Trump

‘He has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.’ So once said Robert Gates, the former US defence secretary, of the now president Joe Biden. We don’t yet know if Biden is wrong about the current Ukraine crisis. We may be about to find out. His speech on Tuesday was at least competent, if not entirely coherent. ‘Who in the Lord’s name does Putin think gives him the right to declare new so-called ‘countries’ on territory that belongs to his neighbours?’ asked the president, in one of his now all-too-familiarly infirm attempts to sound firm. Yet Biden said his administration,

Whatever the West’s response to Russia’s attack on Ukraine’s sovereignty, the crisis demonstrates the limitations of western politics and policy across the board. If Vladimir Putin understands any demographic better than the Russian people, it is the governing class of the West: that Harvard-Oxbridge-Sciences Po axis of toweringly smug and practically interchangeable global-liberals who weep for international norms they weren’t prepared to defend. Their ideas and their sanctions are tired because they are civilisationally tired. Putin knows this, but none of the rival ideologies aiming to replace liberalism have anything better to offer. The failure of the global-liberals comes on many fronts but two of the most significant have been

Donald Trump famously boasted that he could ‘stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody’ and still not lose voters. That was back in 2016 and the following years proved his point. We are now in the winter of 2021, however, and the 45th president may at last have stumbled across a way to alienate his fan base — by endorsing vaccines. Covid is today the most hostile frontline in America’s all-consuming culture war. Resistance to the national vaccination drive has become the stickiest point. You are either pro-freedom or in bed with the Great Globo Pharma Conspiracy. Trump has adopted a more middle-ground position: encouraging people to take the vaccines while

So endeth the Trump presidency, not with a bang but a long and and predictably hilarious list of pardons and commutations. There’s 143 in total. It’s a last, parting gift for those of us who, in our sinfulness, have always regarded the rule of Trump as a sort of divine cosmic joke. The headline pardon is for Steve Bannon, his former chief strategist, who has been charged in connection with a scheme to launder funds from a crowdfunding campaign to ‘build the wall’ between America and Mexico. Trump reportedly dithered over whether to show clemency to Bannon. Publicly, the two men were not meant to have reconciled after falling out as

The figure of the ex-president is one of the most endearingly republican features of American politics. He who was the most powerful man in the world for as many as eight years turns overnight into a political fossil. He’s no longer the leader of his party, much less his country. Whether in his fifties or in his seventies, his battles are over. Now there’s just millions to be made on the corporate lecture circuit and publishing ghosted memoirs. If you’re Jimmy Carter, you build houses for the poor. If not, the spotlight returns only when you’re the opening act for your party’s next nominee at the convention. The only big

The fallout from last week’s storming of Congress by a pro-Trump mob of misfits and criminals has made the controversy over the infamous 2016 Access Hollywood tape look like a cakewalk. In the week since the worst political violence in Washington, D.C. since the British burned the White House and the Capitol Building in 1814, three cabinet secretaries have resigned in disgust over Donald Trump’s response to the melee. The White House is now stocked with dead-enders and hangers-on. Some of Trump’s most loyal allies, including former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, senator Lindsey Graham and former White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, have either denounced the president or

Book burning has not historically been considered an anti-fascist gesture. But in the wake of the storming of the Capitol Building in Washington DC by crazed Trump supporters, perhaps that’s set to change. This is the news that Republican Senator Josh Hawley, who indulged Trump’s conspiracy theories about the election being ‘stolen’, has had his book deal with Simon & Schuster terminated. It might not be a book-burning per se, but it’s certainly the 21st-century, polite-society equivalent of it. Simon & Schuster said it decided to pull Hawley’s forthcoming book, titled The Tyranny of Big Tech, in response to the ‘disturbing, deadly insurrection’ at the Capitol on Wednesday, and what

Senate runoffs are being held today in Georgia, due to a peculiar state law which says that if no candidate gets over 50 per cent of the vote (as neither seat did in November), the top two go on to a second round. It’s the first time ever that two Senate runoffs are being held on the same day – and the first time a runoff will decide which party controls the Senate. Polls close at 7pm local time (midnight in the UK), with results coming in the following hours, though the large volume of mail-in votes, as in November, could mean a close race remains uncalled for days. Both

Finally, some real evidence of electoral fraud. After weeks of claims and court dismissals, Donald Trump at last has solid evidence that this is a country where elected officials can pick up a phone and try to fix the results, and that, as the mobsters used to say, the fish rots from the head. Unfortunately for Trump, he’s the one on the line — and the hook. Call him The Codfather. The leaked recording of Trump trying to strong-arm Georgia’s secretary of state Brad Raffensperger confirms that The Godfather movies aren’t just an immigrant parable, but also a handbook to how to get on and up in American life. If