Donald trump

Thursday

James Forsyth

This pandemic has put politics on fast-forward

‘The normal grease of politics is not there,’ bemoans one sociable cabinet minister. Certainly, the whispered conversations in corridors that make up so much of Westminster life are in abeyance during this period of social distancing. The fact that the backbenches and the cabinet have deep reservations about the government’s approach matters far less than it would in normal times. In the Zoom parliament, there is no such thing as the mood of the House. One Tory grandee pushing for a significant easing of the lockdown complains that the current arrangements ‘make it easier for No. 10 to ignore parliament and cabinet’. But contrary to appearances, politics has actually sped

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Hiding Biden is the best way to get him elected

So Mrs American Voter, which septuagenarian sex abuser do you want to be President? The whole ‘#MeToo’ business probably should have taken a back seat in 2020 — given the epochal health crisis, the vast Covid-19 death toll and the collapsed US economy. But sex always makes headlines and this month Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, finds himself wrestling with the shocking allegation that in 1993, he ‘digitally penetrated’ a young woman staffer called Tara Reade. Biden adamantly denies Reade’s claims. However, as someone who peddled the ‘Believe all women’ mantra when it suited him politically, he is now hoist by his own canard. In 2018, Biden said that

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Boris’s son is born, Commons sits apart and Belgians told to eat more potatoes

Home Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, returned to work at Downing Street after recovering from his Covid-19 sickness. Speaking outside No. 10, he said that there were ‘real signs now that we are passing through the peak’. By the beginning of Sunday 26 April, there had been 20,319 deaths, mostly in hospital, of people who had the disease; a week earlier the cumulative total had been 15,464. There were additionally 2,000 coronavirus deaths in care homes in the week ending 17 April, according to the Office for National Statistics, twice the number of the week before. In the week ending 10 April, of the 7,996 excess deaths above the average,

Friday

Freddy Gray

Why are people taking Trump’s disinfectant comments seriously?

Every time you think Donald Trump has lost his talent for making people’s heads explode, he somehow excels himself. His latest? Telling Americans that injecting disinfectant and shining UV light could cure Covid-19 patients. You’ll have seen the clip already, everybody has, but it is worth watching again: Trump voters don’t necessarily take Trump all that seriously This was a Trumpian masterpiece. I particularly enjoyed the way he turned to the experts for validation, while his mouth trotted out the peculiar ideas. And I find it hilarious, even though I know we are all supposed to be horrified that the US Commander-in-Chief, the leader of the free world, can sound

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: The Queen turns 94, Captain Tom raises £27m and Harry and Meghan block newspapers

Home The number of people with the coronavirus disease Covid-19 who had died in hospitals by the beginning of the week, Sunday 19 April, was 15,464, compared with a total of 9,875 a week earlier. Two days later it was 16,509. But the number of people in London in hospital with Covid-19 fell for seven consecutive days and there were plenty of empty beds. Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, was reported by colleagues to be worried that relaxing lockdown measures too soon might lead to a second spike in the outbreak. Supplies of personal protective equipment were reported to be falling short; a delivery of 84 tons, including 400,000 gowns,

Friday

David Patrikarakos

The global politics of a pandemic

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

Thursday

Taki

The joy of pumping iron at 83

Gstaad So the days — and months — drift by. This once peaceful Alpine town is packed with rich refugees fleeing the you-know-what. They come from nearby cities crammed with real migrants. There isn’t an empty apartment left, and the locals are raking it in. Two good friends have died, the village is supposed to be locked down, but God awful bikers are everywhere. Yes, they are biking down the middle of narrow paths which makes it impossible to keep your distance from them. What boggles the mind is the mentality of the morons who refuse to practise social distancing. The hotels, clubs and restaurants are shut, so surely they

Tuesday

John R. Bradley

Saudi may have won an oil truce – but a greater conflict now looms

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

Thursday

Taki

The way Greece has conducted itself in this pandemic is an example to us all

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

Wednesday

Daniel DePetris

The three reasons Bernie Sanders couldn’t beat Joe Biden

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

Tuesday

Daniel DePetris

Can Trump’s presidency survive coronavirus?

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

Tuesday

Daniel DePetris

Coronavirus is a disaster for Trump’s re-election campaign

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

Tuesday

Daniel DePetris

How coronavirus is changing America

The coronavirus is altering American life as we have never seen before. New York City’s restaurants and bars can now only offer take-out and delivery service. Night clubs, movie theatres, and gyms in Los Angeles are closed until further notice. The same orders are being issued by the authorities in Chicago and Washington, DC. The Centers for Disease Control have recommended Americans cancel any social gatherings of more than 50 people over the next eight weeks, a measure that will hit social butterflies across the nation hard. Dr Anthony Fauci, a leading authority on infectious diseases and a member of the Trump administration’s coronavirus task force, would like far more self-isolation from individuals than he’s seeing to date.

Saturday

Emma Smith

America’s love-hate relationship with Shakespeare

Shakespeare’s single explicit reference to America is found in The Comedy of Errors. The two Dromios are anatomising the unseen ‘kitchen wench’ Nell, who is ‘spherical, like a globe’: ‘I could find out countries in her,’ says one Syracusan brother. ‘Where America?’ asks his twin. The reply, ‘O, sir, upon her nose, all o’erembellished with rubies, carbuncles, sapphires’, embodies early colonial fantasies about the famed riches of El Dorado.The first record of a Shakespeare text in America comes a century later, and the first known production — an amateur run of Romeo and Juliet in the Revenge Meeting House, New York — three decades after that. But by 1898 a

John R. Bradley

Crude tactics: Russia and Saudi Arabia are at war over oil prices

It all started at what every-one thought would be a routine meeting between Opec and non-Opec nations in Vienna. There were the usual fake smiles and firm handshakes in front of the cameras from the dignitaries. Bored journalists roused themselves to prepare to write stories they expected never to be read, before they could at last head to the pub. And then, out of nowhere, came a bombshell. Downward pressure on oil prices from the coronavirus panic was posing an obvious risk to Saudi Arabia’s still heavily oil-dependent economy. And this is what a cartel like Opec is for: to agree to release less oil into the market, pushing the

Saturday

Ross Clark

Donald Trump’s ‘hunch’ about coronavirus is likely correct

Donald Trump is in the soup again, this time for appearing to reject the World Health Organisation’s estimate for the death rate from coronavirus (Covid-19): 3.4 per cent. ‘I think the 3.4 per cent is really a false number,’ he said on Thursday before adding that he had a ‘hunch’ that the real death rate is less than one per cent. Twitter, needless to say, immediately went into meltdown, the most polite response was to call him ‘irresponsible’. Trump is not quite the person I would call upon for insight into matters relating to virology. He does, of course, have a reputation for shooting from the hip, yet his reasoning on this is

Wednesday

Daniel McCarthy

Could Joe Biden be the Hillary Clinton of 2020?

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

Saturday

Freddy Gray

The best news for Bernie is that his rivals are so weak

‘Bernie beats Trump! Bernie beats Trump!’ That’s what Bernie Sanders’s fans keep chanting, and they have the polls to prove it. Survey after survey suggests that, of all the leading candidates for the Democratic party’s nomination, Sanders is most likely to defeat Donald Trump in the election in November. Voters like Bernie. Some 46 per cent of voters say they admire him. Only 26 per cent say the same of President Trump. Still, most political experts think Sanders will be a disaster for the Democratic party. He may be popular with the base, they say, but he is far too left-wing for the general electorate: 2020 would be a repeat

Saturday

Freddy Gray

Battle of the billionaires: Trump vs Bloomberg could be the nastiest election ever

‘There are two things that are important in politics,’ said Mark Hanna, the American senator, in 1895. ‘The first is money and I can’t remember what the second one is.’ In 2020, Hanna’s maxim could be updated: the second thing is being an old white guy from New York. The presidential election is 36 weeks away and it looks as if the winner will be one of three men. There’s the Manhattan billionaire incumbent, Donald Trump, 73, whose fortune is estimated at $3 billion (he claims eight). There’s the socialist outsider from Brooklyn, Bernie Sanders, who is 78 and worth $2.5 million. And last but not least is 78-year-old Mayor

Saturday

Peter Jones

Ancient Athens would have been horrified by Trump’s impeachment

An impeachment trial is overseen by Congress and Senate, who both make the law and (in this case) sit in judgment on it, ignoring the modern legal principle of the separation of powers. Athenians would have been shocked, not because they believed in the separation of powers (their citizens too made the law in assembly and sat in judgment in the law courts) but because in democratic Athens it was citizens that decided verdicts, and in randomly selected and therefore unpredictable juries. By contrast, two elected oligarchic cabals decide impeachment trials, usually making acquittal a foregone conclusion. Athenians would have been appalled: what was even remotely democratic about that? Statistics