Us politics

I don’t like Donald Trump. I think his executive order barring travel from certain countries is rash and illiberal. And yet I cannot get behind the hyperbolic, Holocaust-citing protests against him. I cannot line up with the idea that he’s a uniquely bad president, possibly the worst ever; that he’s an ‘aberration’, ‘abnormal’, someone we must never ‘normalise’. I can’t do that for the simple reason that treating Trump as abnormal implicitly normalises that which preceded him. It whitewashes history. It forgives, or dilutes, the crimes of past politicians. The idea that Trump is different — scarily, historically different — is everywhere. ‘Don’t treat Trump as a normal president’, says

I am no fan of Donald Trump, but I can stand far enough back from his presidency to see that many of his critics are inadvertently already doing his re-election campaign for him. Today, Starbucks has reacted to Trump’s US travel ban on citizens of seven Middle Eastern and African countries by defiantly saying that it will go out and hire 10,000 refugees. Can the coffee chain not see that this is exactly the sort of thing which attracts America’s white poor to Donald Trump: the suspicion that they are being overlooked in favour of cheap labour from abroad? In Starbucks’ case it isn’t just a suspicion – it has

Of all the specimens in the Donald Trump menagerie—Charming Trump, Vicious Trump, Soapbox Trump—Subdued Trump may be my least favorite. It is true that the restraint my president showed during his press conference with Theresa May is in both our countries’ interests, but it is also uncomfortably artificial, like watching a space alien trying to cheer for a football game. Trump is who he is, an energetic insult comic at his most natural when he’s dissing the size of his political opponents’ hands. Watching him strain to appear statesmanlike always leaves you with the impression that he’s been pumped full of Valium. Nevertheless, he seems to have passed his first

It has, to be honest, been rather hard to keep up with the flow of executive orders, policy pronouncements and big name appointments from the new US president: they’ve been coming thick and fast. So it’s been tricky drawing up any sort of running audit of debits v credits, though some changes, like the appointment of Jared Kushner to preside over the Israeli/Palestinian peace process, are sufficiently surreal to make you wonder why the Women Against Trump brigade didn’t put it on their placards. But there are pluses, depending on your point of view. And from where I’m at, Trump’s executive order reintroducing the ‘global gag rule’ – which sounds unhelpfully

It has been claimed that Jared Kushner masterminded the success of a seemingly impossible campaign. He was the rational voice behind an irrational man and sanitised Donald Trump so effectively, it has become almost fashionable to support him. His reward is a seat at the President’s right hand: senior White House adviser in the Trump administration. His first job included welcoming Boris Johnson and Shinzo Abe on recent visits to the US. Back in 2003, Jared Kushner was still at Harvard.  His billionaire father Charles Kushner had oiled the wheels, gifting the university $2.5 million, before being convicted on multiple counts of tax fraud, election violations and witness tampering.  And this was all re-reported when