Donald trump

Saturday

Ed West

Star Wars is the perfect analogy for the decline of America

Star Wars is a generational thing and older people think my cohort are mentally subnormal for enjoying it, but it’s been such a part of my childhood that I’m prepared to just set aside that voice in my head telling me it’s nonsense. So I was sad when I came out of the cinema earlier this week, having watched the best Star Wars film in at least 36 years, to hear that Carrie Fisher had died. Rogue One is an interesting example of my theory of Ottomanism. In the most recent Star Wars films the human rebels have been overtly multiracial while the baddies are almost to a man of

Emily Hill Emily Hill

‘The woman is a disaster!’: Camille Paglia on Hillary Clinton

We’re closing 2016 by republishing our ten most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 1: Emily Hill’s interview with Camille Paglia, in which the iconoclastic professor labels Hillary Clinton a ‘disaster’ Talking to Camille Paglia is like approaching a machine gun: madness to stick your head up and ask a question, unless you want your brain blown apart by the answer, but a visceral delight to watch as she obliterates every subject in sight. Most of the time she does this for kicks. It’s only on turning to Hillary Clinton that she perpetrates an actual murder: of Clinton II’s most cherished claim, that her becoming 45th president of the United

Friday

Brendan O’Neill

The sneering response to Trump’s victory reveals exactly why he won | 30 December 2016

We’re closing 2016 by republishing our ten most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 2: Brendan O’Neill’s blog post in which he argues that the response to Trump’s victory in the US election reveals exactly why ‘The Donald’ won in the first place If you want to know why Trump won, just look at the response to his winning. The lofty contempt for ‘low information’ Americans. The barely concealed disgust for the rednecks and cretins of ‘flyover’ America who are apparently racist and misogynistic and homophobic. The haughty sneering at the vulgar, moneyed American political system and how it has allowed a wealthy candidate to poison the little people’s mushy,

Thursday

Taki

High life | 29 December 2016

What a great year this has been, what a good mood I’m in, why, it’s almost like being in love. The year 2016 will be seen as the worst ever by many patients of Dr Klinghoffer, the famous German psychiatrist who treats those suffering from the extreme distress of post-electoral disappointment syndrome, and a man about to make a fortune treating the poor dears. There are many Brits under the Herr Doktor’s care, and his clinic, situated near Ossining, New York, resembled a British retreat for broken-down thespians following 23 June of this annus mirabilis. Now more American voices have been added, and when I last spoke to Dr Klinghoffer

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 29 December 2016

New Year’s Day is the most depressing of holidays. It doesn’t celebrate anyone or anything worth celebrating. It simply marks the passage from one year to the next, something so predictable and uninteresting that it’s hardly worth mentioning. Yet people see it as a great opportunity to start again, to turn over a new leaf, to make times better and happier than before. It’s an odd moment in which to be optimistic, when the winter is deepening and the debts incurred over Christmas are waiting to be paid. But nothing stops millions from greeting this non-event with wine and song and gaiety as the clock strikes midnight. New Year’s Eve

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Positively Trumpian

This being the time of year for it, you’re probably thinking what form your New Year New You will take. You know — the reinvention that we’re all encouraged to go in for from 1 January. Well, I have a corker. It’s huge. It is nothing less than the programme created by Donald Trump’s spiritual mentor, and look where that got him. Before reading this formula for success, I did wonder how it was that Mr Trump got as far as the presidency; now the only wonder is that it took him this long. The self-help book I have in mind is written by Mr Trump’s favourite pastor, Norman Vincent

Bill Kauffman

Looking homeward

 Batavia, New York The presidential campaign just ended was mercifully lacking in the ghostwritten platitudes with which Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan lull readers of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations to sleep. Hillary Clinton’s only memorable utterance was her defamation of one quarter of the electorate as a ‘basket of deplorables’ — a curiously clumsy locution that effectively conveyed her contempt for American prole-dom and sunk her candidacy. Donald Trump’s best line was his dismissal of the foamingly bellicose Republican senator John McCain, who has built a career on his stint as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. ‘He’s not a war hero,’ said Trump. ‘I like people

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Will disgruntlement prevail again in 2017? Who knows, but at least 2016 was quite fun

Most of my predictions for 2016 were wrong; so let’s not revisit them. But I was right, in January, to identify as a theme of the coming year an evident gulf between ‘the reinvigorated and the demoralised’. In small business sectors and provincial towns, as well as in the attitudes of millions of citizen voters here and abroad, the divergence between optimism and disgruntlement grew as the year went on. And when it came to elections and referendums, it was the downbeat that prevailed. So here we are, fearful of the craziness of Trump, the disintegration of Italy, the triumph of Marine Le Pen and the non-resolution of the Brexit

James Delingpole James Delingpole

2017 will be one long vampire scream from the liberal elite

I’ve been looking at my predictions for 2016 made this time last year. It’s extraordinary — don’t check, just trust me — all 12 of them came true. If you had placed a £1 accumulator bet on my forecasts that Britain would vote Brexit, Trump would be elected US President, and that Scarlett Moffatt off Gogglebox would win I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here, you wouldn’t need to read The Spectator any more — just the Forbes Rich List, where you’d come just between Warren Buffett and Carlos Slim. 1. 2017 will be one long vampire scream from the liberal elite. That moment when Christopher Lee finally gets

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Deplorable entertainment

Buried Child is a typical Sam Shepard play. The main character, Dodge, is a brain-damaged alcoholic cripple stuck in a Midwest shack with a half-witted xenophobic wife shrieking at him from the coal cellar. The wife makes an early speech about her son who ‘married a Catholic whore’ and got stabbed to death by her on his honeymoon. This sets the tone for the play. Every character is a shrill, chippy barbarian and every speech is an exercise in tragicomic one-upmanship. The audience for Shepard’s work consists of social voyeurs who want to gawp at the underclass from a safe distance. The play purports to be a mystery but the

Wednesday

Piers Morgan

What price a First Lady?

What price a First Lady? ‘If I offered you $10 billion,’ I once asked Donald Trump, ‘but you can’t have sex for the next ten years, would you take the deal?’ ‘Not even with your wife?’ Trump replied. ‘Definitely not with my wife.’ ‘I meant my wife!’ ‘No, not even with your wife.’ ‘No, I’d absolutely take my wife.’ So there you have it: Melania Trump is worth at least $10 billion. This is an extract from Piers Morgan’s diary. The full article can be found here. 

Thursday

John R. MacArthur

Yes, Trump is grotesque. But I would never have voted for Hillary

We’re closing 2016 by republishing our ten most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 10: John R. MacArthur on why spoiling his ballot paper was a better option than voting for Donald Trump – or Hillary Clinton  New York ‘Does this mean we have to vote for Hillary?’ asked my wife. It was early morning 16 March, and the queen consort of the Democratic party had seemingly sewn up the presidential nomination — a coronation promised years ago by her king but thus far denied by unruly subjects. As I scanned the headline in the New York Times, ‘Clinton and Trump Pile up the Delegates’, I felt sick at heart.

Stephen Bayley

What Donald Trump’s taste tells us about him

Elsie de Wolfe was the pioneer interior designer whose motto was ‘plenty of optimism and white paint’. She banished brown Victoriana from America. And her work on Henry Clay Frick’s private apartments introduced new American money to old French furniture. If only she were with us today. For his first television interview as president-elect, Donald Trump appeared, imperiously, sitting on a golden throne in the style of Louis Quinze. My vision may well have been blurred by circumstances beyond, but I think there were period-incorrect wall and ceiling paintings on classical-allegorical themes in the background. All of this on cantilevered decks behind mirrored glass about 200 metres above Fifth Avenue.

Saturday

Lionel Shriver

A rash hothead in the White House is a problem to trouble us all

Novelists can’t merely tell cracking tales. We’re supposed to save the world. At the University of Kent, a student implored me to inscribe The Mandibles with instructions for ‘how to keep this from happening’ — for the feverish young man now vowed to devote his life to preventing my new novel’s debt-fuelled near-future financial collapse. And I thought I was just doing a book signing. I wrote, ‘To keep this from happening, pay your bills. To cash in on this happening, get as deeply into debt as possible.’ The next student proffered a tiny spiral notebook, in which I was to jot ‘three things that are really important’. In desperation, I

Friday

Rob Crilly

Trump Grill could be the best representation of America

I have a confession to make. I go to Trump Tower in New York a lot. It’s an easy jaunt for a New York-based hack: where better to chat with Trump supporters than in its golden lobby or with opponents outside its golden doors? Maybe you’ll spot a celebrity like Kanye West or, if you are really lucky, Nigel Farage. And occasionally the place becomes the story itself, whether it’s about the expense of the secret service renting an entire floor to provide security for the next president, or this week when a sniffy restaurant review – headlined ‘Trump Grill could be the worst restaurant in America’ – prompted a miffed

Thursday

Rob Crilly

Donald Trump is going back on his promise to ‘drain the swamp’

Donald Trump has a method for making his Cabinet picks. Parade the contenders in and out of Trump Tower and its waiting TV cameras. Leak and Tweet their performance ratings (‘very good meeting’). And then, once the suspense has reached something approaching a reality TV show, announce the hire on social media. And as the administration of the president-elect takes shape, it is also abundantly clear that Trump has a type. Let’s call them the G-men. Because they are mostly men, and mostly Goldman, generals and gazillionaires, as one arch critic put it. On Tuesday, Rex Tillerson was named as Trump’s pick for Secretary of State, the latest super-wealthy businessman to join

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

‘Putinites on the web’ are the new ‘Reds under the bed’

Wounded Remainers in Britain and the Hillary set in the US love banging on about ‘post-truth politics’. Lies are everywhere, they say, falling from Trump’s weird mouth, plastered on the side of Brexit buses. And apparently these lies invaded voters’ minds and made us do the unimaginable thing of voting against the EU and failing to vote for Hillary. We was hoodwinked by falsehoods! All of which would be a tad more convincing if it wasn’t for one thing: it’s actually the Remainer and Hillary cliques that have gone full post-truth, even descending into the cesspit of conspiracy theory. Yesterday in the House of Commons, Labour MP Ben Bradshaw did

Tuesday

Anne Jolis

Donald Trump is doing more to undermine himself than any Democrat

America may need to ‘vote again,’ says former CIA operative Robert Baer – preferably in a plebiscite not orchestrated by Vladimir Putin. The spy-turned-author spoke to CNN on Saturday about the latest reports of Kremlin skulduggery to elect Donald Trump. While there is no evidence that hackers fiddled with electronic voting systems or ballot-counting machines, the CIA has concluded with ‘high confidence’ that Russian-backed hackers were actively out to sink Hillary Clinton, according to unnamed officials speaking to the Washington Post and the NewYork Times. If true, the reports add motive to mischief already known. In October the Department of Homeland Security said all 17 US intelligence agencies (yes, 17) are ‘confident that the Russian Government directed the recent

Saturday

Rob Crilly

Not all Muslims are despairing at a Donald Trump presidency

The immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s surprise election victory brought a slew of comparisons with 9/11. In New York, my liberal friends waking up on 11/9 said they experienced the same range of emotions. You will have seen the stories of commuters weeping on the subway, colleges offering counselling to students and a general sentiment that life would never be the same again. Therapists reported an overwhelming sense of grief among their clients as they tried to process their world turned upside down. Robert de Niro chipped in, telling the Hollywood Reporter: ‘I feel like I did after 9/11.’ Whether or not the comparison was fair or even in good taste, the fact was

Thursday

Mary Killen

Celebrity Dear Mary

From Rt Hon Gisela Stuart MP Q. I keep getting into arguments with people about what being a Labour MP is all about. I used to think that being in government was better than being in opposition. They now tell me I’m wrong and that the years since 2010 have been better and purer than the flawed years from 1997 to 2010. Help. Are they right and am I wrong? A. As a Roman Catholic German Brexiteer Labour MP for a Birmingham constituency, you should have grown used to being in a minority. If you would rather be in power than out of it, the obvious solution is to switch