America

It’s not yet February, and already we have a clear idea of what Joe Biden’s re-election will be all about: Donald Trump, abortion and, er, Taylor Swift.  The New York Times reported yesterday that Team Biden-Harris 2024 has made recruiting Taylor Swift as one of its endorsers a top priority. This, inevitably, has triggered a media storm because Taylor Swift is now a culture-war avatar. She’s the new Meghan Markle when it comes to dividing opinion, although Swift is arguably more controversial because she was once a conservative darling and a hate figure among left-liberals. Today she’s the opposite.   The Guardian called Swift ‘an envoy for Trump’s values’ Right-wing

Donald Trump said yesterday that we’re ‘on the brink of world war three’ after a suicide drone killed three US soldiers and injured a further 34 in Jordan. ‘This attack would never have happened if I was president, not even a chance – just like the Iranian-backed Hamas attack on Israel would never have happened, the war in Ukraine would never have happened, and we would now have peace throughout the world,’ said Trump. ‘Our country cannot survive with Joe Biden as Commander in Chief.’ It’s cynical, of course, to score political points over military deaths. Yesterday’s US combat fatalities were reportedly the first in three years under Joe Biden.

Let’s park for a moment the morality of the death penalty. You know what you think. It’s one of those issues that is as divisive as it gets, and along all the predictable lines. It’s the method that exercises me. Last night, Alabama executed Kenneth Smith by the administration of nitrogen gas. Smith, who murdered a pastor’s wife in 1988, was strapped down as officials put a tight fitting, commercial industrial-safety respirator mask on his face. A canister of pure nitrogen was attached to the mask and set flowing. One local journalist who witnessed the execution said Smith struggled and thrashed about – well as much as the restraints on

Donald Trump has, like a boa constrictor, squeezed the life out of the Republican primary cycle. Last night, he swallowed New Hampshire and possibly Nikki Haley too.  Haley did better than many of the late polls suggested. But that’s not saying much. She won 44 per cent of the vote, finishing 12 points behind Trump. She now has the momentum to move on to South Carolina, where she is thirty points behind in polls. But if she couldn’t win here in New Hampshire, where independents can vote in the Republican primary, it seems unlikely she can win anywhere. Or, as one Trump campaign official at his campaign’s election night watch party in Nashua put

The Florida governor has dropped out of the 2024 presidential race

The theory that Donald Trump will pick Nikki Haley as his vice president refuses to die – in spite of the growing evidence that he won’t.  Haley, for one, is adamant that it will not happen. Today, at a meet-and-greet with voters in Mary Ann’s diner in Amherst, New Hampshire, a voter floated the idea. She grimaced and said: ‘I’ve never said that. That’s my opponent saying that… I don’t want to be anyone’s vice president. That’s off the table.’  She could change her mind, of course. Politicians do, and analysts will keep saying that Haley would help Trump appeal to aspirational suburban women and so on. But Trumpworld loathes

‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself,’ said Franklin D. Roosevelt, famously. The Democrats of 2024 have a rather different message for the world: Be Very Afraid! ‘I’m scared as heck,’ said vice president, Kamala Harris, yesterday, as she discussed the ‘crazies’ who might put Donald Trump back in the Oval Office. Not for the first time, Harris was echoing the sentiments of Michelle Obama, the former First Lady: ‘I am terrified,’ Michelle told a podcast last week. ‘We cannot take this democracy for granted.’ We’re a long way from 2008, when Michelle’s husband won the White House by appealing to the opposite emotion. ‘We choose hope over fear,’

Iranian airstrikes on ‘militant bases’ in neighbouring Pakistan signal a dangerous and worrying escalation of the conflict in the Middle East. Details of what unfolded remain sketchy, but Iranian media reported that the strikes were aimed at the bases of a Sunni militant group, Jaish al-Adl. The missiles and drones landed in the Balochistan province, which lies along the 600-mile border between the two countries. Both countries have long bickered over the activities of Baloch separatists and other militant groups in the border region. All it would take is one misunderstanding or false move to spark all-out war Pakistan’s foreign ministry said two children were killed and three others were injured. The Pakistani

Over the past few days it has become clear that Donald Trump’s return to the US presidency has gone from being an outlier to an increasing likelihood. His landslide in the Iowa caucus yesterday only confirms this further. As the first term of Joe Biden’s presidency comes to a close, one of his achievements is no doubt the increased coordination amongst leading democracies when it comes to dealing with the challenge that China presents. Under Biden’s tenure the G7 has agreed to collectively fund an alternative to Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative and work on de-risking their supply chains away from the country. Meanwhile, in the past year, the US and

The bitterly cold conditions in Iowa today have at least given journalists something to talk about. There’s a distinct lack of political drama, given everyone expects today’s Republican caucuses to be a blowout win for Donald Trump. The main questions of interest are: will Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis finish second? And will Trump break Republican records and win more than 50 per cent of the vote? Given that polls suggest Trump voters are far more enthusiastic than the supporters of his rivals, the arctic temperatures may only give him a further advantage. The weather is also a handy metaphor for the frozen state of Republican politics: Haley and DeSantis’s