A forthcoming Peacock documentary is expected to explore a controversial theory suggesting OJ Simpson may not have acted alone in the 1994 killings of his former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman. The theory centers on allegations that a possible accomplice had connections to organized crime.

Simpson was cleared of criminal murder charges in October 1995. Sixteen months later, however, a civil jury found him liable for the wrongful deaths of Brown and Goldman.

Joseph “Joey” Ippolito Jr., a former convict and restaurateur who died in 2006, was not a focus of either trial. But after years of speculation and reports linking his name to the case, the new documentary reportedly examines whether he could have played a role in the Los Angeles murders.

The Daily Mail said it reviewed unauthorized footage leaked without approval from Peacock, parent company NBC, or documentary producer Ample Entertainment. The clips include interviews with two of Ippolito’s brothers. A source familiar with the production told the publication that the documentary examines at length the possibility that Ippolito may have carried out the killings alongside Simpson.

The program also features Charles “Charlie” Ehrlich, a longtime Simpson associate. In one of the clips reviewed by the Daily Mail, Ehrlich appears to reject any suggestion that he was involved.

Ehrlich, 72, confirmed to the Daily Mail that he participated in the Peacock documentary before ending the conversation. During a later call, when asked whether he had any role in the deaths of Brown or Goldman, he replied: “No comment.”

Questions surrounding Ehrlich’s possible connection to the June 1994 stabbings outside Brown’s Los Angeles condominium are not new. He previously sued the Miami New Times for defamation over its reporting on a film script that, Ehrlich contended, wrongly implied he had been involved in the murders.

That defamation lawsuit survived a summary judgement motion and was headed to trial before the Miami New Times settled with Ehrlich in 2025. His attorney, Robert J Hantman, told the Daily Mail that the settlement was close to $100,000. An attorney for the Miami New Times did not respond to a request for comment.

Ehrlich has other ties to Simpson, who continued to deny any involvement in the Brown-Goldman murders until his death from cancer at age 76 in 2024. Ehrlich, too, told US Magazine in 2024 he ‘never believed’ his friend Simpson ‘was involved’ in the killings.

A convicted former cocaine trafficker and longtime Florida strip club manager, Ehrlich was in the Las Vegas hotel room where Simpson stole sports memorabilia at gunpoint in 2007. Simpson was later convicted on 12 counts and served nine years in a Nevada prison, while Ehrlich was sentenced to probation after pleading down to lesser charges.

Meanwhile, Ippolito was close with AC Cowlings, the lifelong friend and former teammate of Simpson. It was Cowlings who led LAPD on a low-speed chase with Simpson in the back seat of a white Ford Bronco on June 17, 1994 before Simpson ultimately surrendered at his Brentwood mansion.

As confirmed by Cowlings’ attorney to the Boston Herald in August 1994, Ippolito once helped Cowlings kick a freebase cocaine habit and in return, Cowlings asked a federal judge to release Ippolito on bail as he awaited trial on drug charges in 1993.

Later, after being sentenced to 10 years behind bars, Ippolito walked away from a minimum-security style prison camp on a military base in Pensacola, Florida on May 6, 1994, according to a Boston Herald report at the time.

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The Herald also reported that the FBI and federal prosecutors had telephone records showing calls from Ippolito’s Santa Monica restaurant to Simpson’s Brentwood estate.

As for Ippolito’s alleged mafia connections, federal law enforcement officials claimed he was a member of the DeCavalcante crime family of New Jersey with ties to New York’s Lucchese family.

Spokespeople for both NBC and Ample Entertainment declined to comment to the Daily Mail for this story.

Another documentary, ‘O.J. Unseen: Exploitation of Evil,’ premiered on ID and HBO Max this week. It includes a clip from Simpson’s unaired hidden-camera prank show in which producers tried – and failed – to catch him confessing on tape.

Simpson authored a hypothetical account of the 1994 murders with the help of ghostwriter Pablo Fenjves in 2007 titled: ‘If I Did It.’

In the hypothetical description offered by Simpson, he intended to go to ‘scare the s*** out of’ Nicole by confronting her at her condominium with an accomplice named ‘Charlie’ on June 12, 1994.

But rather than being based on Ehrlich, this ‘Charlie’ was simply a fictitious friend who was bestowed the name by Fenjves, the ghostwriter has since explained. 

There have long been rumors that Simpson may have committed the 1994 murders with one or two accomplices. 

Simpson defense attorney Johnnie Cochran posited a theory during the murder trial that Brown and Goldman may have been killed by drug dealers looking for her friend, Faye Resnick, who was battling a cocaine problem.

However, at least one member of Brown’s family remains skeptical that Simpson had an accomplice.

‘I’ve heard about the conspiracy theory for years,’ Brown’s sister told the Daily Mail by email. ‘To me it’s a bunch of BS.’

An exact date for Peacock’s documentary has not been revealed, but it is expected to run by the end of 2026.

A Wendy’s manager in Tennessee was fired after allegedly restraining a neurodivergent employee to kitchen equipment because she did not want to “babysit” the worker while handling her other responsibilities.

The unidentified employee was reportedly held in place by a makeshift restraint fashioned from garbage bags and attached to a metal counter at a Wendy’s restaurant in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, according to video obtained by WSMV.

“I actually felt sad for him,” co-worker Nicholus Murphy, who recorded the footage, told the outlet. “I actually wanted to cry.”

Michiko Burton, a manager at the fast-food restaurant, acknowledged tying up the employee but offered conflicting explanations for what happened.

She had previously told other staff members that she did it to keep the worker out of the way.

“She said that she didn’t want to babysit him, and that she needed him to ‘stay put’ so she could do whatever she was doing in the back,” Murphy said.

Burton, who was later fired over the incident, told police it was a “TikTok trend” that was “intended as a joke” and claimed the worker was “okay” with participating.

“If there was a TikTok trend, then where’s the TikTok?” Murphy asked the outlet.

After Murphy shared the video with supervisors, franchise officials held a meeting with restaurant staff.

“Whether it be a cruel joke or intended, I don’t care,” an area manager said during the staff meeting, which Murphy recorded.

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“Whatever went on a couple of Sundays ago is unacceptable,” the higher-up added. “Flat out. With anybody, it’s unacceptable.”

Burton was not charged or arrested after the worker said he was not upset or injured from being tied up.

“It’s unacceptable for anybody,” the area manager told workers. “That is why Michi is not here anymore. Michi is no longer a manager for us.”

About 20 percent of the world’s population is neurodivergent, with the designation being used as an umbrella term encompassing ADHD, autism, dyslexia and dyspraxia, among others, according to the Neurodiversity Directory.

“In the United States, an estimated 85% of autistic adults are unemployed, compared with 4.2% of the overall population,” the World Economic Forum found.

Any qualified neurodivergent employee is protected under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Police reopened the investigation and interviewed Murphy, the area manager and the employee who was tied up, looking for more information on the incident Friday, the outlet reported.

The independently owned location opened its doors in 2025.

Store officials condemned Burton’s act.

“The safety and well-being of our employees is our top priority, Wendy’s of Bowling Green told WSMV. “This behavior is inconsistent with our values and the standards we expect in our restaurants. Upon learning of the situation, it was promptly investigated and appropriate action was taken. We remain committed to maintaining a respectful workplace where all employees are treated with dignity and respect.”

Prince Harry’s summer effort to soften his public image — featuring an awkwardly matey podcast appearance with bearded former England rugby player and Traitors contestant Joe Marler, followed by “goat yoga” at a charity event — appears to have come to an abrupt end.

The campaign had already been strained by the confusion and competing briefings surrounding the Sussexes’ supposedly private UK visit in July, which included Harry seeing the King at Highgrove.

Now, after a remarkable week in which the Palace reportedly stressed that the Duke and Duchess should be regarded as “akin to private citizens with commercial and charitable interests,” rather than working royals, the earlier warmth has seemingly disappeared.

Within a day of Monday’s reported “guidance letter” from the King — sent through the Lord Chamberlain to senior figures in government, the military and the Lord Lieutenancies — Harry’s representatives issued their response.

Through his press operation, which includes a communications specialist in London and a wider team in California, the Duke was said to have reacted with unusually pointed criticism of the Palace.

“The duke is understood to have taken particular issue with the notion that the couple were to be treated as private citizens. If that were the case, it was claimed, such formal guidance would not be required.

“The Sussexes prefer the term ‘public figures’, and would have liked an acknowledgement that, on a personal level, they remained members of the Royal Family, despite no longer receiving public funding,” a Sussex source said.

A similar message emerged on Thursday, when a source close to the couple told People magazine, their preferred publication: “They are public figures. Members of the public know who they are. The idea that they can live a normal, ‘private’ life is sadly not realistic.”

Barely more than two weeks after returning home, Harry is already challenging the description of himself as a private citizen. That is despite the Duke and Meghan having said in 2020 that they wished to live as private citizens, and despite friends repeatedly maintaining that he hopes to keep a low profile in the months ahead.

Now those very same friends are briefing that Harry ‘always expected’ a row like this one to be the outcome.

After all, they say, he was briefed against by the Palace machine ‘for years’ when he and Meghan were living in the UK. They say he views this week’s developments as just yet more of the same.

‘He is not surprised,’ a friend tells me. ‘Remember, this is a couple who had briefing after briefing after briefing against them from parts of the establishment. They had really prepared themselves for this outcome before they came back. They were always expecting it.’

Yet wanting privacy, desiring to have the freedom of ‘private citizens’ – and then complaining when they are labelled as such by the Palace seems, at first, rather perplexing.

What then is Harry trying to achieve? Says another source, bluntly: ‘Look, they expect to be let back in. Harry expects they [the Royal Family] need him.

‘He and Meghan have nothing else going for them. They’ve burned every bridge in America.’

With that in mind, it’s worth noting that yesterday Harry announced his forthcoming activities – which were rather pointedly, one might say, described by his team as his ‘September public engagements’.

As for Meghan, she’s apparently eyeing the prospect of being invited to the 40th anniversary celebrations for the Phantom of the Opera in London on October 9.

This would send a bit of a message as Lord Lloyd-Webber and King Charles are close. As a former actress, a re-entry into British showbusiness would make sense for her.

You could certainly argue that building new bridges here is imperative for the couple given the decline of their American dream – their commercial deals have fallen away, Meghan’s As Ever brand doesn’t appear to be flying, and their attempts to make waves in Hollywood have led only to embarrassments.

To be told they are out of the royal fold, then, through this week’s Palace press release, has caused what appears to be an almighty tantrum from Harry’s side, who claim to have found fault with the timing of the release.

It seems the Sussexes feel they didn’t have enough time to ‘clarify’ some of the points made of behalf of the King.

You may think it takes some nerve, after the couple dropped so many vicious bombshells on the Royal Family in their television interview with Oprah, in Harry’s memoir Spare and in the Netflix documentary Harry & Meghan, to be annoyed about a lack of warning over what was effectively a re-statement of the terms of the Sandringham summit in 2020.

Nevertheless, they complain that they were caught ‘off guard’ – as well as being denied the chance to protest their royal status.

To demonstrate the ‘unfairness’ of it all, their representatives even went so far as to release the timings – to the minute – of when each email dropped. The letter was shared with them at 1.59pm. They say they wrote back at 2.19pm ‘in the hope’ the Sussexes could have ‘the chance to clarify one or two points’.

At that point, Harry was visiting Tower Bridge Studios in London and ‘could not be contacted’ until 3.09pm. At 3.11pm, they received confirmation it was too late to change anything as the missive already been sent to the media five minutes earlier.

As you might expect, this briefing of such minutiae, and in such bad grace, has only served to shred what remains of relations between the Palace communications team and the Sussexes.

Sources close to the Palace, who were ‘weary and wary’ before their return, have rather had their point made for them about the sheer impossibility of navigating a working relationship with the Sussexes.

The mood music is very much: ‘Will they never learn?’

From the Palace side, I’m told the intention on Monday had only been to ‘clarify’ that the Megxit deal as struck in 2020 still held, despite the new circumstance of the couple and their children Archie and Lilibet returning to the UK and enrolling the children in schools.

The letter confirmed Prince Harry and Meghan’s HRH titles remain ‘in abeyance’ and they were not to be treated as working royals, but as private citizens.

The question of their security, the letter notes, is down to the Home Office. If circumstances arise in which public funds might be called upon when they visit, organisers are to contact Buckingham Palace for guidance.

However, there’s no escaping the fact that what had seemed clear enough when the Queen drew the line in 2020 – and Harry and Meghan were going to live permanently in America – now looks simply confounding when they are in the UK.

Put simply, the Sandringham arrangement fails the ‘duck test’. (The duck test being that if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it’s a duck.)

Here, Harry (still fifth-in-line to the throne, lest we forget) and Meghan behave like royals and insist that they have royal status – but the King insists they don’t.

One observer says: ‘Harry and Meghan’s philanthropic activities are so close to the royal playbook. They go on “royal” tours abroad, they lay wreaths, they meet local consular staff, they make speeches which closely echo sentiments expressed by the King.

‘Now that they are back in Britain, can the public really be expected to remember that Harry is a member of the Royal Family, who is acting like a working royal, but isn’t? It feels like nonsense.’

A source close to the Sussexes believes this confusion is actually what the couple are counting on and forms part of the strategic thinking behind the return – which is, surely, a high-stakes tactic.

The source says: ‘Ultimately their PR is disastrous every time and I hear that the team are utterly miserable. It all looks awful.

‘The spinning is unbelievable – so sloppy and I cannot believe that they offered (off-the-record) quotes in response to the King’s letter.

‘What it shows is that they’re assuming the King would change his mind about sticking to the Sandringham summit rather than holding the line.’

As ever, the Sussexes are trying to ride two horses. As well as all the grumpiness and back-biting, friends of the couple are still keen to emphasise their ‘excitement’ over their new beginning.

They are about to make a start on house-hunting in earnest in the Cotswolds, and have been prioritising the first days at school for Archie, seven, and Lilibet, five.

They’ve not been spotted out and about, which is apparently a deliberate move. Home for now is a ‘cottage’ on the estate of a wealthy friend, about which I’m told: ‘You or I would call it a massive house but they call it a cottage.’

The Sussex friend adds: ‘I think they’re both feeling largely very positive and are really excited about the new chapter. They have minimal plans between now and Christmas and the aim is to be quiet.’

However, the anonymous briefings and public announcements this week tell a rather different story.

Those ‘September public engagements’ announced by Harry’s team today include the launch of the INSPIRE educational initiative and the Wellchild awards.

He has been patron of the charity for seriously ill children for 18 years. Before the main ceremony, he will host a private reception for the young recipients and their families, present the award for Inspirational Child and deliver a speech.

After his UK commitments, the Duke is scheduled to fly to New York on September 22 to attend the Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting.

There also remains a heavy focus on plans for the Invictus Games next year. It’s thought he was filming some material for sponsors at the Tower Bridge Studios this week.

Indeed, plans for the Games are at a crucial point, with Prince Harry and the team seeking further corporate sponsorship.

One of their major sponsors, Boeing, opted not to renew after the event in Vancouver in 2025. Another sponsor is Netflix, who recently downgraded Harry and Meghan’s deal to a ‘first look’ arrangement, and who dropped out of their commercial partnership with As Ever.

Some say that Harry needs to get around £20 million in sponsorship to ‘save’ the Games in the coming months.

That may account for the dismay after Ugandan military chief General Muhoozi Kainerugaba announced that the country, a member of the Commonwealth, was pulling out because of ‘that Harry-Meghan nonsense’.

He wrote on X: ‘In order not to be construed as being opposed to His Majesty King Charles III of the United Kingdom, whom we deeply revere, Uganda hereby withdraws from the Invictus Games.’

Harry subsequently let it be known he blamed the Lord Chamberlain’s letter for the withdrawal.

Palace sources, however, counter that the letter made very clear that if there was uncertainty over protocols to contact Buckingham Palace for advice.

They insist they would have responded to any query over the Games with the line that the King encourages any and all organisations and events which support wounded service personnel.

Questions remain over the Games in Birmingham, which have a budget of £45million, with the UK Government coming up with £26million of that. There will be around 400 competitors.

As for Meghan, apart from the potential Phantom of the Opera invitation next month, what lies next for the Duchess here?

Her ‘role’ in the new series of Guy Ritchie’s hit Netflix drama The Gentlemen – which her team briefed was one of the reasons why she was excited to return to Britain – seems to have been no more than a warm conversation and some wishful thinking on her part.

‘It was always a conversation,’ I’m told, as distinct from a negotiation or an actual deal.

Neither Harry nor Meghan are about to take up additional patronages – they’re ‘not in a hurry’ apparently – but friends think they might as time goes on. Harry is in dialogue with various veterans’ associations.

At the end of October, the Sussex family will return to California for half term week, and then batten down the hatches for another five weeks in the UK before they go back to America for a longer spell over Christmas.

Harry believes that by then a Home Office review will have changed his security status.

‘He thinks he is going to get some kind of increased security after the review,’ says his friend. That might, alone, allow this messy re-entry to count as a success rather than a humiliating mess.

But then, as one rather cynical associate from California put it: ‘They aren’t relevant unless they are causing trouble.’

More than 500,000 Russian troops have been killed in Ukraine since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, according to a senior British defense official.

Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, the UK’s Chief of the Defense Staff, said the deaths form part of an estimated 1.5 million Russian casualties during the war.

Britain’s assessment broadly aligns with casualty figures released by Ukraine’s military. Russian officials did not immediately comment.

Despite its larger military, Moscow has struggled to achieve major battlefield gains. Western officials and analysts say the pace of Russia’s advances has slowed markedly this year.

Knighton also said Russia has suffered “enormous” equipment losses, including more than 10,000 armored and protected vehicles, nearly 3,000 air defense and artillery systems, and more than 370 aircraft and helicopters.

He did not provide an assessment of Ukraine’s losses.

Neither Moscow nor Kyiv regularly publishes updates on battlefield casualties.

Russian drones target Kyiv gas stations, aiming to rattle civilians

Meanwhile, Russian drones struck roadside gas stations in Kyiv for a second consecutive day on Friday, widening an aerial campaign that Ukrainian officials say is intended to unsettle civilians.

The strikes hit two Ukrnafta gas stations. The prosecutor’s office said two people were killed and six others were wounded at one of the sites.

Russian attacks on urban gas stations have increased in recent months, particularly in eastern and southern regions close to the front line. Ukrainian officials describe them as part of a broader effort to disrupt daily life and erode public morale, alongside strikes on food distribution hubs that have at times left supermarket shelves in the capital bare.

“Russia is systematically attacking places where it knows people will be spending their time going about their daily lives, seeking to maximize casualties, spread fear, and put pressure on Ukrainian society,” Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said on X late Thursday.

Authorities have urged residents not to linger near gas stations and other exposed infrastructure during air raid alerts.

Ukraine is urgently trying to improve its air defenses as Russia’s invasion stretches into its fifth year, and on Thursday won pledges of more support from Canada.

Russian shopping mall strikes kill 5 in central Ukraine

Pavlohrad, a city in central Ukraine, observed an official day of mourning Friday for five residents killed near shopping malls in broad daylight by Russian drones the previous day.

The attack also wounded 67 people, Sybiha said on X.

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In the southern city of Zaporizhzhia, a 32-year-old woman and her 10-year-old son were wounded in an overnight Russian drone attack, Ukraine’s State Emergency Service said.

The drones struck a nine-story apartment block and a shopping mall, it said.

Efforts to put out the blazes were slowed by the constant threat of repeat strikes, forcing firefighters to stop working and take shelter, it added.

In Dnipro, a city in central Ukraine, a Russian daylight attack Friday wounded 12 people, according to local officials.

Russia says it stopped 777 Ukrainian drones

Ukraine, meanwhile, has extended its own long-range drone campaign deep into Russia, straining air defenses across its bigger neighbor’s vast territory.

On Thursday, its military reported hitting a refinery more than 1,800 miles away in Siberia as Kyiv tries to hurt Russia’s vital oil sector. Its strikes have caused fuel shortages in Russia, one of the world’s biggest energy producers.

Russia’s oil product exports hit record lows in August, and Moscow is importing fuel from South Korea and India, the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air said in a report.

“Ukrainian strikes on Russia’s refining capacity have turned tables on the world’s once largest oil product exporter to see them start importing fuels, with imports surging to a record 189,600 tons in August — more than seven times the previous monthly high,” the Finland-registered nonprofit said Thursday.

Ukraine launched a major barrage overnight from Thursday to Friday, with the Russian Defense Ministry saying air defenses intercepted 777 Ukrainian drones over 16 Russian regions, as well as occupied Crimea and the waters of the Azov and the Caspian seas.

Two people were killed and three others wounded overnight in a Ukrainian drone attack on the Tula region south of Moscow, local officials said Friday.

A Ukrainian drone strike during the night started a fire at the Saratov oil refinery in southwestern Russia, Russian independent online outlet Astra said Friday. Kyiv has repeatedly targeted that refinery, which was last hit in early August.

Major online retailer Ozon said its logistics facility in the same city was struck and set ablaze by a Ukrainian drone, though no casualties were reported.

Ozon is a competitor to Wildberries, whose facilities Ukraine has also targeted.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said long-range strikes overnight hit eight Russian regions, including a business and an oil industry facility in the Saratov region.

The attacks were “aimed at reducing Russia’s capacity to wage war,” he said on X Friday.

Few political offers could sound more audacious. President Trump this week told Americans that if they keep Republicans in control of both chambers of Congress at November’s midterm elections, every adult citizen would receive $5,000 (£3,700). Even by Trump’s standards, the proposal resembles an extraordinary form of electoral inducement — and, in my view, betrays a growing sense of alarm.

The most likely explanation is that Trump has begun heeding advisers inside the White House who have long warned that Republicans could lose both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

For much of the year, he appeared to brush aside those fears. Trump assured aides that once he took to the campaign trail, his presence would energise Republican voters and steady the party’s fortunes.

But the campaign is now under way, and the outlook for Republicans has not improved. Their prospects for November appear to be deteriorating week by week. Democrats were already favoured to retake the House, where the Republican majority is narrow and the president’s party has historically struggled in midterm contests.

The major shift over the summer, however, has been the Senate. It remains a more difficult target for Democrats, yet leading Republican strategists now acknowledge that control of the chamber is at stake. The prospect of Democrats holding both houses of Congress is prompting serious anxiety across senior MAGA ranks.

They understand what that result would mean: Trump would enter his final two years in office as a textbook lame-duck president. Congress would impose far tougher scrutiny on virtually every major initiative, from military action to federal spending — areas in which he has so far faced limited oversight.

House and Senate committees with substantial investigative authority could open a string of inquiries into Trump, his relatives and his close associates, including questions over how far they may have benefited financially during his presidency.

Such investigations could expose scandals involving figures in Trump’s orbit, damage reputations and force resignations — a grim prospect for the MAGA establishment. Democrats might even seek to impeach him for a third time.

Hence the desperate moves to shore up the Republican vote, with this week’s special rally in Dallas, Texas (where they could lose a Senate seat to the Democrats) to showboat the party’s candidates in marginal seats and, above all, parade that $5,000 bribe. I doubt it’ll work: yes, American voters can be gullible. But not that gullible. For a start, they know there’s no money to pay for it. There are roughly 245million adult citizens in America. So at $5,000 a head the ‘Trump dividend’ (as the President is inevitably calling it) would cost a massive $1.2trillion. Where’s the money coming from?

Vice-President JD Vance, who has emerged as the clear frontrunner to be the Republican presidential candidate in 2028, took to Fox News after the President’s speech to explain. Everything he said was untrue.

Trump’s tariffs are now generating ‘an extraordinary amount of revenue’, he claimed. Lie. So much is coming in that it’s ‘helping us pay down the [national] debt’. Lie. Keep us in power in Congress, he told voters, and ‘you’re going to share in this incredible wealth’. Lie.

Let’s turn to the truth. Tariffs are generating nothing like $1.3trillion. They were expected to bring in around $400billion this year and next. But after court rulings deemed some tariffs to be illegal, necessitating refunds, they’ll be lucky to bring in $200billion a year. Moreover that revenue has already been committed to off-setting some of the cost of Trump’s tax cuts. Much as politicians would like to, even Trump can’t spend the same money twice. After all tariff revenue has been counted, America still runs a federal budget deficit of around $2trillion a year – and rising.

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Contrary to Vance’s absurd claims, there is no tariff money to pay for the ‘Trump dividend’. It’s also a nonsense to depict it as a dividend. Dividends are how companies pass on their profits to shareholders. But the federal government doesn’t make a profit. It’s ‘losing’ $2trillion a year and has to borrow the difference.

Nor, despite what Vance claimed, is Trump paying down the national debt. In fact, it’s rising – fast. It was $36trillion when Trump started his second term and, less than 20 months in, it’s now $40trillion. It’s forecast to rise for the rest of his presidency.

So the only way Trump could finance his cash-for-votes wheeze would be to borrow all $1.2trillion, on top of the $2trillion he’s already planning to borrow this financial year and the $40trillion in outstanding debt America has already accumulated. The bond markets simply wouldn’t wear it – which is why, even in the unlikely event the Republicans hold the House and the Senate, it won’t happen.

After all, we’ve been here before. American voters were promised a $5,000 a head handout in the early days of Trump’s second term – a share in the proceeds of the $2trillion Elon Musk was going to save by taking a chainsaw to federal spending. Of course the savings never materialised on anything like that scale. Neither did the $5,000 pay-back.

Nor is this the first time Trump has promised tariff revenues to voters. Last November he said tariffs would generate enough to send every voter a $2,000 cheque. Of course they didn’t generate anything like that. So the $2,000 promise also bit the dust.

It’s a measure of Trump’s less than passing acquaintance with honesty and facts that, even though he now knows tariffs will bring in a lot less than he thought last November, he nevertheless blithely ups his unfunded bribe from $2,000 to $5,000.

Desperate times, of course, call for desperate measures, even fantasy ones. The two-day rally in Dallas was itself a sign of growing panic in Republican ranks. Unlike British political parties, which insist on inflicting their increasingly dire conferences on us every year, the American parties sensibly limit their conventions to the year they have to pick a presidential candidate, which means only once every four years.

So the Dallas mini-convention was unusual, to say the least. It was called to galvanise the MAGA base and allow Trump to place himself metaphorically at the head of the Republican ticket to lead the November election charge, even though he’s not running himself. It suggests a certain madness has already set in on the Republican Party.

It cannot hope to win in November solely on a high MAGA turnout. It needs independent voters too – and they are haemorrhaging fast. The exodus will only be exacerbated by Trump placing himself front and centre. His desire to make the mid-terms a referendum on his second term is the height of self-serving electoral folly.

There was a time when Trump was the Republicans’ biggest electoral asset. No longer. He is seen to lead an administration mired in corruption, a President who has dragged America into a deeply unpopular war with Iran without congressional or public approval. His approval rating is below 40 per cent. Support for his handling of matters crucial to the cost of living is under 30 per cent.

Republican bosses despair that he would rather ramble in speeches about his White House ballroom and his plans for a triumphal arch in Washington than address grocery prices at the check out counter. As the Republican faithful left Dallas yesterday, a gallon of diesel (the fuel of America’s gigantic road haulage industry) hit $6. A gallon of petrol is already over $4. Inflation is stuck at 3.4 per cent and likely to rise.

These are election-losing statistics. All the more so because voters think Trump’s war has made them worse off. In Dallas Trump admitted there would be no end in sight to the war this side of the mid-terms – which means more economic pain is on its way.

Add in the fact that he’s increasingly perceived by voters to be verging on the doolally – even Fox News cut away from his Dallas speech when he embarked on a long ramble about water – and you have the makings of a Republican recipe for defeat in November. No conceivable bribe is likely to thwart that.