Donald trump

Thursday

Toby Young

America’s shootings aren’t Trump’s fault

The BBC’s flagship news and current affairs programme wasn’t in any doubt about who to blame for America’s latest bout of mass shootings. Newsnight’s report began with footage of Donald Trump addressing the faithful at a rally. ‘This is an invasion,’ he warned, referring to the refugees massing on the Mexican border. ‘When you see these caravans starting out with 20,000 people, that’s an invasion.’ It then cut to Emily Maitlis in the studio. ‘That was in May,’ she said. ‘Today, Donald Trump called on Americans to condemn racism, bigotry and white supremacy.’ She added that the President had made these remarks ‘with a straight face’ and ‘with autocue precision’

Nicky Haslam

Designer’s Notebook

‘Volcanic temper… suspicious of everyone… irritability, mood swings… terror stalking the shadows… devastating collapse of Europe’s economy… rampant insecurity, unbridled hypochondria…’ Trump? No, it’s Henry VIII, according to Robert Hutchinson. But the ‘king’ across the water is uncannily like the Tudor tyrant; the discarded wives, the wenching, the rival heirs, the fawning, the flattery, the broken treaties. Palm Beach is his jousting ground; Mar-a-Lago his gaudier Nonsuch. As I was writing a review of the very wordy Dressed: The Secret Life of Clothes by Shahidha Bari, who believes that every stitch we put on has some deep inner meaning, up she pops on a radio programme to say that fashion

Thursday

Andrew Bacevich

Diplomacy by deference

Iran’s seizure of a British-owned oil tanker transiting the Persian Gulf has let loose a fresh round of media war chatter. Yet should another Persian Gulf War actually occur, who would benefit? Not America, that’s for sure. The central theme of present-day US policy regarding Iran is deference. Nominally, US policy is made in Washington. Substantively, it is framed in Riyadh and Jerusalem, with the interests of the United States figuring only minimally in determining the result. I am not suggesting that President Donald Trump supinely complies with secret marching orders from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Indeed, MBS and Netanyahu are both

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Is China really the enemy?

China is a nation with values deeply at odds with the West. The Chinese spy, steal and bully. They don’t really care about human rights yet are getting disgustingly rich, and — well, I’m sure you’ve heard the rest. The western media likes to depict China as the new enemy — both morally and politically. It seems as if a new iron curtain is coming down, with my country (and family) on the wrong side of the divide. Of course, Britain is my country too: I’ve lived here longer than I did in China. But I have to confess that this fundamental ‘clash of values’ — described in such vivid

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 18 July 2019

Home In a televised debate between the rivals for election by members of the Conservative party as their new leader (and hence prime minister), Boris Johnson said of the Irish backstop, ‘It needs to come out,’ and Jeremy Hunt said that it was ‘dead’. This was described as ‘significant’ by Dominic Grieve, who said he was ready to bring the government down rather than see a Brexit without any agreement. Theresa May, the Prime Minister, said that she would continue to sit as an MP after her resignation on 24 July. Ffordd Pen Llech in Harlech was recognised as the steepest street in the world, at 37.45 per cent beating

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

Hatred is in the eye of the beholder

There’s a broad mainstream consensus on both sides of the Atlantic: Trump’s tweet telling four hard-left minority Congresswomen to ‘go home’ to the crime-ridden countries they’re from, when three of the four were born in the US, was racially inflammatory and staggeringly ill-judged.  But the first question that would be raised in the UK if a British politician committed such a gaffe is the last question raised in the US: was that post ‘hate speech’? The First Amendment to the American constitution guarantees five basic freedoms, including freedom of speech, and these principles ought rightly to pertain in other democracies such as Britain. (I’m sorry, but we’ve one-upped the Brits

Thursday

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 11 July 2019

When I last talked to Sir Kim Darroch, he was a slim young private secretary, so it was a long time ago; but I can categorically state that President Trump is wrong to call him ‘wacky and a very stupid guy’. His particular sort of mandarin ‘Rolls-Royce mind’ intelligence does, however, amount to a form of stupidity when confronted with Mr Trump. Intellects like Sir Kim’s are slower than those of ordinary mortals to spot Trump’s communicative genius. They cannot see that it keeps him ahead of the game. It is really remarkable that a 73-year-old man can be such a master of forms of social media which did not

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

The ties that bind

It seems a fitting end to an ill-fated premiership. As Theresa May prepares to leave No. 10, a major quarrel erupts between her government and its most powerful ally, the United States of America. Leaked diplomatic cables show Sir Kim Darroch, the British ambassador in Washington, calling President Donald Trump ‘inept’, ‘insecure’ and ‘uniquely dysfunctional’. The funny thing is, the words in his memo are just as applicable to Theresa May’s leadership. Within days, Sir Kim resigns. But every diplomatic crisis is a political opportunity, as President Donald Trump well understands. He even spelled this out in one of his Twitter rants. ‘The good news for the wonderful United Kingdom is

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Boris’s most important appointment

After being backed by a majority of Tory MPs, Boris Johnson now looks set to win over party members by an even larger margin. Surveys suggest he will hoover up between two thirds and three quarters of the vote. A Tory leader with such a mandate would, normally, start his premiership with huge amounts of political capital and be able to dictate terms to their opponents within the party. But Johnson will have to watch his back from the moment he crosses the threshold of No. 10. Most new prime ministers arrive with a decent majority. Johnson will be clinging to power from day one. Even with the DUP, the

Deborah Ross

The invisible man | 11 July 2019

The Brink is Alison Klayman’s documentary portrait of Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former chief strategist (he shaped the ‘America First’ campaign, proposed the Muslim travel ban, etc.) and former boss of Breitbart News, the place where unsuccessful white men go to whine. The film follows him for 15 months from the autumn of 2017 as he attempts to organise far-right European parties into a ‘populist nationalist’ movement, and you may wish to look away when Nigel Farage smarms all over him as it’s not a pretty sight. (I’m a delicate flower, so could only watch from behind my hands.) But it is not insightful and, alas, utterly fails to capture

Thursday

James Delingpole

Go, West

My plan to cut the BBC out of my life entirely is working well. Apart from the occasional forgivable lapse — that excellent Margaret Thatcher documentary; Pointless and Only Connect because they’re the only programmes we can all watch together as a family — I find that not watching or listening to anything the BBC does is making me calmer, happier and better informed. I’m also learning stuff about myself that I never imagined possible. Like the fact that I have a massive man crush on the rap star Kanye West. Though I’ve long been a fan of his albums, I went right off him as a person a few

Friday

Cindy Yu

On Trump, President Xi had no idea what was coming

When Donald Trump took the US presidency in 2016, China was wary, but hopeful. Here’s was a businessman for whom money was important, and China could offer economic growth for both countries through trade. But three years on, Trump has waged a trade war against China and boycotted its national tech champion, Huawei. The Wall Street Journal‘s Editor at Large, Gerard Baker, writes this week’s cover piece, and argues that this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the containment policy that America is taking against China. He joins Isabel Hardman on the podcast. We also hear from China expert Yu Jie from Chatham House, who

Thursday

The Spectator

Ignoring Iran

Crises in the Gulf and Conservative leadership elections come around with unnerving regularity. It is not unknown for both to coincide — that happened in 1990, when Margaret Thatcher was overthrown in the lead-up to the first Gulf War. On that occasion, drama on the domestic front did not smother Britain’s response to the international crisis — unlike now. It is bizarre to have a US president threatening to ‘obliterate’ Iran while our Foreign Secretary hardly bothers to respond, preferring to pose with fish and chips and Irn Bru on the campaign trail. Jeremy Hunt did intervene briefly a fortnight ago, when he described Jeremy Corbyn’s refusal to accept that

Gerard Baker

Chasing the dragon

It will be all smiles when Donald Trump meets President Xi Jinping this week in Osaka at the annual meeting of the G20: a show of comity for the cameras and financial markets. The two are midway through one of the biggest trade wars that the world has seen in recent years, with the US imposing tariffs on $250 billion of imports from China and Beijing retaliating in kind. It’s possible that some sort of truce will be reached, as it was when the two men met late last year. The next stage of escalation — additional tariffs, or worse — may be postponed again. Don’t be misled. The tariff

Thursday

Toby Young

Boris Derangement Syndrome

I switched on the radio last week and caught the tail end of a discussion about the Conservative leadership election. The presenter, who seemed to be in a highly agitated state, was talking about one of the contenders: ‘A man who’s lied to both of his wives, all of his mistresses, every constituent, every employer, every party leader, every colleague, every interviewer, every journalist he’s ever encountered, he’s not just lied to them, he’s actively agitated to deceive them…’ On it went. Even by left-wing shock jock standards, it was unhinged. He could only have been talking about Boris Johnson. In the US, Trump Derangement Syndrome, or TDS, is a

Roger Kimball

Trump’s re-election campaign never stopped

 New York The great ceremonial game of poll dancing is gearing up for its quadrennial orgy. Headlines across the fruited plain bark out numbers and percentages in mystic confabulation. Votaries sway back and forth as the modern magi of the press repeat the results of this contemporary incarnation of taking the auspices. Was any medieval or ancient devotee of numerology more besotted by the task of squeezing significance out of numbers than our pollsters and their marks, or clients, are today? I doubt it. During the First Punic War at the naval battle of Drepana in 249 bc, the commander Publius Claudius Pulcher grew impatient when the sacred chickens failed

Thursday

Simon Schama

Diary – 13 June 2019

It was when the kindly folk at the Theatre Royal Haymarket said ‘You’ll be in Paul Whitehouse’s dressing-room’ that it sunk in: the epic biting off of more than I could chew. But there was no going back. In a couple of hours, I would be on stage — and this time, I’d sing. Exploring Paul’s stuff didn’t do much to keep the stage fright at bay: comedy-friendly hats and break-a-leg cards were in massed array. Kindly messages from my friends featured the words ‘gosh’ and ‘brave’. A couple of months ago, the stunt had seemed a bright idea. I have a new book to push, Wordy, one of those

John R. MacArthur

A rotten party

 New York For leftist anti-Trumpers like me, the Mueller report was initially a godsend, though not for the more obvious reasons. I belong to a rarified group that hates liberal moaning about Russian ‘interference’ in the 2016 election: we ridicule the claim that Vladimir Putin and his henchmen stole the presidency from Hillary Clinton because we know that Clinton herself and neo-liberal Clintonism were the real causes of her demise. I often tell outraged Democrats to calm down and stop watching Russiagate obsessives such as Rachel Maddow on TV. Trump, I insist, won the electoral college thanks to 80,000 or so angry former Democrats in three states — many thrown

Thursday

The Spectator

Playing chicken | 6 June 2019

Why is it that free trade, which almost everyone agrees is good when conducted with other European countries, suddenly becomes something to be feared when it is proposed with the United States? What is it about American chicken which means that Britons who eat it happily enough when they are on holiday are supposed to fear it when it is imported? And if Americans can offer world-class, well-priced medical services to Britain through the National Health Service, how is that a threat to our social fabric? On his state visit to Britain this week, President Donald Trump reiterated his desire to do a ‘comprehensive’ trade deal with Britain. Given that

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 6 June 2019

Home President Donald Trump of the United States made a state visit to the United Kingdom, avoiding protesters by arriving at Buckingham Palace by helicopter. He brought quite a few of his family, visited Westminster Abbey and was given halibut and lamb at a state banquet. Proposing a toast, the Queen said: ‘After the shared sacrifices of the second world war, Britain and the United States worked with other allies to build an assembly of international institutions to ensure that the horrors of conflict would never be repeated.’ Trump joined the Queen in ceremonies to commemorate D-Day. Earlier, Trump had swapped insults with Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, and,