Anthony Zurcher

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On Friday Donald Trump jetted off to his resort golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, for a 17-day vacation.

The White House has been quick to note that this is a "working" vacation. The president won't be leaving the duties of office totally behind.

It's fair to say, however, that Mr Trump will spend more than a little bit of time on the fairways. The White House is coy about how much the president has played golf so far during his time in office, but given that he's visited his golf properties at least 43 times so far, he almost certainly has teed up more at this point in his administration than any past president.

So while he's lining up his shots over the next two weeks, will memories of his past six months in office break his concentration? Will an ill-timed twinge of concern turn what would have been a solid drive into a wayward slice or cause a sure-thing birdie putt to lip out of the hole?

How many of his apparently unlimited supply of mulligans will he have to use to soothe a troubled mind?

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Deconstructing a Donald Trump verbatim transcript has become the hottest new pastime in Washington, DC.

Just days after being treated to a veritable treasure trove of strange presidential assertions and non sequiturs in a previously unreleased Wall Street Journal interview, the public has been offered a blast from the (recent) past in leaked records of Mr Trump's phone conversations with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.

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Hollywood script-writers couldn't have staged it any better.

At roughly 1:30 on Friday morning, John McCain approached the dais on the floor of the Senate. Votes on the latest Republican healthcare reform plan had mostly been recorded, and it was clear that the Arizona senator would be the difference between success and failure.

Donald Trump apparently subscribes to the Bill Lumbergh school of management.

In the film Office Space, Lumbergh was the obnoxious boss who, rather than fire a troublesome employee, made life increasingly uncomfortable for him in the hopes that he would quit on his own.

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Buried in the middle of the wide-ranging interview Donald Trump granted the New York Times on Wednesday was an interesting tidbit. What, exactly, did the US president and Vladimir Putin discuss when they exchanged "pleasantries" during a dinner at the recently concluded G20 summit?

The subject, Mr Trump said, was "adoption".

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In the end the death blow to the latest iteration of Obamacare repeal came from the right flank.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was always going to have to walk a fine line in his effort to keep both moderates and hardcore conservatives in the party on board with his healthcare reform proposal.

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Now that Hurricane Junior has blown through Washington, special counsel Robert Mueller - charged with investigating possible ties between Russia and the Trump presidential campaign - faces the task of sifting through the debris.

According to CNN, the former FBI director and his team of crack investigators were caught somewhat flat-footed by the recent email revelations. They were believed to have been focusing their attention on former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, son-in-law Jared Kushner and former campaign chair Paul Manafort, among others.

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The word "explosive" doesn't do justice to the details of the emails Donald Trump Jr tweeted out on Tuesday morning.

Calamitous, perhaps? Seismic? Twitterdämmerung?

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Call it a journalistic triple punch.

The New York Times on Friday revealed that Donald Trump Jr, his brother-in-law Jared Kushner and then-campaign chair Paul Manafort had a previously undisclosed meeting with an influential Russian lawyer in Trump Tower during the heat of the 2016 presidential campaign.

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The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee - the group that will help organise what the party hopes will be a successful push to take control of US House of Representatives in mid-term US elections next year - recently tested out some new bumper-sticker slogans.

It did not go well.