely on the pressure of time. Brexit is due to happen, according to the two-year deadline set by Article 50 of the eu treaty, on March 29th 2019. If no agreement is reached before then, Britain could leave without a deal. A majority of mps think this would be a catastrophically bad outcome. If Mrs May can persuade them that the choice is her deal or no deal, she might win a few more over. She can also point to the threat that Brexit chaos could produce a Labour government led by the far-left Jeremy Corbyn as another reason for Tory mps to back her deal.

Yet none of this looks likely to work. Although the risk of a no-deal Brexit is rising, moderate mps on both sides believe a way could be found of preventing it. And far from this being the only alternative to Mrs May’s deal, many prefer another option that she cited several times this week: no Brexit. That the European Court of Justice (ecj) chose this week to confirm a preliminary ruling that Britain can unilaterally withdraw its Article 50 request at any time shows that there is another way out.

Although time is tight, the prime minister knows she may need more than one go at getting her deal through. The position of Labour will be important. Yet Mrs May’s efforts to lure a few pro-European Labour mps to back her deal have not worked. Mr Corbyn wants to defeat it in hopes of securing a general election. He is under pressure from his mps to table a motion of no confidence in the government to help bring this about. But Mrs May would probably win, just as she won the party confidence vote this week, because neither Tory mps nor her Northern Irish Democratic Unionist allies, for all that they hate her Brexit deal, want an early election.

The absence of obvious alternatives explains growing talk in Westminster about putting the Brexit decision back to the people in a fresh referendum. This idea is favoured, naturally, by those hoping for no Brexit. But some mps have also begun to suggest a referendum as the only way to break the parliamentary gridlock. Indeed, a few Tories argue that Mrs May herself should resort to a referendum, giving voters a choice between her deal, as the best form of Brexit now available, and cancelling Brexit altogether. Holding such a referendum would require an extension of the Article 50 deadline, but the eu is likely to agree to this. Mrs May might even win a popular vote for her deal.

The truth is that there are few good places for her to go on Brexit. She was foolish to lay down the red lines of leaving the single market and customs union, ending free movement of people and escaping the ecj. The Irish border was always going to make it hard to break fully with eu rules. Moreover, business was always going to press for the maximum continuity possible, especially of supply chains that are spread right across the eu.

Mrs May is now in the position of selling a deal that shifts away from her red lines in order to make necessary trade-o s. But, as became clear in the 2017 election and again this week, she is a rotten saleswoman. She may have just seen o one attempt to get rid of her. But her days at the top are clearly numbered. 7

Suffrage in Sark

Feudal feuds

S A R K

Residents of a crown dependency are torn between feudalism and democracy

“Things tend to move slowly around here,” explains one resident of Sark, a tiny British crown dependency o the

coast of Normandy. The tra c trundling to the island’s polling station on December 12th, the day of its general election, confirms his observation. Cars are banned on Sark, so most voters arrive by bicycle or on foot. A few chug in on tractors. But the poll is nevertheless a sign of change: until 2008 Sark was governed by a feudal constitution that had remained largely untouched since

Riding into battle

The Economist December 15th 2018

the island was colonised in1565.

The arrival of democracy has quickened pulses. Previously, the island was led by the seigneur, who leased it from the crown for the princely sum of £1.79 ($2.26) a year. His rank entitled him to an 8% slice of all property transactions, as well as other perks including the sole right to keep an unspayed bitch. Forty hereditary landowners dominated the Chief Pleas, the island’s parliament. Now, however, elected commoners sit on its benches and the seigneur receives an annual stipend of £28,000.

Yet many Sarkees feel nostalgic for feudalism. The landowners would thrash out laws among themselves and, if residents had concerns, they could pop round for a cup of tea, says one islander. In contrast, democracy involves a lot of paperwork. Gesturing to a table stacked with papers for the next meeting of the Chief Pleas, Paul Amorgie, a hotel manager, lists the issues Sark’s 18 unpaid parliamentarians must deal with, “from footpaths and dog shit to international legislation.”

Sark has struggled to attract candidates; the previous two elections went uncontested. Kay Char, a retired businesswoman, argues that the new system is less democratic than the old feudal one, since the parliament’s smaller size means it is more open to manipulation and its proceedings involve less debate. This week’s vote, however, saw plenty of candidates, and many young ones elected for the first time.

Campaigners for democracy included Sir Frederick and Sir David Barclay, billionaire twins who live in a castle on Brecqhou, a nearby islet under Sark’s jurisdiction. The brothers have hoovered up large chunks of Sark, buying three of the island’s six hotels and opening a string of businesses. After the inaugural elections failed to return most of their preferred candidates, a representative of the Barclays briefly suspended their businesses in Sark.

Opinion about the tycoons next door is split. Many believe they are trying to transform the island into their own personal fiefdom, citing attacks by the local paper, which is edited by one of their employees, against islanders who cross them. Others argue that the pair have brought investment and jobs to the island. “They have given Sark the little kick up the arse it needed,” says Mini McCusker, who works in one of the island’s pubs.

Some feudal quirks remain. An islander can take out an injunction by throwing his hat to the ground, taking a knee and reciting the Lord’s Prayer in Norman French, for instance. Christopher Beaumont, Sark’s newish seigneur, argues that the island’s democracy must be given time. “England’s road to democracy was a pretty bumpy ride which involved lots of people dying,” he points out. As ever, things are proceeding more gently in Sark. 7

Thirty months after the British voted to leave the European Union, the country’s cultural divisions are more entrenched than ever. Politicians may have promised to bring the country back together and metropolitan journalists may have made grand tours of Leave-voting Britain to find out what the natives were thinking. But the result of two years of hand-wringing has been to confirm the two sides’ low opinion of each other. Remainers continue to regard Leavers as stump-toothed xenophobes. Leave-voters still see

Remainers as hoity-toity snobs.

Yet even if Brexit has frozen thinking at home, it has unfrozen it abroad. Before Brexit a striking number of foreigners had a benign view of Britain. The British might seem a bit di cult at first— stand-o sh and addicted to odd things like monarchy and Mar- mite—but they were fundamentally sensible. They were pragmatic and trade-minded people: a nation of shopkeepers, in Napoleon’s phrase. They were conservative and sensible, not the sort to take leaps in the dark. For all the talk of “fog in the Channel, Europe isolated”, they were champions of global openness.

This view has been shattered by Brexit. Foreigners increasingly talk about Britain in the way they would talk about an admired relative who has gone stark raving bonkers. Whenever this columnist travels abroad he is besieged with questions: what is going on with the country I love? Whatever happened to its pragmatism and common sense? Are you deranged? These remarks reveal a profound sense of loss. It is not just that Europe is losing a close partner. It is that the world is losing a particular version of Britain. Brexit Britain is becoming less like its sensible self and more like the worst sort of foreign country—chaotic and headstrong.

The first thing foreigners focus on is the sheer chaos of it all. “Isle of madness” is one headline from Der Spiegel. “A Shakespearean tragedy” is another from La Tribune. There is some merriment over bizarre procedures, like the struggle this week between a Labour mp and various flunkeys in tights over the parliamentary mace. But there is also genuine worry that chaos will lead to catastrophe, with Britain crashing out of the eu without a deal.

The second thing is the amateurism. Britain was thought to have a Rolls-Royce government. This reputation was so solid that the eu’s Brexit negotiators initially wondered if the incompetence

of their British counterparts was a clever ruse to lull foreigners into a false sense of security. No longer: it turns out that the RollsRoyce is more of a Morris Minor. European politicians puzzle over how a fellow member of their tribe could begin the Brexit talks without a plan, or appoint an addlepated popinjay such as David Davis to act as chief negotiator.

Then there is the eccentricity of so many of the players. Many foreign observers instinctively shared Walter Bagehot’s view that Britain was divided between an “e cient” branch, led by the government, and a “dignified” branch, represented by the monarch (even if in their view the operative “d” word was not “dignified” but “deranged”). Britain could a ord to be such an endearingly odd place, with its bloated royal family and tub-thumping tabloids, because it had a genius for putting sensible people in charge of the things that mattered. Today the general view abroad is that this formula has malfunctioned. The circus acts and charlatans have taken over, in the form of Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, and the sensible people have been locked up in the Tower of London.

Britain is hardly alone in its problems. America is paralysed, France is in flames and even sensible Sweden cannot form a government. Britain also continues to enjoy some of the greatest reserves of soft power in the world. Yet this only underlines the tragedy of Brexit. Britain is missing a golden opportunity to rally the West behind a liberal vision of the future that sees the eu as a building block of a free-trading world order, rather than as a postnational state. The northern Europeans, Britain’s closest allies in the eu, are particularly worried about Brexit, on the grounds that it will strengthen the Franco-German axis and shift the balance of power to southern Europe. Polls suggest that Brexit is already sapping Britain’s soft power. The country’s problems are unleashing an unpleasant strain of Anglophobia. A German comedian, Dietmar Wischmeyer, demands that, rather than waiting for the British to get their act together, the eu should simply “throw them out” because they are “the purulent appendix of the continent”.

Britain hasn’t even succeeded in turning itself into the leader of the opposition to Europe’s technocratic elite. In the aftermath of the referendum some conservatives in Europe hailed Brexit as a glorious example of British exceptionalism, showing that Britain alone had the courage to stand up for common sense and democracy in a Europe hijacked by federalist fanatics. This view was always weakened by the fact that it attracted some dubious supporters, such as Marine Le Pen, the French far-right leader, and Steve Bannon, an architect of Trumpism. It has now been completely sidelined by Britain’s habit of tripping over its own feet. The likes of Ms Le Pen have dropped their flirtation with “Frexit”. One of Brexit’s many ironies is that it has raised the reputation of the Brussels bureaucracy to heights not seen for decades.

Found in translation

The biggest worry is not that the world’s view of Britain is changing. It is that this darker view of Britain is more realistic than the previous one. The Brexit vote could almost have been designed to reveal long-festering problems with the country: an elite educational system that puts too much emphasis on confidence and blu and not enough on expertise; a political system that selects its leaders from a self-involved Oxbridge clique; a London-focused society that habitually ignores the worries of the vast mass of British people; and a Conservative Party that promotes so many pompous mediocrities. The reason Brexit is doing so much damage is not just that it is a mistake. It is a reckoning. 7

vk.com/id446425943

Middle East & Africa

The Economist December 15th 2018 35

ing been pressed to do so by Angola, South Africa and other African states that fear chaos if he lingers. But it would be foolish to expect voting day to be jolly. More than 100 rebel groups are at large. A jihadist militia, reportedly with links to Islamic State, is terrorising an eastern area that is also being ravaged by Ebola. Many Congolese will be too nervous to vote.

Few trust the electoral commission, widely believed to be in Mr Kabila’s pocket. Polling booths may well go up in flames. Two people were killed by police at an opposition rally in the capital on December 11th. Some105,000 electronic voting tablets from South Korea have been nicknamed machines à voler (stealing machines). Delivering them to 84,000 polling stations, many in remote areas accessible only by helicopter, boat or motorbike, will be tricky. If batteries go flat, it will be hard to recharge them. Only 1% of people in rural Congo have access to electricity.

“Voting takes a minute,” says Corneille Nangaa, the commission’s head. It may take rather longer. Jean-Pierre Bemba, an opposition leader and former warlord barred from standing, says it will take an average of six minutes, partly because so many voters are unused to technology. If so, Congo’s 40m voters (in a population of maybe 82m) would need at least two days to cast their ballots. Mr Nangaa says voting must not exceed 24 hours.

If the election is too obviously flawed1

vk.com/id446425943

36 Middle East & Africa

2 and enough people in and outside Congo complain, it could be invalidated and put o yet again—leaving Mr Kabila in power. If not, the winner is likely to be Emmanuel Ramazani Shadary, Mr Kabila’s handpicked successor, a former interior minister. The Eu has just renewed sanctions against him for the part he played in suppressing protests in 2016 and 2017, so he will not be able to visit it. “Congo is as big as the European Union, so Shadary will have so many provinces to cover,” says Mr Kabila breezily. “I don’t think he will miss Europe.”

Mr Shadary faces a weak opposition. Two of his most serious rivals, Mr Bemba and Moïse Katumbi, a former governor, were prevented from running. The rest of the opposition has splintered. In a shortlived moment of hope last month, seven opposition leaders said they had chosen a single candidate, but within a day two of them peeled o to form a rival coalition.

Mr Kabila says he will keep himself busy spending time with his mother. He will also lend a hand to Mr Shadary (or any other winner). He may even try to run again for president next time around, as the constitution allows, perhaps having pulled Mr Shadary’s strings for five years. He is studiously vague about this: “2023 is way away.” At a summit in August he told leaders that he would not say goodbye but rather “à bientôt” (see you soon). Did this mean he plans to return? “I was paraphrasing a movie I have seen very often...when Arnold Schwarzenegger says ‘I’ll be back’. So don’t take lots of my jokes out of context.”

Mr Kabila has stayed in power by keeping friends and rivals weak. The army is often without ammunition, save for the presidential guard. Mr Kabila’s loyalists have been slotted into the constitutional court and electoral commission. Anyone who becomes too popular is in danger. Denis Mukwege, the winner of this year’s Nobel peace prize for treating victims of wartime rape, survived an assassination attempt in 2012. An army general with a big following was murdered in 2014.

Mr Kabila will want his successor to protect the wealth he has accrued. He and his family have interests in mines, banks, real estate, farms and airlines. Their companies have permits for diamond mining that extend along Congo’s southern border with Angola. His farm at Kingakati adjoins a game park teeming with imported gira es, rhino and lions.

“What happens when the lizard becomes the crocodile?” is a Congolese adage. Could Mr Shadary, once in o ce, bare his teeth at Mr Kabila? If Mr Shadary were to follow the example of Angola’s president, João Lourenço, he could tell the taxman to take a hard look at his predecessor’s family. However, lacking a base of his own, most notably in the army or security services, Mr Shadary is unlikely to do so. 7

vk.com/id446425943

The Economist December 15th 2018

South Sudan

War and fees

A D D I S A B A B A

Neighbours help launder the loot from South Sudan’s war

“Iam not a rich man,” pleaded Paul Malong, the ex-chief of South Sudan’s army, in an interview on Kenyan television. Shaking his head, he denied having plundered state co ers or being responsible for war crimes committed by his troops.

“I am just a family man,” he explained. Really? The un Security Council says he

is implicated in the torture, abductions, rape and mass killings by men under his command. The Sentry, a watchdog backed by George Clooney, an actor, says that Mr Malong owns at least two big houses in Uganda and a $2m mansion in a gated community in Nairobi.

Since South Sudan’s independence in 2011 its leaders have pillaged the country (see Books & arts section). Nearly $7bn has gone missing since 2012, reckons Kenya’s Institute of Economic A airs, a think-tank. Petrodollars vanish. Powerful wrongdoers are seldom punished.

Partly because the state is easy to plunder, big men fight for control of it. South Sudan’s conflict, which started five years ago on December 15th, has caused perhaps half a million deaths, mostly by aggravating hunger and disease. Neighbours have hosted peace talks, paid for by donors. But they have done little to stop the laundering of the loot.

Much of this has been parked in Kenya and Uganda. The Sentry claims that both Salva Kiir and Riek Machar, South Sudan’s president and vice-president, who were on opposing sides in the civil war, have expensive homes in Nairobi. Both deny it. The watchdog also claims that Mr Kiir is building a lakeside mansion in a resort town near Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia.

South Sudan is now more or less at peace, thanks to a power-sharing deal struck in September between Mr Kiir and Mr Machar. But corruption risks undermining the fragile calm.

The prospect of a new transitional government in May 2019 has already led to a rise in last-minute looting by those worried that they will soon lose power, says a source in Juba, the capital. A report by a un Panel of Experts raised concerns that oil firms were making large prepayments for oil that is yet to be produced. Although not necessarily corrupt, these deals are presumably concluded with those currently in power, rather than with those who will take over. “It looks like they were o shoring money very rapidly, ” says Klem Ryan, who

vk.com/id446425943

38 Middle East & Africa

Areas of control, November 2018

SAUDI ARABIA Source: Sana’a Centre for Strategic Studies

UAE-backed forces

DJIBOUTI

G u l f o f A d e n

2 stand in the way of a lasting peace.

They start with Hodeida, Yemen’s main port, which is controlled by the Houthis and has been under attack by forces aligned with the government. Fees collected from the port finance the Houthis, whose leaders have in the past said they would rather destroy it than lose it. Some believe a government victory in Hodeida would demoralise the rebels and increase the chance of peace. But fighting around the port risks exacerbating the humanitarian crisis. Mr Gri ths has tried to mitigate the su ering. Both sides say the un can play a role in running the port, and the Houthis now say they are willing to withdraw, but implementing any deal would be tough given the depth of distrust between the parties.

Fighting elsewhere shows how complicated the conflict has become. Pro-govern- ment forces control Taiz, Yemen’s thirdlargest city, which is besieged by the Houthis. But there has been fighting even within the pro-government ranks. Forces aligned with Islah, an Islamist party, have clashed with fighters backed by the uae, which is vehemently anti-Islamist. The uae, despite supporting the government, has also worked with forces that want independence for South Yemen, which was a separate state until 1990. Other areas neglected by the government are pushing for autonomy and a greater share of the country’s resources. It will be impossible to satisfy everyone. (Only the government and the Houthis were invited to Sweden.)

There are many who do not want peace. Powerful people on all sides are profiting from the conflict. In this e ort, at least, supposed adversaries are working together, says the Sana’a Centre for Strategic Studies, a think-tank. Anti-Houthi commanders inflate the size of their forces to receive extra arms from the coalition. These are then sold to the Houthis. The import of cheap fuel from Iran seems to benefit only bigwigs who oversee or approve shipments. By the time it gets to the local market, the price has been marked up. “With-

vk.com/id446425943

United States

The Economist December 15th 2018 39

signed by the president.

The First Step Act is a sentencing-re- form bill that repeals some of the harsher federal laws passed in the 1980s and 1990s. In 2010 Congress passed the Fair Sentencing Act, which among other things reduced the sentencing disparity between convictions for crack and powdered cocaine. The First Step Act would make that measure retroactive, allowing nearly 3,000 o enders imprisoned for crack-cocaine o ences to petition judges for early release.

It would also reduce the mandatoryminimum sentence for serious drug felonies from 20 to 15 years, and for conviction on a third drug-tra cking or violent felony from life to 25 years. Judges would have more discretion to sentence people with minor previous convictions to less than the mandatory minimum (at present they can exercise that discretion only for nonviolent drug o enders with no criminal history). According to an estimate from the Congressional Budget O ce, more than 2,000 people a year would be a ected by that “safety valve” expansion.

Prisoners would no longer be sent to facilities more than 500 miles from their homes, and pregnant prisoners would no longer be shackled. The bill allows some prisoners, though not those convicted of most violent crimes, to earn time o their sentences by participating in rehabilitative programmes, and it expands federal funding for job-training and educational programming in prisons. More elderly and ter-1

vk.com/id446425943

40 United States

Behind bars

United States, prisoners, by correctional facility

2 minally ill prisoners would be eligible for compassionate release. And all prisoners would be able to reduce their time in prison by up to 54 days per year of their sentence for good behaviour. The Brennan Centre, a think-tank and advocacy group, estimates the bill would result in the release around 5,000 prisoners and shorten sentences for roughly100,000 more.

Though welcome, this would only nibble at the prison population. Roughly 2.2m people are imprisoned in America. Less than 10% of them are in federal prisons, and federal prisoners are the only ones affected by the First Step Act’s reforms (see chart). Still, Inimai Chettiar of the Brennan Centre calls the bill “a good compromise”— the resigned view held by many advocates of criminal-justice reform. Given the rhetoric of Mr Trump and policies set by Messrs Sessions and Barr, it is probably as much as anyone could hope for from this administration. It may also encourage Democrats, particularly those eyeing a presidential run, to argue for bolder reforms.

Even this modest change has its critics. Jonathan Thompson, executive director of the National Sheri s’ Association, calls the bill “a giant social experiment,” and argues for “rational prison reform that doesn’t just let people out hoping they won’t recidivate.” Tom Cotton, a Republican senator from Arkansas who has previously said that America has “an under-incarceration problem,” blasted the First Step Act for allowing “early release for many categories of serious, violent criminals”.

Yet while carjackers and bank robbers would indeed be eligible for sentence reduction by completing job-training and educational programmes, Mr Cotton is conflating “early release” with “early transfer to pre-release custody”. The federal prison system does not just wash its hands of violent criminals who manage to chip away at their sentences; they are instead sent to halfway houses, home confinement with ankle-monitoring and other types of supervised, conditional release.

The bill’s opponents may find themselves shouting into the wind. A version of the First Step Act passed the Republicancontrolled House in May by 360 votes to 59, and may have as many as 75 supporters in the Senate. That will displease Mr Cotton, as it will leave a bitter taste in the mouths of reform advocates who wanted more. But that is the nature of compromise. 7

The White House

Going to the wall

W A S H I N GT O N , D C

Donald Trump’s administration is understa ed and under attack

Donald trump says he will shut down part of the federal government if Congress does not provide $5 billion for his border-wall by December 21st. He may be blu ng. Meanwhile the president is already cutting the federal workforce, albeit unintentionally. White House reshu es are usually stage-managed to suggest renewed purpose and vigour. Mr Trump’s latest redo suggests he is running short of competent people willing to work for him. On December 8 he said his chief of sta , John Kelly, would be out to pasture by the end of the month. The next day his intended replacement, Nick Ayers, a 36-year-old aide to Vice-President Mike Pence, said he would rather go home to Georgia than be Mr Trump’s third chief of sta . Several other mooted replacements for Mr Kelly, who has been serially undermined by Mr Trump and is said to be hardly speaking to him,

have also since ruled themselves out. They include Steve Mnuchin, the Trea-

sury Secretary; Robert Lighthizer, the trade representative; Mick Mulvaney, the president’s budget director; Rick Santorum, a former senator—and Randy Levine, president of the New York Yankees, who sounded startled to be included in the speculation, but wants to stay at the Yankees. Mr Trump maintains “a lot of friends of mine want it.” Indeed, he is said to be looking to ardent loyalists, including Newt Gingrich, a former Republican congressman; Matthew Whitaker, the acting attor- ney-general; and David Bossie, co-author

Lights, camera, inaction

The Economist December 15th 2018

of the book “Let Trump be Trump”.

Mr Trump has had more luck filling other important jobs. He has nominated a former attorney-general for George H.W. Bush, William Barr, to reprise the role. A spiky partisan, who has o ered criticisms of the special counsel, Robert Mueller, Mr Barr is a serious lawyer with a fair chance of winning Senate confirmation. Mr Trump’s pick to replace Nikki Haley as ambassador to the un, Heather Nauert, a former Fox News presenter who is currently the State Department’s spokeswoman, is less convincing. It suggests how highly he rates telegenic performance—and how lowly he rates the un.

The administration’s sta ng problems reflect how chaotically it has been run. Turnover in senior non-cabinet secretary roles stands at 62%, higher than that of Mr Trump’s six nearest predecessors. Several departments are undermanned, including the White House Counsel’s O ce, which will soon field subpoenas from a Demo- cratic-held House of Representatives.

Negotiations between Mr Trump and Democratic leaders over the threatened shutdown provided a teaser of what divided government may look like under Mr Trump. He invited Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, Democratic leaders in the Senate and House, to the White House to discuss the looming spending bill. He then tried to hijack the meeting by ushering in reporters to witness him claiming, falsely, that “tremendous amounts of wall have already been built” and challenging Mr Schumer and Ms Pelosi to pay for the rest.

Ms Pelosi, who unlike most Republicans is not cowed by Mr Trump, noted that the president’s party still has a majority in both chambers and so could fund the fortification tomorrow. And if it won’t support his wall, he can hardly expect Democrats to. The second half of Mr Trump’s term could be even bumpier than the first. 7