BRACE yourselves. There is a storm coming this way, one containing a blizzard of opinions, a tornado of stats, and a rolling thunder of analysis, and all to mark a very important milestone. Come November 8 it will have been a year since Donald Trump won the US presidential election. Time flies like an intercontinental ballistic missile sometimes, doesn’t it?

For all the energy the media is pouring into making their coverage enticing and novel, there is one basic question to be answered: how is the big guy with the little hands doing? Not great, suggest reports this week from Washington. According to Vanity Fair magazine, some close aides are concerned that the President is “unravelling”, and he has been heard shouting “I hate everyone in the White House!”

The 45th President would not be the first commander-in-chief to become frustrated at his lack of progress in office. The first thing incumbents learn about the job of being the most powerful politician in the world is that they should not have been so quick to believe the hype. They realise that their reach has its limits, that they cannot govern alone, and that they have to be team players to get things done.

If we know anything about The Donald it is that he does not, as teachers say in report cards, play well with others. What made him a success in business, apart from that multi-million dollar hand out from dad, was his determination to go it alone, to rush in where more cautious types feared to tread. In real estate, where Mr Trump made most of his money, those are positive traits. Especially in the dirty old town that was New York of the 1970s it took some nerve and a certain vision to pour money into dilapidated buildings in the expectation that better times were on the way. And anyway, if the worst comes to the worst in property you go bust and start again. Politics is less forgiving. Mistakes here are as expensive as they come. Sometimes the loss can be measured in dollars and cents, sometimes it is in lives.

Where Mr Trump is being hit hardest is in the damage to his reputation. What America needed, he told the electorate, was a deal broker, a CEO who would make things happen. Drain that swamp, build that wall, bin that health care plan, make America great again. But from the start he has been stymied by the courts and Congress, unable to get his programme through. The economy continues to power along, which has bought him time and leeway, but as the anniversary of his election nears he has no solid achievements to his name other than racking up more Twitter followers.

Such failure would be hard for any President to bear, but add in this one’s volatile temperament, thin skin, and towering ego and it is all too easy to believe that cracks are starting to show. And how. Senator Bob Corker, Republican chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, has likened the White House to “an adult day care centre” where the main task is to “contain” the President. Rex Tillerson, Mr Trump’s Secretary of State, has still not denied calling his boss a “moron” for reportedly saying America needed more nuclear weapons. The channel that broke the Tillerson story, NBC, has been threatened by the President on Twitter (natch) with the loss of its licence, while the media in general is the target of Mr Trump’s ever-growing wrath. “It is frankly disgusting the way the press is able to write whatever they want and people should look into it,” he said. Now there’s a chilling warning.

It is against this backdrop (a cynic would say precisely because of this backdrop) that wily old British diplomats have let it be known that the President’s visit to the UK next year will go ahead, but it will not be a bells and whistles, carriage down the Mall and golf at Balmoral affair. Instead, he will travel to London as part of a political tour of Europe’s capitals, the hope being that this takes the heat off the Queen and out of the visit as a whole.

One cannot imagine this going down well with the President, however silkily it is presented by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. With little but headaches happening on the domestic front, Mr Trump needs to busy himself internationally, preferably far away from the thorny areas of Iran and North Korea, and a tour of European capitals could be just the ticket. Even so, unless the FCO can put together a visit so low key as to be almost invisible, protests are inevitable. For Mr Trump and his administration, that is a problem for next year. For now, a certain electoral landmark, and a growing pile of woes, await his attention. Happy anniversary Mr President? Don’t bet on it.