America

When I first started teaching undergraduates at Harvard, the grading system the university employed struck me as very odd. Even ambitious students at top colleges in the United States see it as their job to answer any essay question in the most thorough and reasonable way. They regurgitate the dominant view in scholarly literature in a competent manner. If they pull this off without making major errors, they fully expect to get an A. And with grade inflation rampant in the Ivy League, they usually do. This attitude has had a significant influence on American public life. If you read an opinion piece in the New York Times or the

President Joe Biden has been touring Nevada and Arizona in an attempt to win back disgruntled Hispanic voters. ‘This guy despises Latinos,’ he said, speaking of his adversary Donald Trump, the inevitable Republican nominee. Trump’s response? He posted the following on his Truth Social page: Laugh or scorn all you want. The polls show Trump now has majority support Hispanic voters.

The United States is heading for a Donald Trump vs Joe Biden rematch in this year’s presidential election. US leader Joe Biden is the presumptive presidential nominee for the Democratic Party after his victory overnight in the Georgia primary pushed him passed the threshold of 1,968 delegates. Donald Trump also passed the threshold of 1,215 delegates to become the presumptive nominee for the Republican Party, following his triumphs in Georgia, Mississippi and Washington. Biden’s approval rating is lagging behind Trump’s at the same stage of his presidency ‘It is my great honour to be representing the Republican Party as its Presidential Nominee,’ Trump wrote on Truth Social. ‘Fear not, we will not

President Joe Biden compared himself to presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, and his Republican opponents to Hitler, Nazis and the Confederacy during Thursday night’s State of the Union – and that was just in the first ninety seconds. Before two minutes had gone by, he’d lumped the Grand Old Party in with Russian president Vladimir Putin for good measure. Having cracked a decent joke and demagogued his opponents, the President was off to the races. By the third minute, he’d reached his next most important goal: more money for war in Ukraine. By minute four, he’d mentioned former president Donald Trump, though not by name. His ‘predecessor’, as he

When US policy-makers supported Nato expansion in the 1990s, it was widely believed that America, as the sole remaining superpower, could impose its will and leadership across the globe. ‘An American century’, ‘indispensable nation’, ‘the unipolar moment’, ‘benign hegemony’ – these became the new buzz-words of Washington’s political class. The rhetoric turned bellicose after 9/11, when outrage over the terrorist attacks, together with the mental habits of global supremacy and American exceptionalism, gave US leaders a clear, overriding sense of mission and purpose. Hillary Clinton reflected this notion of the country’s omni-potence as secretary of state in 2010 when she declared that ‘it is in our DNA’ to believe ‘there

Super Tuesday is over and so is the primary season. Although some states have not voted yet and a few others have not finished counting, the parties’ nominees are now locked in. They were really locked in several weeks ago. Biden had no serious competition and Trump vanquished his two main rivals in the early voting.  Trump’s chief competitors were Florida governor Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, former governor of South Carolina and Trump’s UN ambassador. The former president effectively clinched the nomination when he beat both decisively on their most favourable terrain: DeSantis in Iowa and Haley in New Hampshire and her home state. Haley stayed in the race

In a big victory for democracy, but a big blow to the partisans of ‘Our Democracy™’, the Supreme Court of the United States just reversed the decision of the Colorado Supreme Court, which had determined that Donald Trump could not appear on the ballot for president in that state.  A coven of anti-Trump activists, desperate to stop the juggernaut that is the Trump train, argued that Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment authorised them to remove Trump from the ballot because he had engaged in ‘insurrection’ on 6 January 2021.  Let’s leave aside the question of whether the Fourteenth Amendment, designed to apply to rebels who had joined the Confederacy during the Civil

Commentators find it tedious to keep pointing out that Donald Trump has won yet another primary by yet another huge margin. He just defeated Nikki Haley by more than 40 points in Michigan, for instance, and many journalists seem to be focusing on his struggle to win over key ‘voter blocs’. She will inevitably cave to reality after Super Tuesday next week A lot of this talk is pure wind. Yes, Haley performed well in suburbs around Detroit and Michigan among voter groups that Trump will have to do better with in order to win in a general election against Joe Biden. But Michigan, like South Carolina and New Hampshire,

The math is clear for Nikki Haley. Even though she outperformed polling expectations in her home state of South Carolina, getting 40 per cent of the vote to Trump’s 60 per cent, her path to the Republican nomination is only going to get harder now. Thanks to significant Republican rule changes that increased the number of winner-take-all states, Donald Trump should have the nomination officially locked up within a month. And while donor money can keep Haley afloat through that moment and perhaps beyond, she has lost the backing of the Koch machine, which is shifting its resources to lower level contests. So what lessons, if any, should we take from Haley’s performance,

‘I’m a woman of my word,’ said Nikki Haley after another humiliating defeat last night. ‘I’m not giving up this fight when a majority of Americans disapprove of both Donald Trump and Joe Biden.’  But what, really, is the point? South Carolina is Haley’s home state and she lost by more than 20 percentage points. She lost New Hampshire by 11 points, she came third in Iowa, and, much to Trump’s delight, she lost to ‘none of these candidates’ in Nevada.  Without Trump, Republican voters distrust and detest their party. They haven’t for some time The Republican nomination snoozefest – it’s not a race – will now move to Super Tuesday, on

‘Oh, that’s Liz Truss,’ a conservative reporter says as the former British prime minister passes us in the corridor at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). ‘She sucks. What’s she doing here?’ Trying to sell books, apparently. Truss is one of two Brits – alongside mainstay Nigel Farage – addressing CPAC. Her visit forms part of the promotional tour for the US release of her book Ten Years to Save the West: Lessons From The Only Conservative in the Room, which has been handily retitled for US audiences: ‘Leading the Revolution Against Globalism, Socialism and the Liberal Establishment.’ Truss’s remarks were full of buzzwords: ‘woke-onomics’, ‘DEI, ESG’, broadsides aimed at the

Lord Cameron, bless him, is back striding the world stage. He wrote an article last week in Washington’s inside-beltway website the Hill, urging Congress to vote for more aid for Ukraine. The Foreign Secretary’s tone in that article was forthright in a way that, I expect, he imagined to be the tough talk of a respected international elder statesman getting down to brass tacks. Rather, than, say, the stamping of a butterfly in Kipling.   ‘As Congress debates and votes on this funding package for Ukraine,’ he wrote, ‘I am going to drop all diplomatic niceties […] ‘I do not want us to show the weakness displayed against Hitler in

‘Donald Trump may have authored the Art of the Deal,’ said the New York Attorney General Letitia James, doing her best resolute voice. ‘But he perfected the art of the steal.’ There speaks the voice of American justice: biased, politicised, odiously trite. ‘Today, we proved that no one is above the law,’ said James, which is what every Trump prosecutor has said, over and over, for years now. ‘No matter how rich, powerful, or politically connected you are, everyone must play by the same rules.’ Despite all the strong words and massive fines, Trump’s candidacy is growing in strength That’s garbage and everybody knows it. The rules don’t apply to