Donald trump

Joe Biden talks a lot about restoring America’s standing in the world. But the truth is that if he now has the chance to reshape America’s relationships for a new era, it’s because Donald Trump has already done the awkward stuff. The question is: can Biden and his team swallow their collective pride and build on Trump’s legacy, or will vanity and partisanship send the American Atlas tumbling to his knees? Trump won the 2016 election by forcing the difficult questions on to the national agenda. In office, he developed an alternative to the spent consensus of the 1990s. Call it vulgar realism, the lowest common denominator of American interest.

Last year, in the cigar bar of an opulent London hotel much favoured by visiting Arabs, an interesting conversation took place. My friend was rich enough to have two private jets and claimed to be doing private shuttle diplomacy between Israel and one of the Gulf states. Smoke curled around our heads and a young Qatari in Gucci trainers passed by with a woman my friend assured me was a Russian prostitute. My friend’s phone was out now and he was on a video call with a man he said was a senior official in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. He asked him about a drone strike on Saudi Arabia’s two

The news that Iran’s top nuclear scientist, Mohsen ‘father of the bomb’ Fakhrizadeh-Mahabadi, met his end in a hail of bullets near Tehran today comes as no surprise. As with so many things these past four years, this is all about Trump. Whoever carried out the hit, it is all but certain that Trump gave it the nod. Once again, he is trying to put a stamp on the Middle East that Biden will find difficult to scrub out. His actions would hardly be without precedent; Obama, Clinton and Reagan all made last-gasp moves in the region to shape it in their image. But none of these Presidents were anywhere

Donald Trump is out of the White House in less than two months. But he has scores to settle before he vacates his chair to Joe Biden, the man who defeated him at the ballot box earlier this month. First, it was the firing of multiple officials at the Pentagon who were deemed by Trump to be insufficiently loyal to his agenda. Next came the replacement of those officials with ultra-loyalists who would implement his orders without question or reservation. And now, Trump is levying his exclusive right to pardon people of federal crimes – a power unique to the presidency. On November 25, when most in Washington, DC were

‘We’re going to be back in the game,’ our presumptive and somewhat previous new president tells us. ‘It’s not America alone.’ But America was never out of the game under Donald Trump and never alone. Look who is also back in the game: Tony Blinken, Barack Obama’s deputy secretary of state, will be Biden’s secretary of state. Jake Sullivan, once one of Hillary Clinton’s closest aides, is going to be Biden’s national security adviser. John Kerry, the disastrous diplomat who gave us the Iran nuclear deal, is Biden’s climate emissary. And it was all going so well. Trump might not have built his wall, but he had the first successful

As Donald Trump continues to insist that he actually won the 2020 presidential election, speculation has grown about how the president will spend the next four years. Trump’s political future isn’t over, even if he did become the first president to lose re-election since 1992. Trump is a notoriously prickly man who can make three different decisions on one topic in a span of an hour. Not even his closest advisers and family members know what he is going to do after vacating the White House in about two months. Trump is reportedly mulling a 2024 presidential run to avenge a loss he considers fraudulent; one campaign adviser told the

Donald Trump’s increasingly outrageous attempts to contest the results of the US presidential election were given their absurd symbol early on with what one commentator called The Four Seasons Total Landscaping fiasco.  A week ago, with the decisive votes being counted in the last, critical states in the election, with Trump making a forlorn attempt to persuade Americans he had been cheated out of victory, someone on the campaign blundered. They were supposed to book the Four Seasons in Philadelphia for a press conference by the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. Instead, they booked Four Seasons Total Landscaping, a gardening company in an industrial area of north-east Philly, somewhere out