Donald trump

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Unemployment up, bathers banned and Corbyn’s brother arrested

Home The United Kingdom seemed reluctant to come out of its lockdown. ‘We are likely to face a severe recession, the likes of which we haven’t seen,’ said Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Unemployment rose by 856,500 in April to 2.1 million. More than two million claims had been made for the grant scheme for self-employed people. The government was estimated to be paying ten million of the UK’s 27.5 million private-sector workers. At quiet railway stations, wardens supposedly trained in crowd control stood around talking to each other. Police in England and Wales issued 14,444 fixed penalty notices for breach of the coronavirus regulations up to 11

Tuesday

Steerpike

Watch: Trump says he takes hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19

As scientists around the world race to find a cure, treatment or vaccine for Covid-19, the US president Donald Trump revealed that he had been doing his bit of medical experimentation this week. At a press conference last night the President revealed that he had been taking the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine every day for a week and a half, to ward off the virus. Trump said that ‘a lot of good things had come out about’ the drug, that frontline workers were using it, and that there was no harm in taking it, even if it didn’t stop the disease. Hydroxychloroquine has been touted as a potential treatment for Covid-19

Thursday

Simon Ings

Taxonomy reaches celebrity heights

Heteropoda davidbowie is a species of huntsman spider. Though rare, it has been found in parts of Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and possibly Thailand. (The uncertainty arises because it’s often mistaken for a similar-looking species, the Heteropoda javana.) In 2008 a German collector sent photos of his unusual looking ‘pet’ to Peter Jäger, an arachnologist at the Senckenberg Research Institute in Frankfurt. Consequently, and in common with most other living finds, David Bowie’s spider was discovered twice: once in the field, and once in the collection. Bowie’s spider is famous, but not exceptional. Jäger has discovered more than 200 species of spider in the past decade, and names them after politicians,

John R. Bradley

Oil on troubled waters: the US-Saudi alliance is crumbling

Donald Trump said in October 2018 that the Saudi royal family ‘wouldn’t last two weeks’ without American military support. Last week, on the back of the collapse of the US fracking industry, he finally acted on his long-standing anti–Saudi instincts. He ordered the immediate withdrawal of two patriot air defence batteries, sent to defend the kingdom’s oil infrastructure in September after a missile attack blamed on the Iranians. He also recalled hundreds of US troops and said the US Navy presence in the Persian Gulf would be scaled back. Leaving with the ships were dozens of US fighter jets, which would have been crucial for defending against any full-scale Iranian

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Neil Ferguson quits, Rory Stewart drops out and Boris names his baby

Home The government put its mind to the puzzle of how to get people back to work. Draft advice was for office workers to avoid sharing staplers and to face the wall in lifts. An Ipsos Mori poll found that 61 per cent of people would feel not very comfortable about using public transport. Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, appeared at a daily coronavirus press conference and said: ‘We have come through the peak, or rather we have come under what could have been a vast peak, as though we have been going through some huge Alpine tunnel, and we can now see the sunlight and the pasture ahead of

James Forsyth 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