Donald trump

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

Paul Wood

Pax Russica: as Trump abandons Syria’s Kurds, Russia is ready to expand its empire

While American troops were hurriedly leaving north-eastern Syria, a young female Kurdish politician called Hervin Khalaf was pulled from her car and executed by the side of the road. Actually, the Kurdish media said she was raped and then stoned to death. They blamed one of the Arab militias being used by Turkey in its invasion. A grim video posted online shows a man holding a Kalashnikov nudging her body with the tip of his boot, as you would a dead animal. The video has not been authenticated and the militia accused of doing this says it was miles away at the time. But in Khalaf the Syrian Kurds have

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Brexit approaches, Extinction Rebellion protests and Donald Trump tweets

Home After a telephone conversation between Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, a Downing Street spokesman said she had made clear that a withdrawal agreement with the EU was ‘overwhelmingly unlikely’; Mrs Merkel had insisted on Northern Ireland staying in the Customs Union, which the Democratic Unionist party called ‘beyond crazy’. Donald Tusk, the President of the European Council, tweeted that Mr Johnson was playing a ‘stupid blame game’.There was great excitement over a message sent to James Forsyth of The Spectator, generally thought to have come from Dominic Cummings, the Prime Minister’s chief adviser. ‘We’ll either leave with no deal on 31 October or

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Even Donald Trump is tweeting about Spectator USA

We’ve just launched the US edition of The Spectator and the reaction so far has been great. Americans can be quite gloomy these days, but business optimism runs in their blood. They seem enthused about The Spectator’s transatlantic appeal. I met no end of Rod Liddle fans who thrilled at the sight of his name on the first US cover. Various people told me that America was crying out for a magazine with our sense of humour. But not everyone gushed. At our launch party in Washington DC, Anne Applebaum, the historian and journalist, asked how on earth we expected to make ‘the most quintessentially English magazine’ work in the US.

Thursday

Taki

What you can tell about a man from his choice of underwear

New York It’s Indian summertime and the living is easy. There hasn’t been a cloud above the Bagel for two weeks and the temperature is perfect. But the noise of cement mixers and construction everywhere is unbearable, and there is gridlock while the world’s greatest freeloaders are in town for the annual UN assembly. Despite the great weather, the place feels joyless, the media full of dire warnings about safe spaces and racism. There’s something very wrong here. Pessimism rules an anxious, depressed and angry people. Well, I’d be depressed too if I took American media and its pundits seriously. And speaking of depressed and angry buffoons, a halfwit called

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: A Supreme Court ruling, Labour’s messy conference and Donald Trump’s ‘impeachment’

Home Eleven justices of the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that in advising the Queen to prorogue parliament ‘the Prime Minister’s advice to Her Majesty was unlawful, void and of no effect’. This was because the prorogation had ‘the effect of frustrating or preventing, without reasonable justification, the ability of parliament to carry out its constitutional functions’. The court was not ‘concerned with the Prime Minister’s motive’. The court cited the Case of Proclamations (1611) to show that the limits of prerogative powers were determined by the courts. The judgment overturned the decision of the High Court that the prorogation should not even be considered by the courts. Lady Hale, the

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Why try to impeach Donald Trump?

Democrats have long criticized Donald Trump for his addiction to Twitter, his rolling-news attention span, the backlit narcissism of his reality-TV presidency. But the most media-addled people in public life are, in fact, Trump’s critics. Nobody is quicker to reach the most hysterical conclusions. The anti-Trump show must go on, just like the president’s Twitter feed, never mind the details. Take Nancy Pelosi’s announcement this week that the Democrats are forming a committee to look into whether Trump should be impeached because of his dodgy negotiations with Ukraine. This is Big Trump News: impeachments always are. It’s also a foregone conclusion. There can only be one verdict. The Democrats now

Thursday

Lionel Shriver

Britain’s political system is broken. America’s isn’t

American liberals perceive it as a jarring inconsistency: my opposition to Trump and support for Brexit. Especially outside the UK, these two phenomena are perceived as identical twin expressions of an alarming ‘populism’, whereby the animals take over the zoo. I’m one of the curiously few political voyeurs who think the American electorate’s preference for an incompetent president and the British electorate’s preference for leaving a power-hungry erstwhile trading bloc have little in common. Dizzying events in the UK this month bring out one vital distinction in relief. In 2016, certainly Donald Trump’s unanticipated victory triggered an immediate consternation among America’s power brokers that rivalled if not surpassed the British

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Why 80 per cent of young people in this Macedonian town have turned to posting ‘fake news’

It’s such a relief to turn on the radio and hear the voice of Neil MacGregor. That reasoned authority, his deep knowledge of history and how things have come to be as they are, his measured common sense and ability to see round an argument or story. He’s like the voice of how things used to be, when the world was not so topsy-turvy and the news reports made sense. His series, As Others See Us, returns to Radio 4 this week (produced by Tom Alban), taking him this time to Singapore, the USA, Australia, Poland and Spain to talk to people there about Britain’s past connections, present woes and