Last days of Agent Orange?

In the interests of American/Kiwi relations, perhaps now would be a good time for Opposition leader Simon Bridges to extend a simpatico paw to President Donald Trump to say, ‘‘I know how you feel bro’.’’ Just kidding. While Bridges bumbles round trying to discover the leak in his own party, Trump is on a witch-hunt post the publication of a New York Times Op-Ed written by an anonymous leaker from the Capitol Hill ‘‘resistance’’.

Possibly penned by a senior member, or members, of the Trump administration desperate to save the country from the worst impulses of an amoral president, a flurry of statements denying any fingerprint has emerged from the head honchos of the Trump team.

Isolated and deeply paranoid in the White House, the president will no doubt have mentally created his own version of that infamous pack of Most Wanted playing cards devised by the US military after the invasion of Iraq.

So who’s the culprit/s? Top of the heap and A Number Ones are the much maligned AttorneyGeneral Jeff Sessions aka ‘‘The Dumb Southerner’’, and Vice-President Mike Pence. Or could it have been masterminded from the grave of the late, but still very much present, Senator John McCain, who might as well have been buried in an open casket wearing a resistance beret.

McCain’s death and funeral were a call to arms for the GOP (Grand Old Party).

The tortured war hero who Trump tried to paint as a captured coward had become an almost Christlike figure. McCain’s not-over-my-dead body directive that Trump was, under no circumstances, to attend his state funeral may have given the GOP the gumption to start cutting their unconventional and erratic leader adrift.

After all, Trump is not a proper Republican and, ‘‘if it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly’’ – before mid-terms in November that is.

If Trump decides to slope off and resign after being offered the carrot of immunity, then the Republicans still have a chance of winning the mid-terms, and keep control of the Congress and Senate, and take advantage of two recent Supreme Court appointees.

But if Trump is too bloody-minded and stoopid to realise he has to hit the eject button now, or risk spending the rest of his term as a lame duck president under threat of imminent impeachment, then the Democrats will have the wind at their backs.

McCain’s glorious state funeral legacy, and a worrying and undermining Op-Ed, are only two of Trump’s worries. The launch of acclaimed journalist Bob Woodward’s book Fear: Trump in the White House, exposing the dazzling dysfunction in the Crazy House of a sitting president, cannot be breezily dismissed as fake news or the sour scribblings of a sacked apprentice.

The corporate giant Nike’s major endorsement of Colin Kaepernick, the first NFL player to kneel during the national anthem to highlight racial injustice, further undermines Trump and his base leanings. The economy may be booming but when a major corporate decides to take up and champion a sacrificial sporting hero who is Trump’s sworn enemy, more big business looking for a right-sideof-history branding may well follow.

Tired of Trump’s non-stop dramas, scandals and daffy deflections, the world may yawn and think this is just chaotic business as usual. But surely we must be watching the last days of Agent Orange. Soon the green pastures of his beloved happy place, the golf course, may well be the only domain where The Donald gets to take a swing and play his crazy curve-ball shots.