Donald trump

Wednesday

Freddy Gray

What’s gone wrong for Ron DeSantis?

It’s widely acknowledged that, as governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis has been a success. As a presidential candidate, however, he has been a disaster – at least, so far. Last weekend, amid reports that his bid for the White House was floundering, DeSantis sacked a dozen of his staff and scaled back his travel plans. He may have raised some $20 million between April and June, but some of the biggest Republican donors, who flocked towards him at the end of last year, are starting to turn away. His campaign is now concerned about funds running out. ‘The question comes down to: do you want boring Trump? And the answer

Friday

Max Jeffery

Zelensky was right to feel cheated by Nato

Gitanas Nauseda stood outside his palace and checked his watch. The Lithuanian President’s guests – the leaders of the other 30 Nato countries, VIPs from Europe and Asia, Volodymyr Zelensky – were an hour late for dinner. Nauseda idled on the red carpet with his wife, and the couple stared at the setting sky. An adviser muttered down his phone and shook his head. The President shrugged. Nato had just issued a statement saying that Ukraine would become a member of the bloc ‘when allies agree and conditions are met’. The alliance needed to see ‘democratic and security sector reforms’. Zelensky tweeted that the statement was ‘absurd’. He had come

Wednesday

The Spectator

Who lifted the ban on trans women taking part in Miss Universe?

Mx Universe A transgender woman was named ‘Miss Netherlands’, and will now compete in the Miss Universe contest. British TV viewers might be surprised to learn there are still such things as beauty pageants, given they disappeared from the main TV channels in the 1980s. They might be even more surprised to learn who was responsible for lifting the ban on transgender women taking part in Miss Universe. – The decision was made in 2012 by Donald Trump, who then owned the franchise for the competition, after a Canadian trans woman, Jenna Talackova, had been banned from taking part and her cause had been taken up by the Gay and Lesbian

Tuesday

Simon Kuper

What, if anything, have dictators over the centuries had in common?

Big Caesars and Little Caesars is an entertaining jumble with no obvious beginning, middle, end, or indeed argument. But there is an intriguing book buried underneath it which asks more or less this: where does Boris Johnson stand in the historical procession of would-be strongmen or, as Ferdinand Mount calls them, ‘Caesars’? How successful was Johnson’s attempt – overshadowed by the Brexit noise, his personal scandals and his Bertie Wooster act – to turn Britain into a more authoritarian state? Even when Caesars are kicked out, they weaken a country’s institutions Mount, now 84, comes at this from a long Tory past that in recent years he has seemed to

Saturday

Tom Goodenough

Is Gary Neville following in the footsteps of Thatcher – or Trump?

A video loop on the homepage of Gary Neville’s new website shows the ex-Man Utd captain turned businessman, broadcaster and now BBC Dragon’s Den star in various action poses. The clip changes at such speed it’s hard to keep up without becoming nauseous. And that’s the problem with Gary the dynamic middle-aged wannabe politician-tycoon: he makes everyone feel a bit sick. Neville is in the football stand cheering on his team, decked out in an expensive suit fielding questions from an adoring audience and zooming around Manchester in his car. He’s like a luxury watch model but the looks aren’t quite there.  ‘Relentless’ is Neville’s slogan and the name of his

Wednesday

Freddy Gray

Can Trump’s opponents prove him wrong on Ukraine?

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

Wednesday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Coronation protests, new powers for pharmacists and Labour gains ground

Home The day after the coronation, 20,000 attended a concert in Windsor Castle, including the King and Queen. ‘As my grandmother said when she was crowned, coronations are a declaration of our hopes for the future,’ said the Prince of Wales in a speech to the crowd. ‘And I know she’s up there, fondly keeping an eye on us. She would be a proud mother.’ His brother, the Duke of Sussex, had witnessed the coronation from the third row, and left for his family in America immediately after. On television, 20.4 million had seen the King crowned. The Metropolitan Police arrested 64 people, 13 to ‘prevent a breach of the

Tuesday

Susie Mesure

Life’s survivors: The Angel of Rome and Other Stories, by Jess Walter, reviewed

Anyone who has read Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins will want to turn straight to ‘The Angel of Rome’, the title story in this second collection by the versatile American author. Like the novel that elevated Walter from an underrated writer of police procedurals and thrillers to one capable of bestsellers, ‘The Angel of Rome’ is set in Italy and features a filmset and glamorous actors. Both are also partly based on real life. In Beautiful Ruins, Walter plays with what happened during the filming of the 1963 epic Cleopatra. Here he bases the story on an episode in the life of Edoardo Ballerini, an actor who read Beautiful Ruins. Walter,

Friday

Freddy Gray

Is progressivism winning in America?

36 min listen

Galen Druke, host of the FiveThirtyEight podcast, joins Freddy Gray on this episode to talk about what to take away from Chicago’s election this week, how well the Biden team is handling the progressive wing of the Democratic party, and whether the Democrats would prefer to face up against Ron or Don as the Republican nominee. Produced by Natasha Feroze, Saby Kulkarni and Cindy Yu.

Kara Kennedy

In defence of Melania Trump

Where is Melania? This was the question on many people’s lips after the former First Lady was absent from the after-party at the Mar-a-Lago estate on Tuesday night following her husband’s quick trip to New York City. Trolls took to social media to ridicule Mrs Trump for ‘not standing by her man’ during his indictment; some even cracked jokes that she was moving on to pastures new with freshly single Rupert Murdoch. Wherever she was, I hope she was happy. In fact, I hope she was positively beaming while horizontal at a spa getting a deep-tissue massage with martinis flowing and charging it all to her husband’s credit card. For

Tuesday

Freddy Gray

How long can the Democrats keep Trump in legal limbo?

Yesterday, a political committee set up in order to condemn Donald Trump condemned Donald Trump. It would have been truly jaw-dropping if the congressional January 6th committee (which consisted of seven Democrats and two Republicans, all of whom thought Trump was guilty as hell) had decided to say that Donald Trump had not criminally abetted the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. As it was, the headlines last night are about as surprising as the news that Donald Trump has released a new set of Trump-themed NFTs. Congress is not the Justice Department. The committee’s ‘criminal referrals’ may sound dramatic, yet the four counts have no legal teeth.

Wednesday

Taki

We’re all victims in the Bagel now – even me

 New York That Kim Kardashian dame being fined by the Securities and Exchange Commission for a ‘pump and dump’ scheme should help add victimhood to her other assets. Everyone in this country revels in being a victim, or so it seems when watching the news or reading the papers. Here’s our own Jeremy Clarke, as ill as it is possible to be, and what we get is his brave and wonderful column every week, never complaining about how unfair it is, but expressing how lucky he feels to have Catriona taking care of him, and so on. I was telling a friend about this, in a deliberately loud voice, hoping

Thursday

Emily Hill

A character assassination of Rudy Giuliani

Lord help me I love a hatchet job, and you’ll have to too if you want to make it through Giuliani before donating it to Oxfam. This is not just any old biography – it’s a 480-page character assassination. Born in 1944 to an ex-con who broke kneecaps for a living and a mother who was about as ambitious as Margaret Beaufort, Rudy Giuliani excelled at school, qualified as a lawyer and started making his mark as a prosecutor. Across 12 days in 1986, he won convictions against the heads of four New York crime families (the fifth was murdered before he came to trial), a politician from the Bronx

Tuesday

Stephen Arnell

Trump and the art of compromising material

When the FBI raided Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, they found a file titled ‘Info re: President of France’. Many have speculated (with no little encouragement from Trump himself) that it contains illicit details of Emmanuel Macron’s sex life.  Whatever the truth about this particular cache, political kompromat has long been a source of great drama – both on and off screen. Some bring it upon themselves – Gary Hart blew his chances of securing the US Democratic presidential nomination in 1988 by inviting reporters to dig up dirt on him (‘Follow me around, put a tail on me. You’d be very bored’). They promptly did – and the events surrounding the 51-year-old

Tuesday

Jonathan Miller

What kompromat does Trump have on Macron?

Did Donald Trump have kompromat on Emmanuel Macron within the secret files seized by the FBI from his Mar-a-Lago Xanadu? One of the files is known to have been titled ‘Info re: President of France’. And Trump is known to have bragged for years that he knew details of Macron’s sex life. Well, possibly. There’s plenty of circumstantial evidence to suggest that Macron is not entirely conventional in the sexuality department, not least in his marriage to his former drama teacher, 25 years his senior. Early in his presidency, Macron himself weirdly volunteered that his former bodyguard Alexandre Benalla was ‘not my boyfriend’ Maybe the spooks of the CIA are

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

The intense heat is gone and so are the grandsons

Finally rain. None for months, then a violent tropical storm lasting two days. It marked the end of high summer as clearly and distinctly as a clarion of trumpets. Afterwards the nights were cooler and the sun less fierce and it was easier to maintain one’s temper. We could begin to look forward again instead of merely enduring. The week before the storm burst the village had been stretched to its collective mental limit. You could see it on the exhausted faces of the waiters and in the traffic negotiating normally unfrequented side streets. You could hear it in the buzz of the packed outdoor restaurants on the village square,

Monday

Steerpike

Who cares about Trump’s toilet?

It’s the scoop they were all after. Finally, at last, the much-lambasted Washington press pack has obtained the media equivalent of the holy grail: images of Donald J Trump’s toilet. For months, such shenanigans have exercised the finest minds in American political journalism. Now, Maggie Haberman, the darling of the DC class, has pipped them all with pictures for her forthcoming hatchet-job on Trump, according to a breathless report by the admiring hacks over at Axios. Why the focus on Trump’s toilet you ask? Well, Haberman reports that during Trump’s tenure, White House residence staff periodically found wads of paper clogging a toilet — and believed the former president, a

Thursday

Oliver Balch

Has Cuba’s revolution finally fizzled out?

In 1968, the US anthropologist Oscar Lewis arrived in Cuba with a tape recorder and a mission to capture the revolutionary zeal of everyday Cubans. Eighteen months later, he was sent packing. ‘We have nothing to hide,’ Fidel Castro, the leader of the country’s 1959 revolution, had supposedly told him. That wasn’t quite true: production targets were being missed, dissidents were being locked up and the US trade embargo was already beginning to bite. The project briefly – and unsuccessfully – passed into the hands of Boom-era author and friend of Fidel, Gabriel García Márquez. After that, the voices of Cubans vanished from the official record. Lots of vituperative denunciations

Tuesday

Francis Buckley

January 6 has turned Trump fans into NeverTrumpers

The 6 January hearings are a bit of a kangaroo court, since no one is trying to poke holes in the witnesses, as a barrister would do. Still, the picture that has emerged of a rage-filled narcissist in the White House is so devastating that it’s made Never Trumpers out of former Trump supporters. That might seem to hurt the Republicans, but it would be to the party’s advantage if it keeps Trump out of a 2024 race that he would probably lose. The hearings might thus end up biting the Democrats. The hearings have also had the unintended effect of making heroes out of the Republicans who’ve stood up

Thursday

Freddy Gray

Is the world ready for another Trump presidency?

Is Donald Trump going to run in 2024? And if he does, will the world go even more completely crazy? These are questions that almost nobody wants to answer. Many of us are in denial. President Trump broke something in the global political psyche the first time round, which is why so many commentators struggle to admit the obvious: that, by the end of January 2025, Bad Orange Man could well be back in the White House, trolling the universe. The last, best hope of liberal sanity is that Trump will decide not to stand again. He is 76. He knows that running for the White House, and then being