Read about the latest political news, views and analysis
One of President Donald Trump’s chief political foils in the Republican Party — a party that increasingly resembles a Trump fan club more than a group of partisan but independent thinkers — is about to storm the national scene and send a jolt of energy to the dwindling and listless #NeverTrump movement. Mitt Romney, the former Governor … Read more
Wednesday marked the 72nd anniversary of the dropping of the bomb on Nagasaki. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki prompted Emperor Hirohito to announce Japan’s surrender in a radio address, though fanatical war hawks tried to stop him. After 1945, Japan developed a pacifist movement and a so-called peace constitution. No country has deployed these … Read more
There are two Trump-Russia ‘conspiracies’. In one, the US President is bought or blackmailed by the Kremlin. In the other, the FBI and the intelligences agencies — the ‘deep state’ — commit a monstrous abuse of power to try to overturn the election result. The first conspiracy is described in the ‘dossier’ written by a … Read more
Donald J Trump’s State of the Union was as expected: long, boastful, cheesy — and largely right. Trump says he is creating a ‘new American moment’ — and it’s hard to deny that he is. Before he was president, and even in his inauguration speech, Trump painted only a vision of America in ruins. Now, … Read more
Donald Trump had a lot to prove during his first ever State of the Union address this week. He had to demonstrate to the millions of Americans watching on television that he could deliver a semi-unifying and presidential speech and stay in one place for more than an hour without diverging into tangents. He had to show … Read more
Donald Trump had hoped to mark his first anniversary as president basking in surprisingly positive media headlines and enjoying a lavish party at his Mar-a-Largo estate in Florida. Instead he must contend with a government shutdown and another major political crisis in Washington, the political swamp he promised to drain. Congress has remained in session … Read more
Peregrine Worsthorne, the hugely distinguished British journalist, has died aged 96. He was a wonderful man and a brilliant columnist, who once described his job as ‘the articulation of an intelligent, well thought out, coherent set of prejudices’. He also worked as Washington correspondent for The Times of London and the Daily Telegraph. In 2014, … Read more
Something has gone horribly wrong in America, but it isn’t Donald Trump. The 45th president’s first year has in fact been a very good year for the country. By the time those 12 months were up, the unemployment rate was the lowest the country had seen in 18 years, and the number of new filings … Read more
Here’s an aspect of Donald Trump’s personality that I’ve never got past: his hatred of dogs. When Trump tweeted on 5 January that his former aide Steve Bannon had been ‘dumped like a dog’, he recycled an insult he has hurled more than a dozen times since declaring for president, according to the indispensable TrumpTwitterArchive.com. … Read more
How quickly Steve Bannon’s dark star has collapsed. Not so long ago, friends and enemies talked him up as a media genius. He was a political guerrilla operative you underrated at your peril. He was ‘Trump’s Rasputin’, or ‘President Bannon’, the man who really controlled the White House. Then he lost his job in said White House, fell out with … Read more
Will the Trump presidency be replaced by the Winfrey one? The hunt is on for a celebrity to take on Donald Trump and right now America has been seized by feverish speculation that Oprah Winfrey is it. On Sunday night, Winfrey accepted the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the Golden Globes, where she delivered a … Read more
Donald Trump is becoming increasingly unbuttoned. Last night, he tweeted referring to Kim Jong–un that: ‘I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my button works!’ To Trump, size matters. Yesterday was a big—or bigly—day for Trump. He started it off by taking a swipe … Read more
It has not gone unnoticed that a number of commenters to my occasional Spectator blogs harbour keen, if not outright enthusiastic, views of the current occupant of the Oval Office – a touching display of faith that suggests there truly is something special about the relationship between America and the United Kingdom. So in the … Read more
These really are wild times in American politics. A Democrat, Doug Jones, just won the Senate Race in Alabama. A Democrat hasn’t won a Senate seat in the Heart of Dixie since 1992 – and that was Richard Shelby, who was so conservative he then became a Republican, and still is the senior GOP Senator … Read more
President Donald J Trump, the man who never sleeps, hasn’t woken up to the awful news from Las Vegas. Or at least he hasn’t yet gone on to Twitter to rave at the world, as he normally does after any terrorist attack or incident of mass violence. No doubt he will any moment. Until he … Read more
Growing up in Raleigh, North Carolina, I took the monuments around the state capitol for granted. The first Confederate soldier killed in the Civil War, Henry Lawson Wyatt, has leaned into the wind on those grounds for 100 years. Atop a pedestal inscribed, ‘To North Carolina women of the Confederacy’, a mother in billowing skirts … Read more
