Hurricane Nunes is the latest weather system to fill the radar screen. It takes its name from Congressman Devin Nunes, a Republican from California and chair of the House Intelligence Committee. Over the first year of the Trump administration, Nunes has repeatedly made himself a useful arms-length proxy for the White House. Last March he cast some young White House national security staffers who complained about the “unmasking” of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn as being in the mold of Edward Snowden. His other services to the Republican Party include leading the fruitless two-year Benghazi investigation and repeatedly characterizing proponents of environmental regulation and universal health care as communists. In a Monday morning tweet, Trump called him “a man of tremendous courage and grit . . . a Great American hero.”

Most of the time, Donald speaks with a false intimacy, anchoring his claim to truth in the implicit, casual acknowledgement that all his past statements were maneuvering, necessary lies, prologue, so that now, finally, he can tell it to you straight. The words “win” and “war,” however, are Donald’s special words, spoken with some awareness of their meaning.