Donald trump

Thursday

Taki

The Middle East for dummies

Gstaad   The French have a saying: ‘Il n’y a rien de plus bête que le sourire du gagnant.’ In other words, gloating is for dummies. Hence I won’t be doing it, despite the drubbing handed to the Bercows of this world by so-called common folk. Mind you, at a lunch in a gentlemen’s club in the Bagel on the very day the drubbing was being administered, an Anglo-American friend, Bartle Bull, asked me what I thought would be the outcome: ‘Hung parliament,’ answered the great electoral expert, ruining Bartle’s lunch and driving the rest of the guests to more drink. A month down the road, everything’s hunky-dory, at least

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Crisis in Iran, fires in Australia and Manchester rapist jailed

Home Dominic Raab, the Foreign Secretary, who had not been told in advance of America’s killing in Iraq of Qassem Soleimani, the leading Iranian military leader, said that America ‘had a right to exercise self-defence’. British troops were put on standby to be sent to the region, and the frigate Montrose and the destroyer Defender sent to the Strait of Hormuz. Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, returning from holiday in Mustique, said: ‘Given the leading role he has played in actions that have led to the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians and western personnel, we will not lament his death.’ England secured a 189-run victory over South Africa on

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Is there method – or madness – behind Trump’s actions in Iraq?

Leaders are often accused of escalating a conflict abroad in order to distract from headaches at home. On Tuesday, before Iran’s missiles were fired, Donald Trump seemed to be doing the opposite. He and his media surrogates started their now all-too-familiar yabbering about impeachment and the Democrats. It felt as if they were trying to move the news cycle away from the Iran crisis. We’re in an election year after all, and the polls suggest a large majority of American voters don’t want more war. Then Tehran launched what it is calling ‘Operation Martyr Soleimani’, which at first prompted a rare nervous silence in Washington. The White House led reporters

John R. Bradley

Donald Trump has just blown up his goal of isolating Iran

A blood red flag was raised over the Jamkaran mosque in the Iranian holy city of Qom last week, one normally reserved to commemorate the death of martyrs. This time, it was intended as a call to arms. ‘We have unfurled this flag so that all [Shia] believers in the world gather around it to avenge Qassem Soleimani’s blood unjustly shed,’ said the mosque’s leader. In Tehran, there were calls for bloody retribution for the air strike that killed Iranian general Soleimani — and everywhere, talk of all-out war. If it was also intended to strike the fear of Allah into the hearts of Iran’s Sunni Arab enemies, it certainly succeeded.

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

All forecasts are off if Iran shuts the Strait of Hormuz

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water… Late last year, a range of forecasts suggested that the likelihood of recession in the US, with knock-on effects for the rest of the developed world, had significantly diminished. Last summer, many economists were putting the chance of a substantial downturn at 50 per cent but by November, Goldman Sachs had marked it down to 24 per cent and Morgan Stanley to ‘around 20 per cent’. Underlying this shift were strong corporate earnings and consumer spending, plus rising hopes of a settlement of US-China trade tensions. Last month saw a sell-off of safety-first government bonds reflecting the

Wednesday

Daniel DePetris

Trump’s Iran strategy has finally won over the ‘Never Trumpers’

As a general rule, neoconservatives and hawkish Republican foreign policy officials don’t respect President Donald Trump’s capacities as commander-in-chief. They view him as impulsive, unwise, short-sighted, and buffoonish—the kind of guy who doesn’t do his homework, spends more time on Twitter than reading briefing books and would rather pull up America’s drawbridge than act as the leader of the free world. This crop of foreign policy intellectuals are quick to refer to Trump as an ‘isolationist’, a favourite pejorative of the Washington policy elite, who is shattering Washington’s superpower status into a million different pieces. These are the same people who actively worked to thwart Trump’s presidential campaign through a

Saturday

David Patrikarakos

Iran’s generals are weeping for Qasem Soleimani. But soon they will prepare to fight

It has been 24 hours since America droned Qasem Soleimani near Baghdad airport. Now both Iran and the United States are getting ready to deal with a new reality in the Middle East that has (quite literally) exploded into being. There is a mutual recognition that when Soleimani died, the old rules of the game died alongside him. What is instructive about his assassination is not that it happened, but that it took so long. After all, this was a man whose carefully posed portrait spread across Twitter every time he visited yet another of Iran’s many wars in the region. If I knew when Haji Qasem was in Syria, then the Americans surely did too.

Friday

John R. Bradley

The Soleimani assassination is Donald Trump’s biggest gamble yet

Ever since Donald Trump was elected president on a non-military interventionist platform, sceptics have questioned his commitment to withdrawing troops from the Middle Eastern quagmire and stopping the endless wars he claims to despise. Now he has authorised the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, the head of the powerful Iranian Quds Force, we can be in absolutely no doubt on whether he stands: he’s no different to the other US presidents. It’s a massive strategic gamble. Soleimani was the second most powerful figure in Iran, answering only to the Ayatollah himself. For more than a decade he has been the architect of Iran’s regional military strategy. He helped Iraq and Syria

Thursday

Andrew Sullivan

Andrew Sullivan: The evidence against Trump is overwhelming

When people ask me what the mood is in DC these days, the only word I can come up with is ‘surreal’. Everyone in this town — including almost all the Republican senators — knows Trump is guilty as charged over Ukraine, and then some. The evidence is overwhelming. And seeking to get a foreign power’s help in a domestic election is such a textbook case for impeachment — the Founding Fathers were obsessed with foreign meddling — it really should be over by Christmas. It won’t be because of Roy Cohn. That legendary lawyer had a simple technique whenever his clients, Fred and Donald Trump, were sued. He would sue

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Does the truth about Ukrainegate even matter?

If you think the election here has been a disorientating exercise in post-truthiness, try following the latest twists in Washington. In the coming days Donald Trump will become the third American president to be impeached. Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic speaker, is rushing the vote on articles of impeachment through the House of Representatives, so that the Senate trial of Trump can start before the 2020 election primary season begins. Pelosi knows that impeachment is probably a losing cause: the Republican–controlled Senate will almost certainly acquit the President. What, then, is the point? The Democrats will say impeachment is a moral necessity, since the President is evidently unworthy of high office.

Houman Barekat

Dave Eggers’s satire on Trump is somewhat heavy-handed: The Captain and the Glory reviewed

A feckless moron is appointed to the captaincy of a ship, despite having no nautical experience. The Captain has a propensity to grope women and brag about not paying his taxes, and in his younger days he ‘had hidden in the bowels of the ship looking at pornographic magazines’ while his peers went to war. Once in post he fires the entire navigational staff and has the ship’s manuals jettisoned. A mysterious voice in a vent urges him to take ever more drastic measures against the ship’s population, whereupon a number of ‘swarthy’ passengers are thrown overboard to drown. Utilities and basic freedoms are privatised as the Glory descends into

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Terror in London, Trump in London and a resignation in Malta

Home Usman Khan, aged 28, out of prison on licence after serving eight years of a 16-year sentence for preparing acts of terrorism, stabbed to death Jack Merritt, aged 25, and Saskia Jones, aged 23, at Fishmongers’ Hall and wounded three others before being stopped on London Bridge by members of the public and shot dead by police. A Polish kitchen worker called Lukasz Koczocik tried to disarm him with a pole; another man grabbed a narwhal tusk from the wall at the hall where Khan had been attending a conference on rehabilitation while a third let off a fire extinguisher to distract him from further bloodshed. One man who

Thursday

Christopher Meyer

Trump’s visit couldn’t come at a worse time – for Boris and for Nato

In the next few days, on 3 and 4 December, Prime Minister Boris Johnson will host a grand international conference of 29 North American and European nations to mark the 70th anniversary of the foundation of Nato — the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, which, led by the United States, kept the peace during the fraught years of Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union. We are told that the Queen will give a reception in honour of the heads of state and government and that Donald Trump has accepted the invitation. Just over a week later, the British general election takes place. Intrinsically the two events are quite unconnected. In

Monday

Daniel DePetris

Republicans can’t make up their minds on how to save Trump from impeachment

It didn’t take long after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s announcement of an impeachment investigation into President Donald Trump for the top Republican in the Senate to rally his troops. In mid-October, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell schooled his fellow GOP lawmakers on the mechanics of an impeachment process and the Senate’s role as juror and decisionmaker. A tutorial on impeachment is the easy part for McConnell, the shrewd political operator who has battled in the Washington trenches for his entire adult life. The more difficult feat for the veteran politico is balancing the Senate’s job of being a serious jury with the Republican objective of acquitting one of their own and limiting the

Thursday

Frank Lawton

Ben Lerner’s much hyped latest novel reads like an audit of contemporary grievances

Things keep recurring in the novels of Ben Lerner — snatches of conversation, lines of poetry, Lerner himself. But in The Topeka School, while things keep returning, something has also been lost. Lerner’s third novel reunites us with Adam Gordon, the protagonist — and Lerner surrogate — of his much acclaimed debut, Leaving the Atocha Station. Adam is a senior at Topeka High School in the late 1990s, an aspiring poet and champion debater (as was Lerner), whose parents are psychologists at the Foundation, ‘a world-famous psychiatric institute and hospital’ which treats just about everyone in the book. But rather than reprising the autofiction with which Lerner has become synonymous,

Thursday

Freddy Gray

The mesmerising mediocrity of Trump’s opponents

If you believe the headlines, President Donald Trump is in deep trouble. The great impeachment saga is gathering pace. House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff has been conducting closed-door interviews as part of his investigations into whether the President abused his executive power in his efforts to dig up dirt on his political rival, Joe Biden, the former vice president under Obama. Did Trump threaten to withhold military aid to Ukraine unless its government told him what he wanted to hear? More leaked transcripts this week suggest that he did. Gordon Sondland, a US ambassador to the European Union and a Trump ally, has now dropped his Commander–in-Chief in it

Friday

Tim Stanley

How Republicans became the anti-Islam party

Ilhan Omar will come up a lot in the 2020 US election. She’s part of the ‘Democratic Squad’ of congresswomen that Republicans hate, along with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib — but she outshines them all by being a foreign-born hijabi who supports boycotting Israel and is accused of immigration fraud. If Donald Trump goes after Omar, it’ll polarise Democrats around her and conservatives around him, which is the role that Islam seems condemned to play in American politics: a trigger word to whip up the base. It prompts the question, why are Trump supporters so scared of Islam? And are their fears justified? It’s easy to slot

Thursday

John R. Bradley

The story behind Donald Trump’s fake withdrawal from Syria

That noise you can hear is Donald Trump flip–flopping in the sand. Last week, American troops and dozens of tanks and armoured vehicles moved to occupy oil fields in Syria. The escalation came just half an hour after Trump had tweeted that all US soldiers had left the country and would be coming home. As so often, the President says one thing, then orders the military to do the other. On Twitter, Trump is ending the endless wars. In the real world, he is perpetuating them. Trump’s focus is not really Syria, of course. It is the presidential election next year, and his precious voter base. But he can’t seem

Thursday

James Delingpole

If we do get a good Anglo-American trade deal, we should thank Trump’s mother

In an uncharacteristic fit of almost-robustness, Culture Secretary Nicky Morgan has said she is ‘open-minded’ about scrapping the BBC licence fee and replacing it with a Netflix-style subscription service. Good idea. What would we actually miss if we didn’t subscribe? Not an awful lot in my view. Some people cite David Attenborough’s nature documentaries but I certainly wouldn’t now that they have become so obtrusively propagandistic. The problem with the BBC isn’t — and never has been — lack of talented filmmakers, wildlife camera crews, presenters, actors, writers or production teams. It’s that, from news to drama, the BBC’s woke politics now subsume and corrupt its entire output. Still, the

Thursday

Charles Moore

Donald Trump is key to Boris Johnson’s survival

There are so many problems confronting our polity this week that it is almost impossible to write about any of them. Between the time of writing and the time you read this, we could have agreed Brexit, destroyed Brexit, called an election, called a referendum, or achieved nothing at all. Here, perhaps, is one thing which can safely be pointed out. In almost any scenario, Boris Johnson has to worry about the Brexit party. In practice, this means worrying about Nigel Farage. Who, if so minded, could persuade Mr Farage to be amenable? Surely the answer is his friend Donald Trump. If President Trump is serious in his desire for