Donald Trump and the Democrats: is this the start of a beautiful relationship?

Early on Sunday morning, Donald Trump re-tweeted a spliced-together video of him hitting a golf ball which appears to strike Hillary Clinton on the back of her head as she is boarding a plane, causing her to fall over. Disgusting, said his opponents. Get a sense of humour, said his supporters. And so began another bizarre week of his most bizarre Presidency.

On Tuesday he stood before the United Nations General Assembly and an audience braced for some of the usual Trumpy taboo-busting. He didn’t disappoint, gamely speaking up for nations pursuing their own self-interest and lashing into Iran and the “depraved regime” of North Korea. “No nation on Earth has an interest in seeing this band of criminals arm itself with nuclear weapons and missiles,” he said. “The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea. Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime.”

By Wednesday he was back to Washington and the mud-wrestle of trying to dismantle President Obama’s healthcare reforms. Here, he has both Democrats and Republicans off-balance, scrambling to understand his motives.

For most of the summer he taunted the Republican leaders in Congress for failing to repeal Obamacare. Then, last week, he humiliated them by inviting the two most senior Democrats in Congress, Senator Chuck Schumer and Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, for Chinese food at the White House. There, they hashed out a deal to protect the “dreamers” — the young illegal immigrants brought to the US by their parents.

Trump recently ended President Obama’s five-year-old executive order protecting these young immigrants, and put them under threat of deportation. He hoped that by reversing course and allowing them to stay, he might win Democratic support for his long-coveted wall along the Mexican border.

Pelosi and Schumer said Trump had agreed to let the “dreamers” stay, no walls attached. But the next day, Trump’s contradictory and obscure tweets left Washington confused about what had been agreed. It is still unclear.

Republicans who hoped Trump would be tough on immigrants were furious that he was colluding with Democrats. And Democrats were livid with their leaders for consorting with their political Anti-Christ.

Schumer was overheard on the Senate floor saying he persuaded Trump by telling him that the way to avoid being boxed in by his own party was to work with the opposition: “You’re much better off if you can sometimes step right and sometimes step left.”

It was a crafty pitch to Trump’s vanity, his pride in his skill as a negotiator. It is the subject of his most famous book, The Art of the Deal.

If you believe Trump is indeed a supreme negotiator, then all of these fakes and shimmies are mere prelude, the disorienting warm-up to getting what he wants. If not, then you might easily think him politically demented.

The conservative Wall Street Journal wrote following the the deal/no-deal on immigrants: “Did this mark the arrival of a new, compassionate, capable Donald Trump? Sadly, probably not. Mr Trump’s actions are rarely underpinned by principles, or a vision of who we are as a nation. Even on matters of near-perfect moral clarity, he is often transactional and capricious. If he does the right thing, there must be an angle.”

The conservative writer and ardent Never-Trumper William Kristol issued a similar warning: “To liberals, centrists and conservatives, work for good policies during Trump’s presidency — never lose sight of his unfitness to be President.”

This week Trump and the Democrats were at it again, as momentum built for yet another Republican effort to reverse Obamacare. This time the Republicans are trying to jam through a piece of quickie legislation before the end of September. Their law would gut many of Obama’s reforms and push responsibility for managing healthcare away from Washington back to the states, which have wildly differing views on how to fund it.

Due to an arcane Congressional rule, they can pass it in the Senate with a simple 51- vote majority before the end of the month but will have to get 60 votes after October 1. The 60-vote bar would require Democratic support, which will never happen.

The online news site, Vox, called various Republican Senators to explain why they needed to replace Obamacare in such a hurry. The best Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas could come up with was this: “Look, we’re in the back seat of a convertible being driven by Thelma and Louise, and we’re headed toward the canyon. So we have to get out of the car, and you have to have a car to get into, and this is the only car there is.”

This is not a view shared by the millions of Americans who have health insurance courtesy of Obamacare.

It is hard to think that Trump has only been in office for nine months. So much has changed. The pressure of the investigation into alleged collusion between the Russian government and Trump’s campaign has everyone in the White House lawyered up and on edge. The walking dead of his administration haunt the political and media netherworld.

Sean Spicer, his former Press Secretary, has been popping up on late-night talk shows and even at the Emmys at the weekend, trying to jolly away his dismal few months at the White House. But no television network, reportedly, wants to hire him as a pundit because he blew his reputation telling lies for Mr Trump.

Ivanka Trump has recorded an interview with Dr Oz, a daytime TV doctor, in which she is said to describe her role as to “inform, advise and then ultimately execute” her father’s ideas but not to “moderate” him. Daytime TV is hardly the big platform originally envisaged for her.

But she is doing better than her husband, Jared Kushner, who has vanished from view since the arrival of the former Marine general John Kelly as Trump’s chief of staff. Kelly is rumoured to have a low opinion of Kushner’s lack of experience and his incessant leaking to the press.

Rex Tillerson, Trump’s Secretary of State, left his imperial position as chief executive of Exxon to join the administration but he now cuts an emasculated figure, scuttling along the fringes of this week’s UN meetings.

Doing a little better is Trump’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon. He is back running his conservative media empire, Breitbart News, and scheming with the hedge fund billionaire and Trump backer Robert Mercer to support aggressively Trumpy candidates against mainstream Republicans in state and national elections. They want to make the Republican Party Trump’s own.

There are many around Trump who believe all the nonsense of the past few months will be forgotten and forgiven if he can do one thing: dramatically cut taxes.

The original plan was to fund these tax cuts by repealing Obamacare. But unless that happens this month, he is going to have to get creative. That task will fall to his Treasury Secretary, Steve Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs banker and film producer who up to now has lurked in Washington’s shadows. But his time in the spotlight, and the President’s next Twitter target if he fails, is coming.