Last Tuesday Corey Lewandowski, Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, was challenged on television about a 10-year-old girl with Down’s syndrome who was separated from her mother at the Mexican border and put in a detention centre. As a Democratic strategist cited the case, Lewandowski mocked the girl’s plight, imitating the sound of a sad trombone. “Womp womp,” he said.

A few weeks ago, while looking for the family railcard, I found my mother’s first passport. It’s blue and hardbacked, with a lion and a unicorn perched on Latin and embossed in gold. The kind the Brexit types bang on about. The kind we will have when we get our country back. The ones that will be made in France.

They call it the “reachable” and the “teachable” moment: that brief window when a young person who has just been stabbed will be most receptive to a message about how to make changes in their life. Just as the most propitious time to talk to people about diet and exercise is when they’ve just had a heart attack, the best chance for this lesson is right after they turn up in hospital with a stab wound.

Last month, two German-born Premier League footballers of Turkish descent, Mesut Özil and Ilkay Gündoğan, posed for photos with the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, while he was in London. Gündoğan, who has both a German and a Turkish passport, signed his shirt: “To my president, with my respects.”

Back in January, German Chancellor Angela Merkel entertained the press corps with tales of a bizarre non-negotiation she’d conducted with British Prime Minister Theresa May. “Make me an offer,” May kept telling Merkel. To which Merkel would reply: “But you’re leaving—we don’t have to make you an offer. Come on, what do you want?” To which May would retort: “Make me an offer.”1

During the presidential election the Huffington Post’s US site carried the following editor’s note at the end of every story about the Republican nominee: “Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims – 1.6 billion members of an entire religion – from entering the US.”