Donald trump

Thursday

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,

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Children of the revolution

As the left sinks into psychosis, what remains? The answer is sugar, profanity, snacks and toys. Protest now resembles Clown Town, a dystopic toddler play barn near Finchley Central. To mark the American President’s trip to London this week, the Donald-Trump-in-a-nappy balloon rose again. There was also a Donald Trump robot. It sat on a toilet in Trafalgar Square and farted. ‘The fart we couldn’t get from him,’ said its creator, Dom Lesson, ‘so we had to use a generic fart’. Meanwhile, a man mowed a penis shape into a lawn to protest against climate change. He was hoping that Trump might see it from his aeroplane. The fashion, when

Bruce Anderson

Let the wine do the talking

We had all said everything there was to say about Brexit a hundred times over. So the conversation took different routes. We discussed D-Day, Philip Hammond, clichés and President Trump. D-Day: what an awesome concentration of men and materiel — what a magnificent expression of military, national and moral resolve. A youngster made the sort of point beloved of smartass youngsters down the ages. What about the Eastern Front; what about the Kursk salient? Should all that not put D-Day in a diminished perspective? No, he was told, for two reasons. Without D-Day, the Soviet empire would have extended a lot further west, reaching the Rhine if not indeed the

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

Don’t use up all your rhetoric at once

Saturday night, a guest commentator on Sky News sputtered that Donald Trump has ‘normalised white supremacy’. Once the American President has floated off to the horizon after his three-day visit to the UK as an inflatable media punching bag, we will doubtless have been subjected to much further denunciation of this diabolical, fiendish, authoritarian, hate-filled, lying, misogynistic, crass, criminal, moronic, stupid … sorry, that’s a bit too close to ‘moronic’… then, you know, totally crummy leader who is also… also… fat! Sadiq Khan made a brave superlative play in labelling Trump a ‘fascist’. Now, that one’s hard to top  — which won’t have stopped fellow detractors from trying. Welcome to

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Operation Hunt

When a head of state flies in for a state visit, it’s traditional for the Foreign Secretary to lead the welcoming committee. When Donald Trump landed at Stansted airport in Air Force One, Jeremy Hunt was left waiting on the tarmac for a while. Hunt assumed that a tired Trump was ‘probably just powdering his nose’ after a long flight. It transpired, however, that the Commander-in-Chief was busy tweeting his denunciations of Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London (‘a stone-cold loser’) — thereby setting the news agenda for the day. ‘I found out almost in real time because the President told me about his tweets,’ the Foreign Secretary says, when

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

How to save the Tory party

How do you feel about the standard of political debate in this country? I ask this question at the very moment two blimps are flying over London. The first attempts to depict President Donald Trump as a giant baby in a nappy and is the property of people who do not like Donald Trump; the other attempts to depict the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, as a kind of transvestite dwarf and is the property of people who do not like Sadiq Khan. Both groups habitually call each other fascists, doing a passable impression of Harry Enfield’s Kevin the Teenager. Both groups, I would venture, are irredeemable narcissists with the collective

Tuesday

David Alton

The anti-Trump protesters forget where Britain’s true friendships lie

American politics – like our own – is more polarised than ever. More than perhaps any other president in living memory, Donald Trump has divided opinion. To his supporters, he can do no wrong. None of the old political orthodoxies seem to apply. To his detractors at home and abroad, his presidency is an embarrassment, arousing expressions of hatred rarely seen in Western politics. But we would be foolish to muddle a dislike of a particular President with our historic and deep commitment to an enduring, strong, British-American relationship. Even more foolish to presume that everything he says or does has no merit. This week we will commemorate our shared sacrifices

Sunday

Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: This country needs another referendum and I’d vote Remain, says Sam Gyimah

Sajid Javid – Our priority ‘must be law and order’ The Tory leadership race is becoming a crowded field, with thirteen candidates now setting out their stalls as they aim for the premiership. Andrew Marr spoke to two of the hopefuls, including Home Secretary Sajid Javid. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Javid wished to talk about boosting resources for the police if he attains the country’s highest political office: On #Marr, Home Secretary and Conservative Party leadership contender says that if he had got his way in cabinet there would be more police officers on the streets now https://t.co/OakG0Gu6Ro pic.twitter.com/4d1GnNbcKI — BBC Politics (@BBCPolitics) June 2, 2019 AM: If you’d had your own

Steerpike Steerpike

Trump pledges to “go all out” for a UK-US trade deal if Brexit talks fail

The message from the EU is clear: there will be no improvement to the deal rejected by Parliament. And if talks fail? Donald Trump today makes an offer: that the United States, the UK’s No 1 customer, is standing by with its own free trade deal. It needn’t take even a year, he says, as he’d go “all out” so Britain can do a lot more trade with the world’s largest economy. The EU’s deal, he says, is anyway ludicrous: the £39bn is too much money. And why, he asks, would the UK government agreed to a two-year moratorium on signing free trade deals? In an interview with the Sunday

Friday

Steerpike

Will Trump and Boris meet next week?

Trump and Boris; Boris and Trump – the two men have a lot more in common than funny hair, an appetite for women, and a magical ability to offend left-liberal sensibilities. But the hot question in Westminster at the moment is whether these two big beasts will meet when the American President visits London next week. Will they? Won’t they? The British press is teeming with reports that Trump and Boris are to meet privately, possibly at a meeting mediated by Nigel Farage. The new Special Relationship, populism-style. Mr Steerpike understands that, on the American side, officials are standing by to organise the meeting, but it hasn’t been formalised. Boris’s

Thursday

The Spectator

The Trump card

The day after Britain voted to leave the European Union, Donald Trump arrived by helicopter at Turnberry, his golf course in Scotland. The financial markets were in crisis and David Cameron had resigned in a panic. The Dutch Prime Minister, Mark Rutte, said that Britain had ‘collapsed: politically, monetarily, constitutionally and economically’. The then candidate (still not even party nominee) Trump put it differently. ‘You just have to embrace it,’ he said. ‘It’s the will of the people. I love to see people take their countries back.’ Perhaps his advice should have been taken more seriously. Huge numbers of people, including many Americans, think that Trump is unfit for the

Robert Hardman

Trumped

The Queen has seldom had more holes in a state banquet seating plan. The leader of the opposition, the shadow foreign secretary, the Speaker and the leader of the Liberal Democrats have all ostentatiously refused ‘Her Majesty’s command’ to attend her banquet in honour of Donald Trump next week. The fact that the dinner is in honour of our greatest ally — and in the week we celebrate D-Day — seems to matter less than virtue points on social media. Few will appreciate the irony of this petty posturing more than the Queen herself. For it is that same tranche of the liberal elite who remain responsible for the worst

Thursday

Conrad Black

Diary – 23 May 2019

I owe my return to these pages to the pardon I have received from the President of the United States. When he called me, he referred to my ‘miraculously shrinking crime’ of 17 counts, to 13 (including racketeering), to four, to two; and to the quantum of my alleged transgressions from $400 million to $60 million, to $6 million, to $285,000 (which was approved by independent directors and published in the company’s filings). The President stressed that the White House counsel and his legal staff had analysed the legal material and concurred that I received ‘a bad rap (and) an unjust verdict’. The companies we spent 30 years building descended

Taki

High life | 23 May 2019

Goody goody gumdrops! The Donald has pardoned Lord Black and I couldn’t be happier. Conrad got a bum deal and spent three and a half years behind bars for charges I always believed to be phoney, most of which were overturned. Never mind. One can’t get back the years wasted in a cell for as good a mind as Conrad’s, but one does emerge from the pokey stronger. The Big Bagel Times reported the Black pardon in a manner that can only be described as constipated. Black is a conservative, which is a red flag to envious lefties. But there’s something else. I have spoken to medical experts about the

Christopher De Bellaigue

Iran alone

On 20 May, Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, predicted that Donald Trump would fail to subdue Iran just as Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan had failed before him. That Alexander burned Persepolis to the ground and Genghis and his descendants wrought devastation before colonising the Persian plateau doesn’t connote defeat in the Iranian long view; neither the Macedonians nor the Mongols were able to extinguish Iran’s vigour and creativity, which reasserted themselves as soon as the invaders had moved on or been assimilated by the superior civilisation around them. ‘Iranians have stood tall for millennia while aggressors all gone (sic),’ was how Zarif concluded his aspersion on American

Paul Wood

Donald Trump vs British spies

The Daily Telegraph this week has a ‘scoop’ about the UK government giving permission for the Mueller inquiry to talk to former MI6 officer Christopher Steele about his evidence, which said Donald Trump was compromised by the Kremlin. The Telegraph story certainly sets the mood for President Trump’s state visit to Britain in eleven days’ time, and has some important new details, but it is not quite an exclusive. I wrote in The Spectator a year ago that Mueller’s team had been in the UK in late 2017 to question Steele, a meeting that was set up ‘through official channels’. Nevertheless, one of the sources I quoted said that in