Over the Christmas holidays, as Washington entered the second week of its government shutdown, Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic speaker-designate of the US House of Representatives, was spotted holidaying with her family at a luxury resort in Hawaii.

Conservative news outlets had a field day. Donald Trump’s White House pounced. The trip had all the political deftness of George H W Bush luxuriating on a speedboat in Kennebunkport, Maine, during the 1991 economic downturn. While another politician might have grovelled or made excuses, Ms Pelosi was unrepentant. Returning to Washington, she brushed away the criticism.

“The president may not know this, but Hawaii is part of the United States of America — maybe he doesn’t realise that,” she explained in a televised interview. The president, she added, had been confused about Barack Obama’s Hawaiian birth certificate, leading to questions about his grasp of US geography. “The very idea that he would suggest such a thing shows the poverty of his thinking.”