SOMETIMES the story you go looking for isn’t the one you find. That seems to be the case with Donald Trump randomly chopping down trees in Washington DC.

This is not to suggest that Trump himself has been swinging an axe, an activity that would be inadvisable considering his age and barely camouflaged frailty.

Mind you, he might have depicted himself online as a strapping lumberjack, for all I know. He does like AI slop images, in cartoonish self-portrait mode as a dashing superhero, rather than the shabby man he must see in the morning mirror.

What a sight. Sans suit, sans candyfloss toupee, sans orange stage slap on his face. Stripped of… no, let’s stop there. Time to withdraw, shut that door, and talk of trees.

We live in a tree-lined road. And if that sounds bucolic, it really isn’t. It’s busy and suburban but the trees lend grandeur and soften the passage of passing Morrisons trucks and bin lorries. They make life much more pleasant than it otherwise would be, as is the way with trees.

A neighbour has spoken of getting up a petition, having in mind what happened in Sheffield between 2013 and 2018. The council there axed more than 5,000 trees as part of a ‘street improvement’ programme, with plans to cut down around 12,000 more, until protestors got in the way.

Our back garden is also filled with trees, and a few have had to come down over the years. For all their glory, a tree is just a plant with a lifespan that can end in a fall or the chop. Other trees have been planted to replace those that have gone.

There is an old story about the first US president, George Washington, and a tree. The tale has it that as a boy Washington was given a hatchet as a gift and used it to damage his father’s cherry tree. When his father discovered what George had done, the boy said: “I cannot tell a lie…I did cut it with my hatchet.”

All the way from a presidential boy who could not tell a lie to an old president who cannot stop telling them.

Sadly, that story is not true. It is said to have been invented by one of Washington’s first biographers, Mason Locke Weems. He apparently wished to suggest that Washington’s public greatness was due to his private virtues. Whereas Trump’s falling short in greatness might be said to be due to his lack of any virtues, public or private.

According to many social media posts, Trump ordered the chopping down of weeping willows round the Kennedy Center. While a willow might well weep to see what he’s doing to that country, it seems those trees were felled thanks to decay.

A second tree rumour then went viral – Trump was chopping down dozens of cherry trees as part of his plans to renovate a golf course in Washington DC. The US fact-checking site Snopes, and others, found no evidence of such arboreal erasure. The misunderstanding, if that’s what it is, lay in a Washington Post article that reported around 60 trees had been removed from the golf course. This was true but most were poor specimens and only one was a cherry tree, so there you go.

Perhaps it’s just too damn hard to tell what’s true and what isn’t where Trump is concerned, cobwebbed as he is with lies and deceit. And it sounds just his awful thing. After all, he paved over the Rose Garden almost on day one and turned it into a crass patio. Then, without seeking any sort of permission, he knocked down a chunk of the White House in order to build his ridiculous ballroom.

And, you have to admit, he does a good impression of being an intolerant poltroon who would chop down a cherry tree because it looked at him funny; or because it was planted by someone else. Or because he wants more space to cheat at golf, and so on.

But Trump’s cherry tree story, like Washington’s in a way, doesn’t appear to be true. If any removed cherry tree would like to write in to put their side, I will happily print a retraction.

HOW interesting that GB News should put out social media posts praising Donald Trump for using the Falklands Islands as leverage to change Britain’s defence policy.

I thought that lot were in favour of our sovereignty. Nigel Farage never stopped banging on about it before Brexit. Unpuzzle this for me. How was it appalling interference when the EU, of which we were then a member, suggested we do something – but it’s fine now when Trump berates and bullies us and tells us what to do.

I can’t help but suspect that Farage would, if granted power, roll onto his back, stick his legs in the air and invite the Americans to tickle his tummy.