Trump news: Hope Hicks accused of lying to Robert Mueller as president is blamed for Bush ‘heart attack’

President Trump has been relatively restrained on Twitter over the last week, maintaining an eerie silence over the weekend while he golfed with Kid Rock at Mar-a-Lago as William Barr poured over the Mueller report.

He appears to be somewhat chastened as a result of the negative reaction to his grotesque "spat" with the late war hero John McCain on both sides of the divide last week, when even senior Republicans balked at his poor taste and lack of respect.

Last night though, he was back retweeting Fox News with a vengeance.

For the love of god, change the channel Don.

This is nice - the US is officially embarrassed by Donald Trump.

Researchers writing in the journal Frontiers in Communication found there has been a 45 percent spike in Americans tweeting about their "embarrassment" since the 45th president took office.

Analysing tens of millions of tweets sent from US Twitter accounts between June 2015 and December 2017, data analysts found references to embarrassment and variants of the word are up from an average of 909 per million to 1,319 per million.

“Compared with the Obama administration, there was an increase in embarrassment since Trump was elected. Not only does it increase on average, you have very strong spikes in embarrassment too,” says Frieder Paulus, a social neuroscientist at Lubeck University in Germany, who carried out the study.

Incidents found to cause increases in use of the term included the second televised presidential debate on 10 October 2016 and Trump's refusal to shake Angela Merkel's hand on 18 March 2017.

The aforementioned Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is quickly becoming a the internet's favourite politician and yesterday won new admirers with a superbly impassioned speech before Congress on the need for radical action on climate change during a debate on her proposed "Green New Deal".

Here's Chris Baynes.

The late Barbara Bush blamed Donald Trump for her heart attack, according to a new book released next week.

Bush, who died in 2018 aged 92, told biographer Susan Page she blamed Trump’s attacks on her son Jeb, the former Florida governor and brother of 43rd president George "Dubya", during the 2016 campaign for the sudden decline in her health.

Republicans have enjoyed taunting House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff over the last few days. Don Jr was particularly relentless on Twitter and Kellyanne Conway has called for his sacking.

Here's the president's new nickname. Bear in mind the first lady's primary agenda is ending bullying in schools.

Some timely campaigning from Trevor Noah and The Daily Show after the Trump administration called on TV news producers to drop guests who had speculated on collusion with Russian, attacking their credibility.

Here's a reminder of that story from yesterday.

This scene from the Senate floor yesterday was beyond ludicrous.

As Anderson Cooper says: "That actually happened in our government... on Capitol Hill..."

Very decent of him.

Deutsche Bank has been cooperating with the House Financial Services Committee’s investigation into Donald Trump’s finances, according to the top Democrat leading the probe.

Chairwoman Maxine Waters confirmed the bank was now providing it’s records of the president’s finances, after previously rebutting Democrats throughout 2017 and 2018. 

The bank previously declined to cooperate with Democrats on the committee before they assumed majority power after sweeping the House in the 2018 midterm elections. 

Nancy Pelosi just revealed the Democratic Party will introduce legislation that effectively keeps America’s placement in the Paris Climate Accord, after Donald Trump previously announced a withdrawal from the agreement.

“Democrats are introducing legislation to keep America in the Paris Agreement & force the Trump Admin to take real action to curb carbon emissions,” the House speaker wrote in a tweet.