Freddy Gray is deputy editor of The Spectator
A ‘black swan event’, as defined by the risk analyst Nassim Nicholas Taleb in 2007, is a surprise occurrence that has a major impact on the global financial system and is rationalised after the fact as something that ought to have been expected all along. The 9/11 terror attacks are one example, the Covid pandemic
Jeffrey Goldberg laid a trap and Team Trump has blundered right into it. In Monday’s sensational story, ‘The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans’, the Atlantic editor rather pompously declared that he was withholding some of the information he had received on grounds of national security, contrasting his own propriety with the slapdashery
Jeffrey Goldberg’s story in the Atlantic is so mind-blowing it’s hard to know what to say in response. It defies belief that Donald Trump’s National Security Adviser, Mike Waltz, appears to have accidentally added a top journalist to a Signal messaging group with senior government officials – including the Vice President, Secretary of State, Defence
Washington D.C. For Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, it’s a case of today Ukraine, tomorrow the world. In their much-hyped telephone call this week, the Russian leader didn’t appear to give much away: a step towards a sort-of ceasefire, a prisoner swap and a few other bits and bobs. But Putin knows that Trump wants
Almost exactly seven years ago, on Monday 19 March 2018, Donald Trump decided he wanted to telephone Vladimir Putin to congratulate the Russian president on his re-election. The call was set up for the following day, though Trump’s then national security advisor H R McMaster ordered his team to give the President helpful note cards.
It’s great that JD Vance is all for free speech, though he does tend to shoot off his mouth in an off-putting way. He is, as Disraeli said of Gladstone, ‘a sophistical rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity.’ In an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity last night, the Vice President said: ‘If you
Keir Starmer seemed on unusually good form as he arrived in Washington last night. He cracked quite a good joke about the United Kingdom’s new ambassador to the United States, Lord Mandelson. Maybe, just maybe, there’s a charismatic statesman lurking behind the Prime Minister’s dreary exterior. We shall see. At any rate, assuming no bizarre media blow
And just like that, we are back in 2017. Donald Trump, the President of the United States, is posting ridiculous hyperbole on his socials and mouthing off from Mar-a-Lago, as he always has. In the last 24 hours, however, the global political and media classes have gone back to gnashing their teeth and wailing in
Who knew that America First had such global ambitions? Who knew that, when Donald Trump promised ‘mass deportations’, he also might have been thinking about using America’s might to extract Palestinian people out of Gaza to give them a ‘lasting home’ in Jordan or Egypt? Donald Trump promised ‘peace through strength’ on the campaign trail.
‘What a terrible night this has been,’ writes President Donald Trump on his Truth Social platform. ‘God bless you all!’ Trump also expressed his bafflement as to how a Black Hawk military helicopter, operating out of Fort Belvoir in Virginia, managed to collide with American Eagle Flight 5342, a commercial passenger plane carrying 64 passengers, directly over
The special relationship is dead, long live the special relationship. On Friday, at a ‘Stars and Stripes & Union Jack Celebration’, British and American right-wingers mingled gladly atop the Hay-Adams hotel, which overlooks the White House. Nigel Farage and co smoked cigarettes with their Republican brethren and shared Trump war stories. Dolled-up American girls took
Biblical weather outside the rally for the sixtieth presidential inaugural in the Capitol One Arena in downtown Washington yesterday: hail plonked down onto streets of slush. The poor huddled Magas lined up for hours and hours, through labyrinthine perimeter fencing, just to see their leader. Inside, the atmosphere was electric and jubilant. ‘We won, we
Washington, DC On your marks, get set, executive orders. Donald Trump will be sworn back into office on Monday, from inside the Capitol Rotunda, as Ronald Reagan was in 1985. Cold weather is the official reason for moving the ceremony from outside to in, and it seems true – the 78-year-old president-elect may wish to
‘The mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation,’ said William McKinley, America’s 25th commander-in-chief, who happens to be one of Donald Trump’s favourite presidents. Trump, who barely dodged a bullet in 2024, shares a number of traits with McKinley, who was assassinated in 1901: Scottish blood, ferocious work ethic, an affinity with
Goodbye EU, hello AU? It’s been evident for a few months now that Donald Trump’s second administration will be more geostrategically ambitious than his first. Yesterday, in another extraordinary press conference in Mar-a-Lago, we got a glimpse of what Trump and his advisers are thinking for the planet in 2025 and beyond. Trump reiterated his
Another day, another UK volley from the one-man media universe that is Elon Musk. At 07.51 this morning, Musk posted a yes/no poll on his X feed: ‘America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government.’ At the time of writing, 70 per cent of 170,000 X users replied in the affirmative. Musk
Donald Trump is an unconventional politician and he responds to terror attacks unconventionally. When bad things happen, he often goes on the offensive. ‘Our Country is a disaster, a laughing stock all over the World!’ he posted on his Truth Social media account last night, after 15 people were killed in the New Year’s Day
It’s hard to think of a political oration that has backfired as famously as Jimmy Carter’s ‘crisis of confidence’ speech, delivered from the White House on 15 July, 1979. The fact that it is still today called the ‘malaise’ speech, despite the fact he never used the word, speaks to the scale of its failure.
Have the plutocrats of the internet age finally realised that all Donald Trump wanted was their love? This week, Jeff Bezos had dinner at Mar-a-Lago. The Amazon founder has said he’s ‘actually very optimistic’ about all the regulation slashing that Trump plans to introduce in his second term, and he’s contributed a million dollars to
The meeting between Nigel Farage, the property developer Nick Candy and Elon Musk has prompted an all-too-predictable fit among media commentators. Are we proud, democracy-loving Britons just going to stand by and watch as American billionaires and the radical right buy out our politics? Are we going to let hedge-funders and the real-estate tycoons gut
