I do not mean that Newt Gingrich — the one who is a virtual Michelin Man of grandiosity, pneumatically overstuffed with self-references and appeals to the political gutter. I do not mean the man whose public life has been as chaotic as his private one (and vice versa) and who is capable of the most sinister simplicities, such as the time he suggested that Susan Smith would not have murdered her two children had Republicans been in power. This Gingrich is a Rorschach test: If you don’t think he’s nuts, you are.

Wikipedia says that name may refer to a British film producer, a soccer player, an actor or a sportswriter. Google says he could be a hairstylist in Atlanta. None of these, though, is the David Barron I have in mind. The one I want is the one who signed off on the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, a very bad guy but, still, an American citizen. Barron was a U.S. government lawyer.

Back in 1990, Ivana Trump told her divorce lawyer Michael Kennedy that “from time to time, her husband [Donald Trump] reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, ‘My New Order,’ which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed.” This information, which comes from a startling 1990 Vanity Fair profile of Trump, certainly does not prove that he is anti-Semitic (a daughter recently converted to Judaism) and is cited here just because, as with so much about Trump, it makes no sense at all. It is just another grenade that comes rolling out of the profile — yet another detail about Trump that is just plain weird, sordid, compellingly interesting and, upon reflection, terrifying. Nothing stops the man.