Saturday

Dominic Green

First Reformed is Taxi Driver for the age of Trump

‘That was some weird shit,’ George W. Bush is said to have muttered after Donald Trump’s desolate inauguration speech of January 2017. ‘I couldn’t have agreed more,’ wrote Hillary Clinton in What Happened. Americans cannot agree on what has happened to their country, other than that everything has gone wrong. Is it ‘white supremacy’ and patriarchy, or the collapse of the white working class and the decay of patriotism? The symptoms too are polarized, beyond mutual comprehension. The leading cause of young black male deaths is murder, but the leading cause of young white male deaths is suicide. The weirdness of these linked statistics has a common source.

Friday

Chase Madar

What does Ronan Farrow want next?

Ronan Farrow is currently the most wonderful wunderkind in the United States, at least on the Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor. Former news chat show host for the MSNBC network, Rhodes Scholar and former foreign service officer, recent winner of a Pulitzer Prize for exposés on nasty sexual misconduct which brought down both Harvey Weinstein and the attorney general of New York, author of a new book of foreign policy deep thoughts and gossip. And all at age thirty and half! Not only does Farrow embody the anti-Trump zeitgeist right now, he has a freehold on the future, whether inside the next Democratic administration or in broadcast media. His ma is Mia Farrow; his paternity, complicated.

ronan farrow
Roger Kimball

For your eyes only: A short history of Democrat-spy collusion

Who what where when why? The desiderata school teachers drill into their charges trying to master effective writing skills apply also in the effort to understand that byzantine drama known to the world as the Trump-Russia-collusion investigation. Let’s start with “when.” When did it start? We know that the FBI opened its official investigation on 31 July 2016. An obscure, low-level volunteer to the Trump campaign called Carter Page was front and centre then. He’d been the FBI’s radar for a long time. Years before, it was known, the Russians had made some overtures to him but 1) they concluded that he was an “idiot” not worth recruiting and 2) he had actually aided the FBI in prosecuting at least two Russian spies.

Sam Leith

Spectator Books: Behold, America

Is the "American Dream", as Donald Trump claims, dead? Is “America First” a policy of national pride or a dogwhistle to white supremacists? In this week’s books podcast we take the long view. My guest, Sarah Churchwell, excavates the long histories and surprisingly variable meanings of these two phrases in her new book Behold, America: A History of America First and the American Dream — and shows how central they have been to the United States’s long argument with itself about the meaning of the nation, and how they continue to be so today. Listen to more episodes of Spectator Books and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

Thursday

Freddy Gray

What happens when you give Steve Bannon a platform? Fascinating television, apparently

If the BBC really is, as Steve Bannon says, a communications department of the global elite, they messed up badly last night. Emily Maitlis’s 20-minute long interview with Bannon on Newsnight was mesmerising television — even, or especially, if you can’t bear the subject. It was also the longest advertisement for economic nationalism yet delivered to British viewers. No doubt Raheem Kassam, the close Bannon associate who’s just left Breitbart and has been on Newsnight a few times himself, had something to do with it.By airing the discussion, the Beeb disproves the Bannonite idea that it is part of an elite conspiracy to silence populist points of view on immigration.

Rick Wilson

Trump is having a very loud public meltdown – all thanks to Michael Cohen

If you’re wondering why President Trump’s mad-dog frenzy in the last 48 hours has surpassed even his typically manic tone, look no further than Michael Cohen’s mounting legal troubles. Two new fronts were opened this week, pushing Cohen closer to the edge of a painful, existential choice: cooperation with Special Counsel Robert Mueller, or an extended, unpleasant stay in federal prison. Trump can sense his friend edging closer to capitulation and his own legal peril mounting as Cohen begins to crack. As usual, he’s having a very public, very loud meltdown.First came the news that Gene Freidman, Cohen's associate in his taxi-medallion enterprise, has flipped.

Melanie McDonagh

Ireland’s abortion referendum has been horrifically one-sided

It will, as one pro-life campaigner told me, take an act of God to swing the Irish referendum for the No side tomorrow. I’m all for referendums but this one has been so wildly unbalanced as to make the Brexit campaign look almost effete in its regard for impartiality and fair play. The polls suggest a win for the Yes side, on repealing the eighth amendment to the Irish constitution which protects the right to life of the unborn – something around the 44-32 per cent margin according to the last Irish Times poll. It’s a big deal, abortion. But there is not one political party that represents the No side other than a tiny outfit called Renua which doesn’t have a single MP. There is no newspaper that represents this quite hefty minority.

Lionel Shriver

I like a fight too much. That’s why I’ll never go on social media

During a dozen years in Belfast I collected a number of political coffee mugs, hailing from both sides of the divide. Unionist designs including the heartbreakingly punctuated ‘Ulster Say’s No’ (not merely to the Anglo-Irish Agreement; no to everything) and the impressively witty ‘Reservoir Prods’: four toughs in shades identified as ‘Mr Orange’ and ‘Mr Boyne’, etc. The republican mugs exhibit no such sense of humour, which won’t surprise you. Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams stare sternly from their porcelain. Worse, the mugs from the Sinn Fein bookshop are cheaply decorated with decals, which are less robust than the inked unionist ones, and tend to melt in the dishwasher.

Jacob Heilbrunn

Donald Trump goes on the warpath with North Korea

So much for the “World Peace” that Donald Trump bragged he would create at the June 12 Singapore summit. In a wildly inappropriate letter that veered between a bullying and lachrymose tone, Trump bowed to the inevitable in canceling the summit with Kim Jong-un. He had to do it before Kim did.Already Kim had the upper hand. Trump’s impetuous decision gave the Supreme Leader, as the administration had taken to calling him, the validation the regime was seeking for decades. Now it will not be back to the future. South Korea isn’t going to readopt a tough posture of “maximum pressure” toward the North. Score one for Kim.But another winner is national security adviser John Bolton who never wanted a summit in the first place.

Wednesday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Did Ukraine bribe its way into the White House?

An actual sinkhole has developed on the north lawn of the White House. It might serve as a good metaphor for the state of the Trump presidency, which is being engulfed by the very Washington swamp that it once vowed to eradicate. The latest revelation comes courtesy of the BBC’s indefatigable Paul Wood, who reports today on a corrupt bargain that apparently took place between the White House and Ukraine. It seems that Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko, who bet on the wrong horse during the 2016 campaign by releasing some information about the sordid financial machinations of Donald Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort to the New York Times in August 2016, was desperate to make amends.  He wanted to butter up Trump.

Damian Reilly

The sex-mad genius of Philip Roth

A few years ago I asked Martin Amis about Philip Roth. “All his dildos,” he replied, “he’s not letting it go.” At the time the comment struck me as harsh, but this morning when I saw the sad news of Roth’s death I remembered it with a little amusement. I understood what Amis was getting at: Roth often did seem sex mad. But it was very much part of what made him glorious. Philip Roth wrote standing up and you could kind of tell by reading him. To me, starting a Roth novel always felt a bit like embarking on a run with a supremely fit and virile man, a man who could run at any speed, fast or slow, all day and all night. Forever.

Tiana Lowe

USC should fire its president – and every bureaucrat who could have stopped George Tyndall’s campaign of abuse

Possess the wrong firearm after dark just one block west of Vermont Avenue, and the Los Angeles Police Department will have you pinned to the ground before you can say, “I can’t breathe.” Serially molest hundreds of your patients from your perch as the sole full-time gynaecologist at the University of Southern California Engemann Student Health Center, and it appears the bureaucrats and billionaires who run the school will protect you for years.By now the story has broken into national news, namely that Dr.

Monday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump is getting ‘schlonged’ by America’s enemies

So much for the Nobel Peace Prize that Donald Trump said “everyone thinks” he should receive. The New York Times reports that Trump is starting to get second thoughts about visiting Singapore on June 12 to hold a summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. Trump boasted earlier that if they cut a deal, Kim would be “very, very happy.” Now it’s starting to dawn on the Trump administration that it’s getting played by the portly pariah of Pyongyang.Even as Trump abrogated the Iran nuclear deal, he was confident that he, and he alone, had the magic touch that would persuade North Korea to hand over its nuclear stockpile to America. He would, in turn, play the role of the benignant emperor, showering economic largesse upon Pyongyang.

Daniel McCarthy

Why America First beats the party of Bernie Sanders

The 2018 midterm elections, like the 2016 presidential contest, are proving to be far more interesting than conventional wisdom ever suspected. Two years ago, pundits were sure that Trump would lose, right up to the early evening of election day. This year, the conventional wisdom has it that Democrats will take back control of at least the House of Representatives, probably by a landslide, if not the Senate as well. But two critical polling indicators suggest the GOP’s hand is getting stronger. President Trump’s approval ratings are solidly into the 40s in recent polls, and even hit 50 percent in the most in the Rasmussen survey last week (which, to be sure, has consistently shown better numbers for Trump).

Sunday

Melanie McDonagh

This is monarchy for the Netflix generation

Well, a star is born. I refer to the Rt Rev Michael Curry, bishop of that vanishingly rare breed, the American Episcopal Church, who was stole the show at yesterday’s royal wedding in Britain. Anyone who can make Elton John look like that  – sort of nonplussed toad  – and generate barely suppressed mirth in the congregation to the extent it wasn’t whether the Prince of Wales was laughing or crying or trying not to do either, is quite some preacher. He may be Anglican but there was an awful lot of Pentecostalist in there. The other star turn was the young cellist, Shekuh Kannah Mason, the Jacqueline du Pres of Britain’s Got Talent; again, big on feeling.

Dominic Green

Review: Let the Sunshine In

Here in the English-speaking world, the hours after work and before dinner are known as the ‘reverse commute’. We spend these hours standing on trains, sitting in cars, or pedaling for our lives. Over there in France, these hours are called the ‘cinq à sept’. Although they may also involve being pressed up against other people, the sequence of postures is different. Strange, then, that so many skilled workers have left France. Stranger, still, that so few skilled foreign workers have moved there. You’d think they’d be banging at the door. Isabelle, the heroine of Claire Denis’ Let the Sunshine In, is so committed to the ‘cinq à sept’ that she does it round the clock.

Friday

Kelly Jane Torrance

Trump’s ZTE talks have Congress wondering if he’s putting America first

It doesn’t happen often, but it happened this week: Republicans in Congress made it officially known that they disagree with their party leader, President Donald Trump, on an important issue of policy.On Thursday, the House Appropriations Committee voted unanimously to accept an amendment to the 2019 Commerce, Justice, and Science Appropriations Bill. That amendment, introduced by Democratic Maryland congressman Dutch Ruppersberger, forbids the Commerce Department from renegotiating the sanctions it enacted last month on Chinese telecom company ZTE.It’s a real reprimand of the president, who started sending tweets in support of the company on Sunday.

AI
Julie Burchill

Why do prettier sex-pest men get away with it?

It’s quite commonplace now to say that people’s lives and careers have been ruined by #MeToo ‘witch-hunts.’ But witches weren’t ever real; sexual assaulters are.Like many women, I love the idea of Me Too as a relay of shame; that every victim who stands up and names what happened passes on the blame to an assaulter who will have to remember that he was so undesirable he felt it necessary to force himself on someone who didn’t want him – feel the fear and pass it on!In most cases that hasn’t happened. The big ugly New York ones – Weinstein, who conveniently looks like the archetype sweaty sex-pest and Eric Schneiderman, the ghoulish attorney general – are thrown overboard. The younger, prettier ones have basically got away with it.

nasty meghan markle
Josh Glancy

How the British royal family became a very American obsession

America has been on quite the journey since the Boston Tea Party, when a group of young, ambitious colonials threw off the yoke of British royal dominion. A superpower was built from those discarded tea leaves to rival the Roman empire, while their former British masters have been reduced to playing the role of docile satraps. Much has changed since that December day in Boston Harbour. But a different kind of tea party, one being held across the nation on Saturday, will demonstrate that one thing has stayed the same: America is still in thrall to the British monarchy, at least in an emotional sense. Britannia may not rule the waves anymore, but it still rules many hearts.

Thursday

Ian Marcus Corbin

Silicon Valley has entered the culture war to ‘make the world a better place’

The HBO program Silicon Valley has a recurring joke. Every time some eager young Zuck pitches a business idea, he caps it by promising to “make the world a better place” through whatever inscrutable software enhancement he’s trying to sell – “through Paxos algorithms for consensus protocols”, “through canonical data models to communicate between endpoints . . .” and on and on. It’s pretty funny. Faux-philanthropy is not just for incel code-ninjas.