Donald trump

The Great Game of the 21st century is upon us and as ever it’s a scramble for resources. This time, though, the thirst is not for land or diamonds or gold. Personal protective equipment has become the oil of the contemporary moment: desperately needed by a world that is strafed by coronavirus. Britain has its own urgent PPE supply problems. But what about the broader international struggle? The answer to this question offers the clearest glimpse of how our post-pandemic global politics is likely to look.   At the top of this scramble stands China. Ahead of the curve (for obvious reasons), it imported about 2.5 billion healthcare items between 24 January

For the first time in months, the coronavirus panic was briefly demoted as the main news story on Sunday when OPEC and oil-producing non-OPEC nations agreed a deal to cut oil production by 9.7 million barrels a day – initially to stabilise and then hopefully increase prices. It is the most dramatic production cut in history and of course not unrelated to the pandemic itself. Last month, demand collapsed as the global economy began to shut down but Russia shot down a Saudi opening proposal fearing it would give a boost to the American fracking industry. The kingdom’s de facto leader Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman threw a characteristic hissy fit

Aristophanes was a comic genius long before the Marx Brothers, but he also gave good advice to the Athenians: stop the war! In his play Lysistrata he had the women going on strike — no more nookie — until the men stopped fighting. During the plague that killed the greatest Athenian of them all, Pericles, Aristophanes advised the young to isolate, meditate and masturbate, advice still valid to this day. Greece, with roughly the same population as Switzerland and faced with a surge of migrants turned loose by the dreaded Turks, has handled the crisis well. The American media is using the virus crisis in order to attack Trump, but

He took nearly a month to assess the state of his campaign after a whopping 15-point defeat in the crucial battleground state of Michigan. But after private deliberations with his wife, Jane, and some lobbying from his senior political advisers, Bernie Sanders came to the conclusion that continuing his presidential campaign would likely do more harm than good. On Wednesday he decided to call it quits, telling his supporters that there was ‘no alternative’. Mathematically, he was right. Sanders was trailing former Vice President Joe Biden by over 300 delegates in the primaries and would have needed to win over 60 per cent of the remaining delegates to capture the Democratic

Donald Trump is that rare specimen in US presidential history whose approval ratings have never reached the 50 per cent mark. Any other incumbent would find that fact downright frightening, a prelude to an inevitable defeat in an election year. Trump, however, had something in his back pocket that any politician could only dream of having: a strong and robust economy that added hundreds of thousands of jobs every month. Unfortunately for the President, the key word here is ‘had’. A thriving record of economic success over the last three years is now at risk of being completely undermined by a national pandemic that Trump himself didn’t take seriously until

If President Donald Trump at first dismissed coronavirus as a menacing-sounding version of the sniffles, he is certainly taking the virus seriously now. One in ten coronavirus victims are in the United States and it’s clear the fallout from the virus is going to get much worse before it gets better.  ‘I want America to understand: this week, it’s going to get bad,’ the US surgeon general Dr Jerome Adams has said. Trump, who cares deeply about his legacy in US history as much as he cares about his public image, continues to watch as Wall Street falls down like a ton of bricks and as more depressing market indicators

The 2020 struggle for the White House is shaping up to look a lot like the 2016 contest. Once more the Democratic field is narrowing to Bernie Sanders and an establishment Democrat who lays claim to Barack Obama’s legacy—this time Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden, rather than his first secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. And now, as before, the establishment looks to have the edge, though not as much of an edge as last time. Sanders is far from beaten and the prospect of a contested convention still looms. Democrats should stop to think for a minute, however, about what a rematch in the primaries might mean for a rematch

President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address began with a snub to Speaker Nancy Pelosi as she extended her hand across the dais for the customary greeting. It ended with a visibly annoyed Pelosi ripping the copy of her speech and slamming it down on the table. And those were the boring parts of the event. Trump, the reality television expert, turned the hour-and-a-half long address into, well, a reality show. He gave a young schoolgirl a scholarship, surprised conservative radio personality Rush Limbaugh with the presidential medal of freedom, and shocked a wife and her two children when her military-clad husband emerged from the darkness and hugged her