America

President Biden continues to project strength ahead of the 2024 election — by tumbling on stage at the US Air Force Academy Graduation. The 80-year-old commander-in-chief fell today while handing out diplomas to graduating cadets in Colorado. Rest assured, he was quickly helped up and escorted off stage by three Air Force officials.  The White House has blamed the fall on a sandbag placed by the podium. ‘He’s fine. There was a sandbag on stage while he was shaking hands,’ White House communications director Ben LaBolt tweeted after the incident. Mr S isn’t sure how the sandbag got there but could have sworn he heard the familiar cackle of one

A few months back I asked a question of Donald Trump: does he know why he’s running to be president again? He made one major speech of which even some of his most ardent followers questioned the enthusiasm. Since then he has occupied the depths of Truth Social and not much more.  After his announcement to seek the presidency for a third time last November (he ran as a Reform Party candidate in 2000, remember), he has held one campaign rally, one town hall on CNN, made one stop in Iowa and another where he canceled a much-hyped rally. He has spent much of his time taking shot after shot

Joseph Robinette Biden, a practising Catholic, has travelled a long way when it comes to gay rights. In 1996, as Senator for Delaware, he voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, which blocked the federal recognition of same-sex unions. Two years earlier he voted to cut funding to schools that taught the acceptance of homosexuality. In the 1970s, when asked about homosexuals in the US military, he replied: ‘My gut reaction is that they are a security risk but I must admit I have not given this much thought… I’ll be darned!’   Saudi Arabia is the world’s second-biggest oil producer and so it gets a pass. Uganda has little to

People imagine that the real world is similar to the dark side of the TV show Succession. For some reason we enjoy thinking that media barons and tech tycoons pull the strings of global power, creating the election-deciding narratives which the bovine public then swallows whole.  But the truth, as Elon Musk and Ron DeSantis showed so spectacularly with their disastrous campaign announcement on Twitter last night, is much more like the funnier bits in Succession. It’s cock-up not conspiracy.  His candidacy makes so much sense in theory. But he’s slipping further and further behind Trump in the polls People mocked Elon Musk last month when his big SpaceX launch

Boris Johnson, Britain’s most sought-after Churchill impersonator, visited Texas on Monday to urge a group of rich right-wing Americans to never, never, never give in to Vladimir Putin. ‘I just urge you all to stick with it,’ Agent Bojo told a private lunch of conservative politicians and donors in Dallas. ‘You are backing the right horse. Ukraine is going to win.’ Johnson wasn’t paid to speak at the lunch, though it’s worth noting that he only stopped over in Texas on the way to the SCALE Fintech conference in Las Vegas, where he is expected to receive a six-figure sum for talking about the future of innovation alongside Saudi Arabia’s

Ron DeSantis is expected to announce his 2024 presidential bid during a Twitter Space with the app’s ‘chief Twit’ Elon Musk in the next few hours, according to NBC News. At 11 p.m. UK time Wednesday, DeSantis will appear in a discussion with Musk – perhaps part of a bid to make the governor seem less awkward? – moderated by David Sacks, ‘a Musk confidant and DeSantis supporter’. The Florida governor’s entry into the race is long awaited – and the unique decision to make his announcement on Twitter is earning plaudits from his supporters. ‘@RonDeSantis announcing his campaign with @elonmusk is a big deal – and not only because it’s

In February on a snowy Wednesday, I met a homeless man named David standing outside a Safeway panhandling for money. He was wearing a white hoodie with the words ‘Portland State University’ printed on it and holding two empty beer cans and a remote control. I asked him what it’s like to be homeless in Portland. ‘I know how not to be homeless, but there’s a reason I am out here and something’s not right,’ he replied. He told me that when he gets housed, he often gets kicked out quickly and doesn’t want to have to go through the effort again. Something bad happened to him when he was

It’s a cliché of publishing that men over the age of 40 only read military history. In my case it’s not entirely true: I still occasionally squeeze in the odd novel, some politics, even poetry if I’ve drunk too much sweet wine. But it’s true enough that my mind is probably over-furnished with historical-military examples, metaphors, and allusions. And for the last week I’ve been trying to find the correct analogy, from the annals of war, to characterise the battle recently joined by the Writers Guild of America. For anyone that has missed this particular strike, amidst our own melancholy roster of industrial actions, here’s the skinny: as of 2 May 2023 all the screenwriters of the USA, from east coast to west, from gag-smiths to

Everyone knows F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous line from the end of his unfinished novel The Last Tycoon: ‘There are no second acts in American lives.’ But Fitzgerald wasn’t talking about second chances. He meant that, unlike in a traditional play – where Act I presents a problem, Act II reveals the complications and Act III resolves it all – Americans want to skip Act II and go straight to the resolution. The more I think about it, the more I think the Joe Biden presidency is Act II – and Donald Trump is not the last tycoon. He’s Act III. He’s the next president. The campaign of lawfare against him

The latest poll from the Washington Post and ABC News sent shockwaves through America’s media over the weekend, with numbers that are absolutely dire for president Biden. ‘This poll is just brutal’, announced former Democratic spokesperson turned ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos. He’s correct: with approval ratings at just 36 per cent, and lagging far behind Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis in potential general election matchups, the voting numbers are terrible. But the personal ratings are somehow even worse than that — 68 per cent of those polled, including 48 per cent of Democrats, believe Biden is too old for another term. And just 32 per cent think he has the mental acuity to

Since Joe Biden confirmed that he will run for re-election, the odds of Kamala Harris becoming the first female president of the United States have shrunk – and significantly so. For Harris to take over from Biden, several things would have to happen. Biden would have to keep her as his vice-president for the 2024 campaign. Let’s assume, not with total confidence, that the 80-year-old Biden is still alive and well enough to lead by the start of 2025. If not, his vice-president would anyway take over as commander-in-chief, possibly only for a matter of days. But if Biden won in 2024 and didn’t complete his second-term, it would be all hail Kamala, the lady

The largest gathering of Satanists in history is taking place in Boston this weekend. It’s not open to the public. Or, to be more precise, no longer open to the public. That’s because all the tickets have been sold. They’ve downgraded the supernatural in favour of aggressive secularism, with an emphasis on trans issues The second annual SatanCon is being organised by The Satanic Temple or ‘TST’, the world’s biggest Satanic sect, at the Marriott Hotel in Copley Square. That’s the same Marriott chain founded by a devout Mormon family who, back in the 1960s, only agreed to serve alcohol to guests after securing permission from the president of the

In America last week, a 92-year-old media titan agreed to pay out a $787 million (£632 million) settlement with Dominion Voting Systems on behalf of his network Fox News. This morning, the 80-year-old Democratic president has announced that he is running for re-election next year, even though polls suggest 70 per cent of Americans don’t want him to. Joe Biden will probably end up facing the 76-year-old Donald Trump, the man at the heart of that Fox/Dominion defamation. Welcome to America, the land where dinosaurs rule.  President Biden spent the weekend at Camp David running through his re-election agenda. His video campaign announcement has just aired, kickstarting another 19 months of

Now that Dominion Voting Systems has settled for $787.5 million (£633 million) – less than half the $1.6 billion (£1.3 billion) they were asking for in damages from Fox News – the circus must pack up and move elsewhere.  There’s nothing the media likes to cover more than itself, and there is no media target juicier than Fox News. Fox was suckered into the vacuum left by Donald Trump that Joe Biden’s presidency was never going to fill. The media needed a villain and Fox, led by Tucker Carlson, scratches that itch for them.   Fox News did itself no favours by slingshotting back and forth from being the first network to accurately call