John Bolton turned up on Fox about an hour before I did last night, and professed to be surprised by the sudden Tweeting of his appointment as US National Security Advisor. The Beltway insiders allege that it was rushed out to distract from Trump’s cave-in on the 2,232-page Schumer-Pelosi Early-Christmas-For-Big-Bloated-Budget-Busting-Bureaucracy Bill that not a single person on this planet has actually read. Oh, and don’t give me that “increased funding for our troops” straw-clutching: every sentient creature from the earthworm up knows that the extra dough’s just going to go to diversity programs and gender reassignment surgery as opposed to anything that might increase the odds of actually winning the next 17-year war.

At this stage the Gullible Old Pussies of the Republican Party are pretty much openly advertising that giving them control of the House, the Senate and the White House is the equivalent of giving Yosemite Sam three sticks of dynamite to shove down his pants – with the additional nicety that this time round they’re actively flipping the finger at their president’s bedrock issue. I reiterate the point I first made on the radio a year ago: On January 20th 2017 Trump should have taken all those showboating showbiz no-shows at face value and held a businesslike inauguration at the southern border while laying the first brick. The brick remains unlaid – not because Vicente Fox refuses to “pay for Trump’s f**kin’ wall” but because Paul Ryan does.

As for the Bolton distraction, it seems to be working. I’ve given up trying to discern ideological themes in Trump’s firings and hirings: as far as I can tell, it’s mostly about people he likes to hang out with. In the case of John Bolton, I first met the new National Security Advisor a decade and a half or so back, in a roomful of European prime ministers and foreign ministers. He delivered a line that stunned the joint:

International law does not trump the US Constitution.

I was standing next to the Finnish Prime Minister, Paavo Lipponen, who had a genuinely puzzled looked on his face and eventually inquired of me: “He is making a joke, no?”

No. Since then, I’ve interviewed him at Fox a couple of times and passed him in the green room on many others. Once, when I was guest-hosting, he talked very amusingly about “the European Unionization of the world”, and I got a laugh out of him with a couple of Herman van Rompuy cracks. Off-air on on another occasion, during a break in “Fox & Friends” and after the Perth Declaration on proposed changes to the Succession to the Throne in Commonwealth realms, he asked me, seriously, what the governments of Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands made of the end of male primogeniture: it surprised me – not because he was interested in the topic so much as that most commentators would be so entirely unaware of the topic as to not even know they were entirely uninterested in it.