Donald trump

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 7 June 2018

Home A third runway at Heathrow Airport was approved by the cabinet; £2.6 billion was earmarked for compensation and soundproofing. Northern Rail brought in a temporary timetable that removed 165 train services a day until 29 July, but scores more trains were still cancelled; all trains to the Lake District were cancelled for a fortnight. Thameslink and Southern also wallowed in incapacity. Petrol prices rose by a record monthly sum of 6p in May to an average of 132.3p a litre. The government reduced its holding in the Royal Bank of Scotland from 70.1 to 62.4 per cent, losing £2.1 billion on selling the shares which it bought to save the

Armond White

Go West

Kanye West is more than halfway in to the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame — if his politics don’t block the way. This extraordinary rapper-producer first won over a worldwide audience with the 2004 anthem ‘Jesus Walks’, disrupted hip-hop’s bling-bling materialism with the us-vs-them challenge of his Jay-Z collaboration Watch the Throne, and then released the confounding My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, which rightly became the most highly acclaimed hip-hop album this century. He went on to make controversial public art with his ‘New Slaves’ video, which was projected in 66 locations around the world (called Orwellian by admirers and dumbfounded detractors). With news-making political statements occasionally interspersing that résumé, West

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

The Spectator Podcast: Putin’s Losing Game

In this week’s episode, we talk about Russia’s hidden fragility, and ask, is Putin surviving on luck? We’ll also be getting to the bottom of Trump’s tariffs – is there really no rhyme or reason to them? And last, with all that’s going on in the world, is kindness what we all need more of? The Russia World Cup is due to start in a week, and as the streets of Moscow are cleaned up in preparation, things seem to be going pretty well for Putin’s Russia. Russia has been asked to fill the void left by Trump in the Iran nuclear deal, Russophile parties are wreaking havoc to the

Thursday

Jacob Heilbrunn

The sorry state of Trump’s affairs

 Washington, DC It was a petulant Donald Trump who appeared at a White House press briefing on Tuesday with the South Korean president, Moon Jae-in. When a reporter asked if Trump had confidence in the deputy attorney-general, Rod Rosenstein, given the latest complicated twists in the investigation into collusion with Russia, Trump snapped that Moon didn’t want to hear about it. But it won’t be easy for Trump to dismiss these questions as piffle for long. Even as the old boy tries to pose as a great statesman, tales of his past shenanigans keep mounting. The latest is an exposé in New York magazine that suggests the Republican fund-raiser Elliott

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

Bonkers

John Kelly, the White House Chief of Staff, has a way with words. During the invasion of Iraq in 2003 he was asked if the Marine Corps forces he led might be defeated by the strong Iraqi army defending Baghdad. ‘Hell these are Marines,’ he said. ‘Men like them held Guadalcanal and took Iwo Jima. Baghdad ain’t shit.’ Now he must cope with Donald Trump. At the end of last month it was reported, from an anonymous source, that he had remarked that the President was ‘becoming unhinged’. Before midnight that day, Mr Trump tweeted that ‘the Fake News is going crazy’ and ‘are totally unhinged’. Eleven minutes later, another

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Roll up, psychos

Describe the Night opens in Poland in 1920 where two Russian soldiers, Isaac and Nikolai, discuss truth and falsehood. Next we’re in Smolensk, 2010, where some strangers scream at each other about a hire car. Next Moscow, 1931 (or 1937 — the surtitles are illegible), where Nikolai, now a top soldier, asks Isaac, now a successful screen-writer, to audition his wife for a movie. Isaac improvises a scene with the wife and then fondles her bottom as they perform a weirdly sexless dance that is supposed to symbolise something, but it’s unclear what because everything that preceded the dance was indecipherable. Then the interval. I looked for enlightenment in the

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Jerusalem Notebook | 17 May 2018

‘Trump Make Israel Great’ reads the banner on the deserted hotel next to the new American embassy in Jerusalem. Unlike most of the world population, Israelis regard the US President as a big improvement on Barack Obama. In government, his decision to move the embassy here from Tel Aviv has elevated him to near godlike status. ‘We are very lucky that the strongest kid in the classroom is on our side in this crazy school,’ is how Yoav Gallant, Israel’s housing minister, puts it. There is evidence for Trumpophilia all over the place. Signs proclaiming the US President a ‘friend of Zion’ are dotted around the Holy City and ‘God Bless

Thursday

Taki

High life | 10 May 2018

New York Talk about high life this is not. I smelled a rat long ago, but then the scent got weaker and weaker. Now it’s back — and stronger than ever. I’m talking here, of course, about the Saudis, the Qataris and the son-in-law who has also risen, Jared Kushner. Almost a year ago the Saudis issued an ultimatum to Qatar to meet its list of demands or face a blockade by Saudi-allied countries in the Gulf. All sorts of accusations were made and the Qataris were given 24 hours to comply. While the 300,000 Qatari citizens froze en masse, the couple of million non-Qatari migrant workers went about their

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 10 May 2018

The point behind the argument about the Iran nuclear deal goes beyond precise nuclear facts. It is like the row over SALT II when Ronald Reagan succeeded Jimmy Carter as US President in 1981. SALT (the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty) was not formally junked, but it did not operate because, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan at the end of 1979, the Americans felt the necessary trust was absent. Better times, including the coming of Mikhail Gorbachev, allowed Reagan to pursue negotiations which culminated (under his successor, the first George Bush) in START I (the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) being signed in 1991. By then, the United States and its

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

The Spectator Podcast: Trump vs Iran

What comes after the end of the Iran nuclear deal? Is Donald Trump an expert diplomat worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize, or a maniac let loose? Why don’t ethical millennials care about the moral cost of their drug habits? And are emojis ruining children’s abilities to communicate? Find out about all this and more in this week’s Spectator Podcast. On Tuesday, President Trump announced his decision to take the US out of the Iran nuclear deal. The decision has come despite appeals from Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron, and even our own Boris Johnson, for the US to stay in the deal. Christopher de Bellaigue writes in this week’s magazine

Friday

Ella Whelan

Michelle Wolf’s speech exposed the hypocrisy of the press

Writer and comedian Michelle Wolf has hit the headlines for her routine at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday. Comedians were invited to take the piss out of the American political establishment and the press, and Wolf did not disappoint. Her jokes ranged from Trump using pussy-grabbing to find loose change to Senator Mitch McConnell getting his neck circumcised. No one was let off the hook. Wolf joked that she could talk about Russia but, addressing the ‘liberal media’ in the room, said that ‘I’ve never really wanted to know what any of you look like when you orgasm’. She poked fun at Hillary for losing Michigan, as well

Thursday

Taki

High life | 3 May 2018

New York ‘What do we do with these men?’ thundered a New York Times headline. It was followed by a frothing-mouthed, overwrought hissy fit worthy of an Oscar in the overacting category. The men in question are the usual suspects: media people and Hollywood types who have been accused by the weaker sex of sexual harassment. Oh boy! Is this place going nuts or what? Spring is here, the girls are in their summer dresses — not really, they all wear leggings — and all one hears about is the bestiality of the stronger sex. The question is: who is next? The bookies are having a field day. ‘Under what

Thursday

The Spectator

Rocket men

After spending most of his presidency posing a nuclear-armed hothead, Kim Jong-un is now presenting himself as a man of peace. ‘I came here to put an end to the history of confrontation,’ he said on his historic visit to South Korea. Which might be so. But his real agenda may be to gain acceptance for North Korea’s status as a nuclear power: holding an olive branch in one hand, and a seven-kilotonne bomb in the other. The visit to the south comes ahead of his trips to meet Donald Trump, who has referred to Kim Jong-un as a ‘little rocket man’ and tweeted a photo boasting that his own nuclear

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 26 April 2018

Home No. 10 insisted: ‘We will not be staying in the customs union or joining a customs union.’ The undertaking came after a defeat for the government on the matter in the House of Lords and before a vote in the House of Commons. The government proposed two alternatives: one being a ‘customs partnership’ in which the UK would collect tariffs on the EU’s behalf on goods coming from other countries, and the other being a ‘highly streamlined customs arrangement’. Jacob Rees-Mogg called the notion of a customs partnership with the EU after Brexit ‘completely cretinous’ and remarked that Theresa May, the Prime Minister, ‘is carrying out the will of

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 19 April 2018

A week ago I plucked my eight-year-old grandson Oscar from the bosom of his rumbustious young family and took him on an orange aeroplane to Nice, and from there up into the hills of the upper Var to spend 11 days in our breeze-block shack. His second visit. On his first, last August, the temperature hit 45 degrees Celsius and we were roasted alive. This one, though, was relentlessly cold and wet and the mop and bucket were in constant use in the living room. Confined to barracks, we played Dobble, a card game akin to snap, but more complicated and requiring sharper wits. Several games of Dobble revealed beyond

Dominic Green Dominic Green

A bipartisan bungler

Americans forget their corruption in order to savour their innocence. When Republicans and Democrats are struggling to find ways forward and the presidency is all over the road, the combat of ex-FBI director James Comey and reality television star Donald Trump is almost heartening. For, despite partisan division and the rise of China, the drama of the American psyche survives. The puritan grips the porn-ographer, and the spirit of the civil servant contends with the flesh of the president. The excitement over last Sunday’s ABC News interview with Comey was almost as much as that around Michael Woolf’s Fire and Fury. So much has happened since that worthy mishmash of secondhand

Michael Moorcock

Lone Star individuality

The subtitle of Lawrence Wright’s splendid God Save Texas (‘A Journey into the Future of America’) would be alarming if I found it entirely convincing. It’s hard to imagine a future where the Catholic Texan spirit of individualism would seriously overwhelm Yankee Puritanism, however mutated. In New England it’s about hard-earned old money shrewdly invested. In Texas it’s about striking it rich on a hunch, and new money rashly spent. There are contradictions in Texas which allow you to select almost any argument you like from her. She is beautiful and she is barren; corrupt and honourable. Whatever you want to say about her, she will supply abundant evidence. Texans

Friday

Katy Balls

Theresa May is losing the PR battle on Syria

After Theresa May’s Cabinet agreed on the ‘need to take action’ in Syria, it seems a matter of when, not if, military strikes against the Assad regime take place. But the strikes won’t be the end of the matter politically. Labour have been quick to stir up trouble, with Jeremy Corbyn describing the government as ‘waiting for instructions’ from Donald Trump. The British government is also struggling to keep up with a Russian propaganda barrage. Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has rejected claims that there is evidence proving the Assad regime is behind the alleged attack – instead claiming its specialists have evidence that it had been faked: ‘We have

Thursday

Cindy Yu

The Spectator Podcast: War Games

In this week’s episode, we talk about the escalating situation in Syria and ask, would counter strikes actually help? We also look into ‘drill’ music, a genre of rap popular with the London youth most vulnerable to gang activity. Last, we talk Spice Girls and Beyoncé – what is modern ‘girl power’? President Trump is facing a major foreign policy test in the Middle East. Reports came in over the weekend of a brutal chemical weapons attack in Douma, Syria. The most likely suspect is President Assad, or as Trump likes to call him, ‘Animal Assad’. But, Paul Wood asks in this week’s cover, how certain can we be that

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

En marche

Remember the never-ending handshake? It was 14 July 2017, Bastille Day, and Emmanuel Macron and Donald Trump opened their formal relationship as leaders of their respective countries by interlocking palms and refusing to let go. They kept at it for a good 30 seconds. They didn’t release even as Trump began kissing Macron’s wife. It looked like the beginnings of a bitter rivalry. But Trump and Macron weren’t clashing. They were flirting. The night before, the two men — plus wives — had had an intimate dinner in the Eiffel Tower, and they bonded. A great bromance had been born. For all his posturing, Macron treated the US President like