Freddy Gray is deputy editor of The Spectator
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
Joe Biden’s whole presidency has been built on untruths. We were led to believe, for instance, that since 2021 the Commander-in-Chief has been fit and well enough to serve, when everybody could see that he was not. So the latest proof-of-dishonesty over the pardoning of Hunter Biden comes as no great surprise. Of course, Joe
Welcome to the United States of Disruption. From his ‘Winter White House’ in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, Donald Trump has been busy lobbing hand-grenade cabinet appointments in the direction of Washington and watching on happily as each one blows up in a variety of stunning ways. Explosiveness is the point. ‘Personnel is policy,’ Trump’s transition team like
Of all Donald Trump’s cabinet appointments this week, his selection of Robert F. Kennedy Jr to lead the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is in some ways the least surprising. Yet it could prove the most controversial. RFK Jr’s mistrust of Big Pharma and Big Food resonates widely If confirmed, RFK Jr will
Yesterday morning, I asked why President-elect Donald Trump seemed to be pausing before announcing Marco Rubio as Secretary of State. By the evening, we appeared to have an answer. He wanted to combine that news, which distressed the anti-elitists in the MAGAsphere and reassured Republicans in Washington, with his announcement that Tulsi Gabbard would be his Director
Rubio, Rubio, wherefore art thou Rubio? How Little Marco, as Donald Trump dubbed him in 2016, must be squirming. It was reported on Monday, with great confidence, that Trump had chosen Rubio as his Secretary of State, along with Congressman Mike Waltz as his National Security Adviser. The news came as a relief to national
‘Susie Wiles is a great choice for President Trump’s chief of staff,’ said Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida and the man Donald Trump so humiliated in 2016. Uh oh. Bush’s approval of the second Trump administration’s first major appointment instantly rang alarm bells in some quarters of the new American right. Wiles, who
Palm Beach, Florida Donald Trump’s bid to take back the White House has been triumphant. It is a decisive victory and even Trump’s bitterest enemies should recognise him for what he is: an American titan, the most extraordinary politician of our time. He has just pulled off arguably the biggest comeback in US history –
‘Nothing matters very much, and few things matter at all,’ said Balfour. Tell that to the American political class on the day of the 2024 presidential election. After months of the Trump–Biden–Harris drama – the criminal indictments, the disaster debates, the President dropping out, the assassination attempts – the nation is in a state of
The ‘Trumpmentum’ of the last few weeks couldn’t last forever. Now, with less than four days to go until election day, concern is spreading in Republican circles that the Trump train has ‘stalled’ as the Democrats make late and potentially decisive gains in key areas. Across the battleground states, and especially in Pennsylvania, early voting
For Donald Trump fans, one of the many creepy curiosities of this year’s presidential election is that Liz and Dick Cheney and other disgruntled Bush-era Republicans are firmly supporting the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris. Donald Trump understands this dynamic better than most For Harris supporters, meanwhile, it’s strangely alarming that Robert F. Kennedy Junior, scion
‘Garbage In, Garbage Out’ is a computer programming principle which states that the quality of a system’s output is determined by the quality of its input. It’s also a phrase that speaks to US politics this week. After a string of good news cycles for the Republican campaign, the Democrats finally believed they had caught
If Donald Trump wins back the White House next week, adopt the brace position. His opponents will go beserk, inevitably, and try once again to put him in prison. Yet Trump allies might go even more crazy as they scramble for influence. Trump claims to have learned from the mistakes of his first term. But
Nigel Farage was on gregarious and ebullient form at our Americano US election event in Westminster last night. He confidently assured the audience that Donald Trump is going to win. He repeatedly mocked the British Conservative and Labour parties. And he offered his services as a sort of unofficial transatlantic point man for the ‘special relationship’.
Our hapless Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, can’t even fly to Samoa without another international British embarrassment breaking out. The latest is an angry accusation from Donald Trump’s campaign that Labour is committing the crime of ‘election interference’ in the United States. ‘The British are coming!’ screamed a typically camp Trump-Vance official press release last night.
Some experts believe that Donald Trump is on course to win a bigger share of the African American vote in 2024 than any previous Republican presidential candidate. You can’t trust experts. A number of highly-informed pundits made the same prediction in 2020 – and Joe Biden ended up winning 90 per cent of black voters
Donald Trump is many things. Most of all, he is the quintessential American entrepreneur. He sees the upside in everything. Even at the age of 78, he still has the energy to undertake every opportunity to advance himself and his interests. When, for instance, he noticed a few weeks ago that Kamala Harris had claimed
Kamala Harris has been criticising Donald Trump for ducking interviews. Today, however, she avoided a sit-down with the Economic Club of Chicago. Trump, by contrast, showed up and spent an hour facing difficult questions from Bloomberg News’s editor-in-chief John Micklethwait. It was, like all the best Trump appearances, a magnificently weird occasion. Who needs LSD
