Daniel DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities, a syndicated foreign affairs columnist at the Chicago Tribune and a foreign affairs writer for Newsweek.
‘How is the president feeling?’ shouldn’t be a difficult question to answer. And yet over the last 24 hours, nobody could say with any clarity that Donald Trump was ill, on the mend, or perfectly fine. Even reporters with impeccable sources in the White House bubble were left flabbergasted as completely contradictory accounts emerged from
Donald Trump has confronted a long list of adversaries and weathered an even longer list of scandals in his nearly four years as President of the United States. In 2017, there was FBI director James Comey, special counsel Robert Mueller, and the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville. In 2018, there was the felony convictions of
Last night’s presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden started amicably enough. Both men strolled on stage, Trump wearing a red and blue striped tie, ready to battle. Joseph ‘Average Joe’ Biden greeted the president with a ‘How are you, man?’ From that point on, the debate quickly degenerated into one of the most
Donald Trump has a lot to worry about these days. The man who is deathly afraid of being ‘a loser’ could be weeks away from losing in the most visible way to Joe Biden, a competitor Trump has blatantly suggested may be taking performance-enhancing drugs to stay awake on the campaign trail. He is facing
There is no point putting lipstick on a pig: the relationship between the United States and China, two powers holding a combined 40 per cent of the world’s GDP, is at its most depressing and alarming since the establishment of their diplomatic relations in 1979. As soon as you think bilateral ties couldn’t get any
Public opinion polls haven’t been particularly positive for President Trump or his Republican allies on Capitol Hill. This past weekend was no better. CNN’s most recent poll has presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden leading Trump in Florida by 5 percentage points, Arizona by 4, and Michigan by 12. The Associated Press piled on the
The last time a U.S. President lost re-election, the year was 1992 and the victim was George H.W. Bush. President Donald Trump is currently doing everything in his power to make sure he isn’t the first incumbent in 28 years to vacate the White House after a single, four-year term; if that means ditching the
Kanye West is a great artist. But would he make a great president? Kanye and Trump are certainly similar. They both love publicity and are master self-promoters. So for Kanye, what better way to market oneself than running for the Oval Office? This isn’t the first time the hip-hop mogul thought about throwing his hat
There’s no spinning it: if the U.S. presidential election were held today, it is highly unlikely Donald Trump would win a second term. And that’s saying nothing of the damning revelations emerging from John Bolton’s book about his former boss, whom he says ‘remained stunningly uninformed on how to run the White House’. The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll
At the beginning of the year, the odds on president Donald Trump winning re-election this November were 60-40 in his favour. After all, the rule is that the incumbent wins when the U.S. economy is in rock solid shape. Americans react to job growth like bees react to honey: with excitement and appreciation. It was
If there is one thing Donald Trump likes more than patting himself on the back, it’s a convenient scapegoat to shift the public narrative. In what has become a daily ritual, Trump held a coronavirus news conference in the White House Rose Garden yesterday to announce a suspension of U.S. funding to the World Health
With Joe Biden now the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, there is one president Americans will be seeing a lot more of in the months ahead—and his name is not Donald Trump. In the three years since he vacated the White House, Barack Obama has largely kept to himself. The former commander in chief is following
He took nearly a month to assess the state of his campaign after a whopping 15-point defeat in the crucial battleground state of Michigan. But after private deliberations with his wife, Jane, and some lobbying from his senior political advisers, Bernie Sanders came to the conclusion that continuing his presidential campaign would likely do more
Donald Trump is that rare specimen in US presidential history whose approval ratings have never reached the 50 per cent mark. Any other incumbent would find that fact downright frightening, a prelude to an inevitable defeat in an election year. Trump, however, had something in his back pocket that any politician could only dream of
Mathematically speaking, Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign is as dead as disco. After a streak of victories in big, delegate-rich states on and after Super Tuesday, Joe Biden is leading Sanders by 273 delegates. For Sanders to pull off a political miracle, he would need to win 64.2 per cent of the remaining delegates over the
As tens of millions of Americans remain stuck at home in self-isolation, the country’s politicians are busy sniping at each other over who is at fault for a epidemic that Dr. Anthony Fauci – Trump’s coronavirus expert – predicts could kill up to 200,000 Americans. It’s a story far more interesting and potentially calamitous than the normal
What does a leading U.S. presidential candidate do when a deadly and highly contagious virus is spreading throughout the mainland United States and hogging all of the news coverage? Well, build an in-home studio in your basement, of course. Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, is confronting a conundrum most candidates who run for
If President Donald Trump at first dismissed coronavirus as a menacing-sounding version of the sniffles, he is certainly taking the virus seriously now. One in ten coronavirus victims are in the United States and it’s clear the fallout from the virus is going to get much worse before it gets better. ‘I want America to
The coronavirus epidemic storming the world is far more frightening than the bank crisis over a decade ago. It not only poses a risk to people’s health, but if left to fester could tank economies and cause unbearable financial strains for millions. But in the United States, the country’s divided congress could – as it has done
Coronavirus is having a disastrous effect on the economy and whether Donald Trump likes it or not, the United States is no exception. While the Dow Jones recovered from its 3,000-point drop on Monday with a 1,000-pound rebound yesterday, it’s not alarmist to say that Americans could be entering into a recession. After initially burying his
