, Columnist
Mitch McConnell Is Trump's Latter-Day Ed Koch
The president has never been good at cultivating allies. That's a problem -- if he wants to accomplish something.
Shouldn't these guys be friends?
Photographer: Mark Wilson/Getty ImagesIf we lived in a different world, the joke could begin in a familiar, guy-goes-into-a-bar way: "So the president walks into a convention center in Phoenix and …"
But this is the Trump era. Only slices of White House life are just comic. Much more of what the president serves up to American voters, legislators, policymakers and the rest of the world routinely smacks, at best, of the tragicomic.