United States

IN 1922 Donald Trump’s father, Fred, left high school at 16 to work for a carpenter. He was a “very smart guy” who could “add five columns of numbers in his head”. Construction came naturally to him, too. By 1971 he had amassed a multi-million-dollar fortune.

THE king, wrote Charles de Marillac, the French ambassador to the court of Henry VIII, was so fickle he rendered even his word “as softened wax [that] can be altered to any form”. He was so suspicious he did “not trust a single man”.

ON FEBRUARY 13th, Donald Trump signed his first major piece of legislation—“a big signing” as he put it. The law repealed a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regulation that oil and mining companies should disclose their payments to foreign governments.

VIRGINIA prides itself on being a birthplace of enduring democratic traditions. It was here that America made its first foray into representative government: in 1619, the House of Burgesses was created to govern the Virginia colony in partnership with a governor appointed by the British crown.

DURING his presidential campaign, Donald Trump vowed to construct a wall along America’s southern border with Mexico to curtail illegal immigration. He often gave one caveat: this “big, beautiful wall” would have a “big, beautiful door” for those entering the country lawfully.

“WE ARE proud of our Muslim community in Michigan,” says Rick Snyder, the state’s Republican governor, sitting in his office in the grandiose Cadillac Place, the former headquarters of General Motors.

“DOES HoJo still serve fried clams?” asked a Howard Johnson’s patron, using the nickname for the restaurant chain. He recently ate there for the first time in nearly 40 years. Back then, “HoJo” could be found on almost every highway and byway and felt as ubiquitous as McDonald’s or Starbucks are today.

THE mascot at César E. Chávez High School in Houston, Texas, is the lobo, Spanish for wolf. Most of the pupils are Latino. The school is not the traditional pipeline for black colleges, yet last week Texas Southern University (TSU), a historically black university, visited the place to pitch the benefits of its institution.

FOR too long American workers have been ignored, President Donald Trump declared on February 13th, as he promised to “tweak” trade relations with Canada and to transform an “extremely unfair” relationship with Mexico.

SOME resignations from high office are like the cauterising of a wound: brutal but decisive. Others resemble a battlefield amputation: a painful loss which cannot dispel the sinister whiff of some deeper infection.

ILLINOIS was a mess when Bruce Rauner took over as the first Republican governor in many years in January 2015. This large Midwestern state, with a population of 13m, had the most underfunded retirement system of any state and the largest pension burden relative to state revenue.

BARACK OBAMA was bad for satirists, even if few seemed to mind. Moderate, upstanding and cool, the first black president gave close observers of human ridiculousness little to work with. Most gave up and welcomed him admiringly onto their shows.

“IMAGINE,” says Glenn Drummond, gesturing at the farmland beyond the window of his pick-up truck, “this was all pine forest.” Early 19th-century travellers on this part of the old federal road in Macon County, Alabama, “didn’t know what was behind the next tree.” There were bears, rattlesnakes and defiant Native Americans, on whose tra...

AMERICA, along with its new president, is getting a crash course in the role of the federal judiciary.