Us politics

Sunday

Freddy Gray

WATCH AGAIN: John McCain’s brilliant concession speech in 2008

I didn’t much like John McCain’s politics. He never saw a military intervention he didn’t like. He was bi-partisan in all the wrong ways. He was a hothead, well-suited to hawkish Republican Washington, but not to 21st-century America. His admirers elevated his heroics as a war veteran to distract from his failings as a statesman. But McCain, who has just died after a long battle with brain cancer, had honour and grace. He stood against torture despite his instinctive ruthlessness in foreign policy. He could also be insightful and funny. Perhaps his greatest moment, for me, was his concession speech after losing to Barack Obama in 2008. His audience booed

Thursday

Sam Leith

Books Podcast: How the 2008 crash changed the world

In this week’s Books Podcast, I’m joined by the economic historian Adam Tooze, author of the new book Crashed: How A Decade of Financial Crises Changed The World. How are the subprime collapse in the US and the Eurozone crisis that came after linked? Why did a cartel of mega-wealthy businessmen do a good job at rescuing the US from disaster, and a group of well-intentioned political technocrats make such a hash of it in Europe? And how is the Balance of Financial Terror between the US and China holding up these days? Here’s some stuff you won’t learn from Michael Lewis… 

Wednesday

Paul Wood

Trumpworld is spinning out of control

Donald Trump’s Twitter feed was oddly silent as the news came that his former campaign manager and his former lawyer were going to jail. Perhaps his staff have finally seized control of his android phone. Perhaps his lawyers have convinced him that every time he reaches for it to tweet on anything relating to the Russia investigation, he is dancing on the edge of a precipice, with Robert Mueller just waiting to push him off. Whatever the reason, this was the equivalent of Trump entering a stunned, catatonic state, while his world spins out of control around him. The President merely tweeted to note that he was going to a

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

The sordid reality of the Trump presidency

‘How ya like me now?’ tweeted Stormy Daniels last night — and, whatever else you might think about a porn star using her alleged extra-marital affair with a president to get rich, it’s hard to deny that her question has a point. She hasn’t been vindicated, exactly, but it’s no longer possible for even Donald Trump’s admirers to dismiss her story as the baseless claims of a fame hungry whore. Yesterday, Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, pleaded guilty to buying the silence of two women through illegal payments that violated campaign finance laws. He told the judge at the United States District Court in Manhattan that the payments were made

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump’s presidency has imploded – in less than two years | 22 August 2018

This is the beginning of the end of the Donald Trump presidency. The double whammy of Michael Cohen, his former fixer, pleading guilty on eight counts, including illegal hush money payments, or, to put it more precisely, campaign contributions, to two women at Trump’s personal direction for ‘the purpose of influencing the election,’ coupled with the conviction of his former campaign manager Paul Manafort on eight counts, constitute a mortal blow to his already tottering presidency. It is also likely to administer the coup de grace to Republican hopes for the November midterm elections and to complicate the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh. The calculations of Senate majority leader

Thursday

Daniel DePetris

Angela Merkel prepares for a rematch with Vladimir Putin

German chancellor Angela Merkel has a lot on her plate. In addition to keeping her rabble-rouser junior coalition partners in the tent, constantly looking over her shoulder for the increasingly renegade Horst Seehofer, and trying to come up with a European solution to the headache that is illegal migration, Merkel will be sitting down with Russian president Vladimir Putin this weekend to talk state business at the Meseberg. Merkel and Putin have a lot to discuss. The war in Ukraine’s Donbas region continues at a steady clip, notwithstanding the short-term ceasefires that usually collapse after a few hours or (if one is lucky) days. Bashar al-Assad, Moscow’s man in Damascus, is

Tuesday

Daniel DePetris

Has Donald Trump finally met a European leader he can work with?

Donald Trump has finally met a European leader he can stand for more than a moment: Italy’s bookish new premier, Giuseppe Conte. The former law professor, who was plucked out of obscurity by 5Star’s Luigi Di Maio and the League’s Matteo Salvini to be the nominal consensus pick of Rome’s anti-establishment government, is the kind of European Trump can do business with. Or at least that is Trump’s hope. For the brash billionaire, Europe has been nothing but a nuisance. Despite his proclamations of having a terrific relationship with Germany’s Angela Merkel and a kinship with France’s Emmanuel Macron, it is not difficult to see through the facade. Relations between

Wednesday

Daniel DePetris

How May, Macron and Merkel failed to tame Trump

To conclude that relations between the United States and the Europeans are in quite a chaotic and unpredictable state is like saying German Chancellor Angela Merkel misses the good old days of Barack Obama and John Kerry. It’s so obvious that it doesn’t need repeating. There are a whole slew of foreign policy and economic issues that have shaken the U.S.-European relationship out of its traditional complacency. Steel and aluminum tariffs, Europe’s anaemic defense spending, the Iran nuclear deal, Brexit, trade imbalances, and Trump’s style of undiplomatic diplomacy have all thrown the continent for a loop. Trump appears to take pleasure in berating America’s European allies and watching them squirm;

Monday

Pavel Stroilov

Will Donald Trump dare to challenge Putin over his political prisoners?

From Nixon’s ‘détente’ to Obama’s ‘reset’, every new US administration makes one attempt at reconciliation with Moscow. Today it’s Donald Trump’s turn, at his summit meeting with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. At first, such meetings are sensationalised as historic turning points, with the future of the world hanging in the balance. But that view doesn’t usually last long. It only takes a couple of state-sponsored assassinations by Russia, and maybe a small war in addition, for the parties to realise that they are at cross-purposes. And if you are in geopolitics, as a US president has to be, you have to talk to foreign dictators from time to time. That

Wednesday

Steerpike

Watch: Theresa May dodges Donald Trump’s handshake

When Theresa May first met Donald Trump, she was pictured strolling arm-in-arm with the president through the grounds of the White House. But a lot has happened in the 18 months since that meeting, and now it seems May doesn’t even want to touch the Donald’s hand. When Trump greeted the Prime Minister at the Nato summit in Brussels, May refused to shake the president’s hand. Perhaps Trump’s overtures to Boris Johnson haven’t gone down well…

Tuesday

Katy Balls

President Trump: UK is in turmoil, Boris is my friend

Theresa May’s bad week just got worse. After two Cabinet Brexiteers – David Davis and Boris Johnson – resigned on Monday, the Prime Minister attempted today to suggest it was business as usual tweeting of a ‘productive Cabinet meeting this morning – looking ahead to a busy week’. However, right on cue, President Trump has arrived on the scene to enter some drama. Ahead of the US president’s working visit on Friday, Trump has been commenting on the UK political situation which, by the way, is in ‘turmoil’. The part that will particularly concern No 10 is not Trump suggesting his trip to Helsinki to see Putin will be easier than

Jacob Heilbrunn

Brett Kavanaugh is a Republican’s dream Supreme Court Justice

After reciting the usual homilies about the need to interpret the American Constitution as it was written, President Trump appeared visibly bored once his nominee for the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh, took the podium. Who could blame him? There was little Trump could do to inject much excitement into the proceedings and it’s never as much fun to make a solemn announcement as it is to rant and rave in front of tens of thousands of your pursuivants in a sports arena or to send out tweets denouncing NATO or threatening a trade war with China. To be sure, Kavanaugh had clearly been primed on how to curry favour with

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

Why I won’t appear on the Guardian’s anti-Trump panel

Should I help the Guardian to make money? The question arises because the paper’s emissaries have been badgering me to agree to appear on their platform later this month. In itself this is a strange thing. I’m all for ecumenicalism, but the Guardian would seem to be the worst possible platform. My own experience of the paper is not only that it has the most flagrant bias of any UK publication, but that when it is caught in an error it is the most reluctant to publish corrections, apologies or retractions. Indeed, experience shows that the paper is more unwilling than President Trump to admit it has ever got anything

Monday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Donald Trump’s inability to care what his critics think is paying off

Donald Trump is becoming a restaurant critic. This morning he weighed in on the Red Hen restaurant, which is located in Virginia and denied service over the weekend to his press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. According to Trump: It’s understandable if the Trump administration is feeling somewhat henpecked. A newly aroused left is engaging in an increasingly aggressive campaign of public shaming against Trump administration officials, much of which appears to centre on denying them meals at fine dining establishments. Both Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and White House senior adviser Stephen Miller have been singled out for public opprobrium. Moreover, in Florida, the state attorney general and Trump ally

Thursday

Freddy Gray

Trump is ‘vice-signalling’ over immigration – and it’s going to work

The stories are filed, the pictures are posted, and the media verdict is almost unanimous: separating children from their parents is wrong, it is unAmerican, and President Donald Trump is going to suffer for it. His administration is baby-snatching. The ‘optics’ are terrible, say the hyperventilating PR men and Washington know-alls. But if everybody stops to breathe for a moment, they should stop to recognise that, on this issue, as on so much else, Donald Trump is winning the politics. Call it vice-signalling. The President and Kirstjen Nielsen are making clear that, even if it means being seen to be inhuman, they are taking voter concerns about massive immigration seriously.

Tuesday

Freddy Gray

Trump is ‘vice-signalling’ over immigration – and it’s going to work | 19 June 2018

The stories are filed, the pictures are posted, and the media verdict is almost unanimous: separating children from their parents is wrong, it is unAmerican, and President Donald Trump is going to suffer for it. His administration is baby-snatching. The ‘optics’ are terrible, say the hyperventilating PR men and Washington know-alls. But if everybody stops to breathe for a moment, they should stop to recognise that, on this issue, as on so much else, Donald Trump is winning the politics. Call it vice-signalling. The President and Kirstjen Nielsen are making clear that, even if it means being seen to be inhuman, they are taking voter concerns about massive immigration seriously.

William Cook

On Germany, Trump is right about the big picture, wrong about the detail

Time was, a US President wouldn’t dream of criticising the government of one of its Nato allies in public – but that was a long, long time ago, before the Age of Trump. ‘The people of Germany are turning against their leadership as migration is rocking the already tenuous Berlin coalition,’ tweeted President Trump yesterday. ‘Crime in Germany is way up. Big mistake made all over Europe in allowing millions of people in who have so strongly and violently changed their culture. We don’t want what is happening with immigration in Europe to happen to us.’ Of course Trump is being terribly undiplomatic. No surprise there. That’s his thing –

Jacob Heilbrunn

How splitting up families gave Trump the biggest crisis of his presidency

For the Democrats, the mounting furore over forcibly separating children from their parents at the border offers a golden opportunity before the midterm elections to tar Donald Trump as a heartless autocrat, a modern-day Baron Bomburst ruling over Vulgaria with his very own Child Catcher. Do a Caratacus Potts and Truly Scrumptious lurk in the wings to liberate the imprisoned children? Or will Trump continue to lock ‘em up? Both Republicans and Democrats are protesting the policy. Family values has been at the core of the GOP, particularly for its evangelical wing. This represents a repudiation of it. Franklin Graham thus denounced Trump’s move on the Christian Broadcasting Network as

Monday

Ross Clark

Donald Trump’s migrant policy shows he has finally gone too far

Historians will still be asking in 100 years’ time why public outrage did not do Donald Trump more harm. How come he could keep seeming to offend three-quarters of America yet still end up with half the vote? The answer, I think, is that his opponents kept falling into the same trap: they kept over-reacting. Mildly-objectionable comments and policies were met with full-on Twitter storms, making his opponents end up looking like the ones who were deranged. When you went back and thought about what Trump had actually said he kept coming across, if not reasonable, then as less unreasonable than the voices raging against him. You found yourself asking:

Thursday

Jacob Heilbrunn

James Comey is a man obsessed with his own myth

Oh, dear. The myth that James Comey has sedulously cultivated of himself—the ascetic warrior for truth, the vigilant sentinel of liberty—is coming in for a bit of a pounding today. In his report to Congress on Comey’s handling of the Hillary Clinton investigation, the Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz concluded, “While we did not find that these decisions were the result of political bias on Comey’s part, we nevertheless concluded that by departing so clearly and dramatically from FBI and department norms, the decisions negatively impacted the perception of the FBI and the department as fair administrators of justice.” Comey’s recent memoir was titled A Higher Loyalty, but his