Joe biden

Wednesday

Ross Clark

The problem with Biden’s student debt plan

In Europe it is handouts to help pay our energy bills – even for people who could easily afford to pay them. In the US, it is student debts being written off. With remarkable speed the West is emerging into a new age of big – no, make that huge – paternalistic government. Today, Joe Biden announced that graduates who earn less than $125,000 a year, and who live in a household whose joint income is less than $250,000, will have $20,000 worth of student debt written off. For those who work in the non-profit sector, the military, or federal or local government, the write-off will be 100 per cent.

Thursday

Douglas Murray

Biden’s victories look a lot like defeats

Joe Biden’s week did not get off to a good start. When running for office in 2020 he repeatedly boasted that he was going to ‘shut down the virus’, not the country. And then in the space of a few days last week it looked as if he had managed to achieve his promise, just the opposite way around. The President appears to have shut down the economy while suffering from the virus. Despite being endlessly vaccinated, the President recently tested positive for Covid. And then last week he tested positive again. So he had a double dose. At the same time America had a double dose of something else:

Thursday

Freddy Gray

Is the world ready for another Trump presidency?

Is Donald Trump going to run in 2024? And if he does, will the world go even more completely crazy? These are questions that almost nobody wants to answer. Many of us are in denial. President Trump broke something in the global political psyche the first time round, which is why so many commentators struggle to admit the obvious: that, by the end of January 2025, Bad Orange Man could well be back in the White House, trolling the universe. The last, best hope of liberal sanity is that Trump will decide not to stand again. He is 76. He knows that running for the White House, and then being

Steerpike Steerpike

Biden in ‘I have cancer’ gaffe

You’re the American president on a visit to former coal plant in Massachusetts. You’re ostensibly there to deliver remarks about climate change. You’re facing criticisms for being out-of-touch, rambling and gaffe-prone. So what do you decide to do? Start suggesting you’ve got cancer in front of the world’s press! An implausible-sounding scenario perhaps but that’s exactly what bumbling old Biden did yesterday. In a speech delivered yesterday, America’s septuagenarian president mistakenly referred to Glasgow as part of England and appeared to suggest he currently has cancer. Whoops! In a long-winded address on global warming, Biden began to describe the harmful impact of emissions from oil refineries near his childhood home. He

Friday

Steerpike

Watch: Biden puts his foot in it (again)

Oh dear. It seems bumbling ‘Uncle Joe’ has done it again. Fresh from his Holocaust gaffe, President Biden has now decided to offend not one, but two allies, when he gave his thoughts on the Israel-Palestine conflict. On a visit to a hospital in East Jerusalem today, President Biden made remarks that were picked up by the travelling American press. He compared Israel’s contemporary treatment towards Palestine to that of Britain’s historic attitude towards Catholics in Ireland, saying that: …the background of my family is Irish American. And we have a long history not fundamentally unlike the Palestinian people, with Great Britain and their attitude toward Irish Catholics over the

Thursday

Paul Wood

Is Biden ready to let MBS get away with murder?

President Joe Biden will have only himself to blame if he feels a little uncomfortable this week when he sits down with the man who runs Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Mohammed ‘Bone Saw’ bin Salman (MBS). After the CIA accused MBS of ordering the murder of the dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi – dismembered with a bone saw – Biden said Saudi Arabia had ‘no redeeming social feature’ and should be made ‘a pariah’. This was a satisfying bit of moral posturing during a presidential election campaign, but costly now, in a world where Americans are paying $5 a gallon for gas and Russia is funding its war in Ukraine by

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

Shouldn’t we feel sorry for Hunter Biden?

Scandal is such a wonderful driver of human emotions. Just think of the number of things you get to feel in one go: horror, disgust, relief, superiority, guilt and glee, to name just a few. All these flooded through a portion of the American public again this week when a new video emerged of Hunter Biden. Hunter is the sole surviving son of President Joe Biden and it is uncontentious to say that he is a tortured soul. His mother and his one-year-old sister died in a car crash in 1972. Hunter and his older brother Beau were injured but they survived. Beau died of cancer at the age of

Charles Lipson

Biden is the emperor with no clothes

The emperor is naked. The public knows it, and they’re finally beginning to speak the obvious truth. The emperor, in this case, is President Biden. He took office with high hopes from voters and a promise to bring the country together. Those aspirations are dead. The public has lost confidence in Joe Biden – lost confidence that he can do the job, and lost confidence that he is even minimally competent. They certainly don’t think he has brought the country together (though they think Republicans share the blame for that). This sour mood hurts more than the President. It hurts his entire party, and will be extremely hard to reverse.

Tuesday

Freddy Gray

End of quote. Repeat the line. Joe Biden can’t go on

How much longer can the global disaster that is Joe Biden’s presidency go on? Surely there comes a point when the Democrats do what the Tory party did to Boris Johnson last week – declare enough is enough and force him out? The odds of Biden running for a second term are shrinking dramatically – no matter how many times he insists he will go on. The more pressing question is whether he can even hold on for the remaining two years of his first four. A miserable poll just published in the New York Times shows that only 13 per cent of Americans think their nation is on the

Sunday

Lionel Shriver and Freddy Gray

Lionel Shriver on mass shootings, gun control and American carnage

This is an edited transcript of a conversation between Freddy Gray and Lionel Shriver on The Spectator’s Americano podcast, which you can listen to here. Freddy Gray: Lionel, I feel a bit guilty asking you to talk about this, because I know you’ve become a kind of go-to person about mass shootings in America because you wrote a very significant novel – We Need to Talk About Kevin. You’ve written before about how awkward it is that every time there’s a mass shooting in America, people ask you to come on and talk about it. But in your book, the killer was using a bow, not a gun. So you don’t

Bill McMorris

After Biden, who?

Joe Biden is telling everyone he will seek re-election in 2024 – including those who don’t want him around. After Barack Obama gave him the cold shoulder at an April White House event, sources revealed to the Hill that Biden had told his former boss he planned to go for it in 2024. You get the sense the leak did not come from Obama’s camp. ‘I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else,’ Biden said at a Michigan rally in March 2020. ‘There’s an entire generation of leaders you saw stand behind me. They are the future of this country’. Every candidate sounds a conciliatory tone in victory, particularly when

Thursday

Matthew Lynn

The Biden Bust is here

A wave of government spending would reboot the economy. Fairer taxes would pay for restored infrastructure. Skills would be improved, productivity raised, and new digital champions would emerge. When Joe Biden was elected, he promised the most radical programme of economic reform since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s, and, to his army of cheerleaders at least, the American economy was about to be completely transformed. But hold on. Only a year into his term, the reality is very different from the promises. In reality, the Biden Bust has arrived. Donald Trump may have been personally obnoxious, but he bequeathed an economy in perfectly good shape The US GDP figures

Tuesday

Freddy Gray

Will Hunter Biden finally bring down his father?

It was meant to be a kumbaya moment for the Democrats. Barack Obama, the still revered 44th President, would make his first formal visit to Joe Biden’s White House – and sprinkle some of his leadership magic over a struggling administration. Barack and Joe, the old duo, were to mark the 12th anniversary of what is thought to be their greatest legislative achievement: the passing of the Affordable Care Act. Unfortunately, last week’s event ended up reminding most Americans that the current President may be better off in an Expensive Care Home. The videos from the day were painful to watch: Biden bumbled around helplessly as his former boss worked the

Monday

Peter Van Buren

Stopping the next Hunter Biden laptop cover-up

Hunter Biden reportedly paid over $1 million in back taxes for income he never claimed, but which was found in his emails — the ones from his laptop that had been dismissed by the mainstream media as Russian disinformation. The FBI is conducting an ongoing investigation into Hunter’s business activities based on the contents of the laptop. It was only the Bureau’s use of the laptop as evidence that finally forced the New York Times this month to admit that what it said last year was false. See, as the New York Post broke the story that a laptop full of Hunter Biden’s files indicated a potential pay-for-play scenario involving

Monday

Steerpike

Six Biden-Harris howlers on Ukraine

It’s 15 months since President Biden swept into the White House, where, judging by his current poll ratings, his tenure might not be a long one. Of course, many in his party never thought the 79 year-old would run again in 2024: the problem for Democrats is that his deputy Kamala Harris is even more unpopular. Still, while the pair’s record in office is mixed since taking over, America has clearly had a ‘better war’ in Ukraine than they did in Afghanistan, eight months ago. Nevertheless, the two have both made a number of gaffes which, had they been made by Biden’s predecessor, would almost certainly have had far greater publicity and

Thursday

Matt Purple

Biden’s war: does he know what he’s doing?

Anyone could see that Joe Biden veered off-script during his big speech in Poland. ‘For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,’ he said of Vladimir Putin, which sounded a lot like a cry for regime change. Luckily for him, though, and perhaps for world peace, Leon Panetta, a former secretary of defence under Barack Obama, was on hand to explain the comment away: ‘I happen to think that Joe Biden – you know, he’s Irish – really has a great deal of compassion when he sees that people are suffering.’ To be sure, to be sure. Still, even if Biden’s threat to Putin can be wholly attributed to

Monday

Matthew Lynn

Is Biden trying to crash the economy?

A war is raging in Ukraine. Inflation has risen to a 30-year high and may have started to spiral out of control. The country is on the brink of recession, and a gaffe-prone leadership is under increasing fire. You could be forgiven for thinking that President Biden has more than enough problems right now. But he is about to make his already miserable term in the White House a whole lot worse. How? By adding a stock market crash, and the destruction of America’s best companies, to the already worryingly long list of self-inflicted disasters. It is hard to think of a single tax that could be worse for growth

Sunday

Freddy Gray

Could Biden gaffe us into world war three?

‘I want your point of view, Joe,’ Barack Obama once told his vice-president Joe Biden. ‘I just want it in ten-minute increments, not 60-minute increments.’ Obama understood Biden’s biggest flaw – his mouth runs away with him. He’s a verbal firebomb always threatening to go off. Last night, oops Biden did it again. As he rounded off his fiery speech in Poland against Vladimir Putin and autocracy, he concluded: ‘For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.’ The onset of senility had reduced the dangerousness of Biden’s loquacity The White House, in what is now a familiar routine, issued a quick clarification. The President was not demanding ‘regime change’

Friday

Ross Clark

Was Biden’s chemical weapons threat a gaffe?

Did Joe Biden mean to threaten Russia with a chemical weapons attack? That seemed to be what he implied at yesterday’s Nato summit when he said Russia using chemical weapons in Ukraine ‘would trigger a response in kind’ from the US. To respond ‘in kind’ means to respond in the same way – i.e. by firing chemical weapons back at Russia. Given that the US committed to destroying its remaining stockpiles of those munitions when it signed the Chemical Weapons Convention in 1993, it would seem very unlikely that this is what Biden meant. Or indeed, that he would have any chemical weapons to unleash in the first place. There

Wednesday

Stephen Daisley

Why is Biden copying Obama’s mistakes with Iran?

There was a picture taken on Tuesday that says more than just a thousand words. The photograph was snapped in Sharm el-Sheikh and shows Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett seated either side of Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. According to the Egyptian president’s office, they met to discuss ‘the repercussions of global developments, especially with regard to energy, market stability, and food security’ but ‘they also exchanged visions and views on the latest developments of several international and regional issues’. That’s a very wordy way of saying ‘Iran’. Obama and Biden’s foreign policies are indistinguishable Iran is what this meeting