Donald trump

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Trump’s victory, Kemi’s shadow cabinet and footballer killed by lightning

Home Kemi Badenoch, the new leader of the Conservative party, appointed a shadow cabinet. She made Robert Jenrick, whom she beat for the leadership, shadow justice secretary; Dame Priti Patel, shadow foreign secretary; Chris Philp, shadow home secretary; Mel Stride, shadow chancellor. Alex Burghart was given Northern Ireland and the Cabinet Office, with Laura Trott at education, Edward Argar at health and James Cartlidge at defence. Badenoch had been elected leader by 56.5 per cent of the 95,194 members’ votes (compared with the 57.4 per cent for Liz Truss in 2022), in a turnout of 72.8 per cent (compared with the 82.2 per cent in 2022). The Pitt Rivers museum

Niall Ferguson

Not even close: how Trump confounded the pundits

It was supposed to be close. On the eve of election day, Donald Trump was up just 0.1 per cent in the RealClearPolitics polling average. FiveThirtyEight projected a tiny Trump advantage. PredictIt had Kamala Harris ahead. A celebrated pollster ran 80,000 simulations, and Harris won 50.015 per cent of them, versus 49.985 per cent for Trump. And it made some sense to expect a close result. With the exception of Barack Obama’s victories, every US election since 2000 has been close. In two cases, 2000 and 2016, the winner didn’t win the popular vote, which before then hadn’t happened since 1888, when Benjamin Harrison beat Grover Cleveland. What makes American

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

American titan: inside Donald Trump’s remarkable political comeback

Palm Beach, Florida Donald Trump’s bid to take back the White House has been triumphant. It is a decisive victory and even Trump’s bitterest enemies should recognise him for what he is: an American titan, the most extraordinary politician of our time. He has just pulled off arguably the biggest comeback in US history – a feat greater even than Richard Nixon’s Lazarus-like return in 1968. To understand the scale of his victory, recall how weakly he began. On 15 November 2022, when Trump launched his now-triumphant bid to regain the presidency, he did not seem himself. His formal campaign announcement, delivered in the ballroom of his club in Mar-a-Lago,

Joan Collins

The night I was turned away from the Ivy

How the mighty can fall. I was overwhelmed by the approbation I had received for my one-woman show, Behind the Shoulder Pads at the Adelphi Theatre. Standing ovations would erupt several times during our performance. The roar of the greasepaint and the smell of the crowd were heady as my co-star (my hubby Percy) and I took our bows to wild applause and cheering. At the after-party at Rules, the oldest and most revered restaurant in London, we were inundated with admiration and support from everybody there. Two nights later, still glowing from all the attention, Percy, my daughter Katy and I went to the Curzon Cinema in Victoria, our

Wednesday

Kate Andrews

Lionel Shriver on the election that smashed identity politics

29 min listen

News that Kamala Harris has called Donald Trump to concede defeat means that the US election is all but over. Of the seven crucial swing states, Trump has so far won North Carolina, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Republicans have taken the Senate back from the Democrats. How did things go so badly for Kamala Harris? Is this the end of identity politics? Lionel Shriver, author and columnist, joins The Spectator’s economics editor Kate Andrews to reflect on what happened, and how she’s feeling now considering she disliked both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump as candidates.

Michael Gove

Badenoch’s Trump card

16 min listen

It’s happened. The scenario Labour politicians hoped would not come to pass is now a reality: Donald Trump is heading back to the White House. The official line from Labour is that everything is fine – they will work with whoever hold the office of president. That was the message from Keir Starmer at Prime Minister’s Questions as he congratulated president-elect Trump, and made a point of mentioning they had recently had dinner together. However – Kemi Badenoch focused on David Lammy’s past criticisms of Trump at PMQs. Is this a unique tension for the Labour government? James Heale discusses with Michael Gove and Katy Balls.

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

In defence of the liberal elite

You can hear it already. Rising from the tents of the dejected Democrat camp comes the whimper of self-reproach. It’s all our fault. Liberalism created this monster. There’s a distinct whiff of mea culpa in the air. Nostra culpa, nostra maxima culpa for the alienation of half the American people.  Donald Trump and his mob? It’s the fault of liberals for not feeling Trump-America’s pain. We fed their despair. Nigel Farage and his Reform party? Liberal Britain’s fault for being too stuck up to take Red Wall voters’ concerns seriously. Noses in the air (apparently), deaf to the woes of all those deplorables, and babbling about trans rights, preferred pronouns

William T. Vollmann

My friends who vote Trump

On 13 October 2024, I jaunted 20 minutes south down Interstate-5 to the Cosumnes Nature Preserve, whose toy swamp I used to visit with my parents and my daughter Lisa; they are all dead now, and so was my pleasure on that Sunday, thanks to a haze that looked merely dirty until I opened the car door and realised it was smoke again, more smoke, my eyes beginning to burn and my chest to ache: poor sad California! In recent years I sometimes wake up choking; is the house on fire? Oh, no, merely the planet. One of my homeless Republican friends (who stopped speaking to me once he realised

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Election night: early signs suggest it’s Trump’s to lose

21 min listen

Results are coming in across the United States, and the early signs (though it is still very early) look good for Donald Trump. At the time of recording, the betting markets are with him and the famous New York Times ‘Needle’ has swung to a ‘likely’ Trump victory. It is still much too early to call in an election that could drag on for days to come. No media outlet has called it for either candidate yet. To give you the latest updates from the States, Kate Andrews is joined by The Spectator’s team on the ground: Amber Duke is in battleground state Michigan; Matt McDonald joins from Washington DC,

Friday

Lionel Shriver

America’s impossible election choice

31 min listen

With just days to go until the American election, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump’s respective campaigns continue to ramp up, with rallies and gimmicks, and even advertising on the Las Vegas Sphere. Despite this, Spectator contributor Lionel Shriver declares she is America’s ‘last undecided voter’. Why? Is it the candidates’ characters that put her off voting for them, or the policies they represent? Lionel joins guest host, and fellow American, Kate Andrews to discuss further.  Produced by Megan McElroy and Patrick Gibbons.

Thursday

Lara Prendergast

Team Trump, astrologers versus pollsters & debating history

43 min listen

This week: Team Trump – who’s in, and who’s out? To understand Trumpworld you need to appreciate it’s a family affair, writes Freddy Gray in the magazine this week. For instance, it was 18-year-old Barron Trump who persuaded his father to do a series of long ‘bro-casts’ with online male influencers such as Joe Rogan. In 2016, Donald’s son-in-law Jared Kushner was the reigning prince; this year, he has been largely out of the picture. Which family figures are helping Trump run things this time around, and which groups hold the most influence? Freddy joins the podcast alongside economics editor Kate Andrews. What are the most important personnel decisions facing

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Team Trump: who’s in – and who’s out?

If Donald Trump wins back the White House next week, adopt the brace position. His opponents will go beserk, inevitably, and try once again to put him in prison. Yet Trump allies might go even more crazy as they scramble for influence. Trump claims to have learned from the mistakes of his first term. But what counts as a mistake depends on who you talk to. And it’s impossible to even guess at what a Trump Redux might mean without some sense of who he talks to these days – and who might shape and influence his agenda if he is elected. The awkward truth – for insiders anyway –

Christopher Caldwell

How quickly would Trump wash his hands of Ukraine?

For American politicians, all wars are two-front wars. There is a hot battlefield somewhere in the Middle East or the South China Sea, and there’s a political battlefield in Washington, D.C. The domestic contest is decisive. The same goes for Europe. With Joe Biden riding into the sunset and the presidential campaign drawing to a close, American interest in Ukraine is winding down, too. Europeans talking tough about ‘standing up’ to Russia had better be prepared to do so on their own. The next president will find the domestic pressure to scale back involvement in Ukraine irresistible Donald Trump’s campaign message, muddled though it is, bodes ill for the Ukrainian

Wednesday

Andrew Watts

Who do US psychics predict will win the election?

A week away from the American election, and the polls cannot tell us who will be president. But can they ever? A poll is, as the pundits always remind us, a snapshot of public opinion, not a prediction. Nate Silver himself said that anyone dissecting an individual poll is ‘just doing astrology’. So what predictions are actual astrologers making about the election? She looks relieved when she draws the High Priestess: a trump card, but possibly not a Trump card Under the electoral college system, nationwide data is not as important as predictions for the swing states, so I look for astrologers in the seven states which will decide the election.

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Still hunting for a Trump trade? Gold may have further to rise

Anyone hunting for a ‘Trump trade’ at this late stage has probably missed the US election bus. If you bought gold as a traditional safe-haven asset back in February at £1,600 an ounce, you’d be a smug 33 per cent up by now – though my man in the bullion market tells me the rise is by no means all to do with presidential hopes and fears. There has also been big buying from China possibly linked to moves, with Russia and other unfriendly actors, towards ‘de-dollarisation’ of world trade using a partially gold-backed alternative currency. Which means there could be more upside ahead, my man says, and gold ETFs

Thursday

Lara Prendergast

Cambridge in crisis, Trump’s wicked humour & the beauty of AI ceramics

53 min listen

This week: Decline and Fall – how our greatest universities are betraying students.Our greatest universities are betraying students, writes David Butterfield, who has just resigned from teaching Classics at Cambridge after 21 years. What went wrong? First, class lists of exam results became private, under alleged grounds of ‘data protection’, which snuffed out much of the competitive spirit of the university. Now even the fate of examinations hangs in the balance. Grade inflation is rampant, and it is now unheard of for students to be sent down for insufficient academic performance. For students, the risks have never been lower. ‘The pace of change over the past decade has been astonishing,

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

America’s last undecided voter

This is the last column I’ll file before the American presidential election, and I’ve dreaded writing it for months. (The next one, filed on election day itself, may prove impossible. Perhaps that’s when I’ll choose to share my recipe for parsley as a side vegetable.) Meanwhile, I’ve watched fellow ‘double haters’ squirm in print. There are two models for wrestling with this dilemma, one exemplified by Andrew Sullivan. The conservative commentator ‘came out’ in a September Substack newsletter – no, not in that dated sense: everyone knows he’s gay – in support of Kamala Harris, only to lavish the overwhelming majority of that column on what a ghastly candidate she

Wednesday

Freddy Gray

Is Labour interfering in the US election?

16 min listen

Keir Starmer can’t even fly to Samoa without another international British embarrassment breaking out. The latest is an angry accusation from Donald Trump’s campaign that Labour is committing the crime of ‘election interference’ in the United States. ‘The British are coming!’ screamed a typically camp Trump-Vance official press release last night. The campaign denounced Britain’s ‘far-left’ governing party for attempting to subvert democracy by sending almost 100 of its activists across the pond to sway American voters. But are the British actually coming? Freddy Gray speaks to James Heale, The Spectator’s political correspondent.  Produced by Oscar Edmondson. 

James Heale James Heale

Trump’s crusade against Labour

16 min listen

Donald Trump has made the extraordinary move to file an official complaint against the British Labour party for their volunteers campaigning for the Democrats. On this episode, James Heale talks to Katy Balls and the Financial Times’s Stephen Bush about what’s behind the Labour tradition of sending volunteers to other democracies, and why a second Trump presidency might be the defining theme of this Labour government. Produced by Oscar Edmondson and Cindy Yu.

James Ball

Conspiracy theories are as old as witch hunts 

To millions of people across America, Hillary Clinton sits atop a global network of satanic child-traffickers and is battling an underground resistance led by Donald Trump to maintain her malign influence. That is the core tenet of the QAnon movement, a conspiracy theory that originated in obscure corners of the internet before being seized upon by members of the Republican elite for their political advantage. Did the Clintons get rich while undertaking a life of public service? Absolutely QAnon is at the heart of Gabriel Gatehouse’s The Coming Storm. But the book begins with a conspiracy theory from centuries earlier, about witches in medieval Europe. The scrawls of the German