Us politics

What fun the internet is having now that Vladimir Putin has finally met Donald Trump. Social media is teeming with jokes, gifs, and memes about the two big dawgs of global politics finally coming together. It’s the great bromance of the populist age.  Underneath the hilarity, however, there remains intense suspicions about the relationship between Trump and Putin – it is now widely accepted, even if the evidence is still hotly disputed, that Russia ‘hacked the election’ in order to ensure Hillary Clinton’s defeat. Trump’s meeting with Sergei Lavrov in May was considered highly nefarious, especially after Trump accidentally gave away a state secret, apparently just to show off. Reports

G20 summits are usually dreadfully dull affairs, but this week’s global chinwag in Hamburg should be refreshingly feisty. No conference with Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan in attendance could ever be described as boring, and although President Trump’s first meeting with Putin will provide the main photo opportunities, there are plenty of other potential flashpoints – not least the toe-curling relationship between Trump and his host, Angela Merkel. Merkel will discuss trade and climate change with Trump – two subjects about which these two leaders seem destined to disagree. No US President has been so dismissive of climate change; no US President has been so hostile to German

The deadline imposed on Qatar to agree to the demands made by the Saudi-led Sunni coalition has passed without Doha caving in. This was to be expected — the main stipulations, among the 13 made, had no chance of being accepted. The deadline has now been extended by 48 hours and the Kuwaitis are trying to mediate. The Saudis and their cohort meanwhile are threatening more sanctions against Doha and possibly even extending  them to countries which continue to trade with Qatar. Qatar may also be expelled from the Gulf Cooperation Council. There is, for the time being, no threat of military action. To recap: Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt

What are we to make of Donald Trump’s intervention in the case of Charlie Gard, the desperately ill boy whose painful story has been in the news so much in recent weeks. Earlier today, the President took to Twitter – where else? – to say: If we can help little #CharlieGard, as per our friends in the U.K. and the Pope, we would be delighted to do so. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 3, 2017 The President’s generous albeit somewhat vague message sends a clear signal to the world: Donald Trump has a heart. For that reason, it will invite cynicism. This is a reality TV news move from

Was that a touch of gloating I detected last night as I watched the news on French television? The lead item was Donald Trump’s acceptance of President Macron’s invitation to attend the Bastille Day commemoration in Paris next month. It’s always a prestigious occasion and this year marks the centenary of America’s entry into WW1. Hence the invitation to the American president which came in a telephone conversation where the pair also agreed on a joint military response against the Syrian regime should Bashar al-Assad launch another chemical attack. That Trump has accepted at relatively short notice – Macron only issued the invite on Tuesday – suggests that The Donald is

Donald Trump is now referring to himself in his copious Twitter messages as ‘T’. Unlike the real Mr. T, who starred in the popular 1980s American television series The A-Team, however, President Trump is unable to muscle his way to victory. Quite the contrary. Thanks to majority leader Mitch McConnell’s sudden decision yesterday to abandon a vote on the Republican health care bill that would strip some 22 million Americans of coverage, Trump is maintaining a perfect batting average of zero on passing any major legislation. After seven years of huffing and puffing about the perfidies of ObamaCare and of promising to repeal Obama’s signature initiative immediately, it’s starting to look

Forget Russia. Georgia, as the song has it, should be on Donald Trump’s mind. A special election for the House of Representatives takes place there on June 20. The state’s 6th district congressional seat has been comfortably in Republican hands for decades. A hitherto obscure Democrat by the name of Jon Ossoff is leading by seven points in the polls and has raised a record 24 million dollars. He is thirty-years old and has never held office before. In 2013 he earned a Master of Science degree from the London School of Economics. If he wins, Republicans across the nation will be profusely mopping their brows in anxiety. An Ossoff triumph would

As awkward silences go, this was a doozy. James Comey, then FBI director, was sitting alone in an excruciatingly uncomfortable dinner with a newly-elected President Trump. The two uniformed Navy stewards serving food and drinks had discreetly withdrawn. ‘I need loyalty, I expect loyalty,’ the President supposedly said, according to Comey’s notes. Comey recalls: ‘I didn’t move, speak, or change my facial expression in any way during the awkward silence that followed. We simply looked at each other.’ At the end of the dinner, Trump is said to have returned to what seemed to Comey like the whole purpose of the dinner. ‘I need loyalty,’ he said, in Comey’s notes.

Yesterday’s announcement by Donald Trump that the United States is withdrawing from the Paris Agreement is truly historic. The Paris accord was the closest the Europeans had come to getting the US to accepting timetabled emissions cuts in the now quarter century saga of UN climate change talks. The first was in the 1992 UN climate change convention itself, rebuffed by George H.W. Bush; the second was in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, signed by the Clinton Administration, effectively vetoed by the Senate and repudiated by George W. Bush. Now, Donald Trump has dashed their hopes for a third and possibly final time. It’s understandable that the European reaction is one of fury

When Donald Trump announced he was pulling the United States out of the Paris climate agreement, he fulfilled what is presumably the dream of George F. Will, one of America’s pre-eminent climate change deniers. Yet Will is not fond of Trump. In fact Will, America’s Tory manqué, is manifestly unhappy about the ascension of Donald Trump to the White House, where he is rapidly rubbishing everything that the modern conservative movement has stood for in recent decades. At least this is what Will would have you believe in his latest column in the Washington Post, entitled ‘Conservatism needs another Buckley’. Will means William F. Buckley, Jr., the man whom Evelyn

Donald Trump’s verdict on his audience with Pope Francis – ‘fantastic meeting’, ‘honor of a lifetime’ – may disappoint those who were expecting a showdown. The Pope is supposed to be Trump’s ‘antithesis’, ‘the anti-Trump’, his ‘polar opposite’ and so on and so on. But in the end the meeting was merely awkward, to judge by the photos, and the discussion was mostly confined to safe issues (life, peace and liberty good, persecution of Christians bad). People are making much of the grumpiest Pope photo, but Francis often looks bored and uneasy when he meets important dignitaries. He tends to cheer up around the poor and the sick.  If the

In 1981, when President Reagan lifted the grain embargo on the Soviet Union, Washington Post columnist George F. Will went on to complain that the Reagan administration ‘loved commerce more than it loathed communism’. Well, yes. American conservatives have, more often than not, put commercial interests before ideological ones. Sometimes the two even coincide. For all his bluster about the dangers of Islam, Donald Trump seemed to have a dandy time in Saudi Arabia these past few days before he jetted on to Israel. The $110 billion arms deal that he signed with the Saudis, coupled with their promise to invest in Blackstone Group to boost American infrastructure projects, offers the