Politics

Every few weeks, it seems, Carole Cadwalladr drops a long piece for the Guardian or the Observer about how the Trump and Brexit campaigns mind-hacked democracy. On both sides of the Atlantic, people who don’t like Trump or Brexit share these pieces and shriek. The latest article, which has lit up the political internet this weekend, has the added spice of a whistleblower – a pink-haired ‘data science nerd’ straight out of science-nerd central casting. He’s called Christopher Wylie and Cadwalladr reveals that he has been the source for her much-vaunted scoops on Cambridge Analytica, the data firm who worked with the Trump and Brexit campaigns.

Michael Barbaro, host of the New York Times podcast The Daily, opened Wednesday’s episode with the story of the sacking of the Secretary of State: ‘His relationship with President Trump was rocky from the start, but in the end, nobody was more surprised that Rex Tillerson was fired than Rex Tillerson’. Really? If that’s true, then Tillerson was even more out of touch than anyone realised. American functionaries on the other side of the globe knew last month that a Rexit was imminent. I was in Seoul for the tail end of the Olympics and met with some U.S. Forces Korea officials. One spoke - almost in passing - as though Mike Pompeo was going to replace Rex Tillerson rather soon. He referred to Pompeo by name and his colleagues didn’t contradict him.

When Donald Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, went to Moscow in 2006, she did all the usual tourist things: walked around Red Square, visited the Kremlin... sat in Vladimir Putin’s private chair. At least she did according to Trump’s broker and business partner Felix Sater. ‘I arranged for Ivanka to sit in Putins private chair at his desk and office in the Kremlin,’ Sater said in an email, which was later leaked. Ivanka put out a statement more or less confirming this, saying that she ‘might have’ sat in Putin’s chair, but couldn’t exactly recall. The rest of Sater’s emails were more important as they gave details of his efforts to fix a deal for a Trump Tower in Moscow. ‘I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected...

President Trump continues to shake up his White House team. As early as tomorrow he plans to name Larry Kudlow, a senior contributor to CNBC, to replace Gary Cohn as his National Economic Council chief.  Kudlow is an old chum of Trump’s and an inveterate supply-sider whose gospel is that the more you lower tax rates, the more money the government will receive in overall revenues. At the same time, former United Nations ambassador John Bolton remains in play to replace national security adviser H.R. McMaster, though a stumbling block could prove to be whether or not he is willing to shave off the moustache that Trump apparently finds so offensive.

The surprising thing isn’t that Donald Trump fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. It is that it took this long. Tillerson, a hapless manager who decapitated much of the senior ranks of the State Department, has finally suffered his own decapitation at the he hands of Trump. His replacement by CIA Director Mike Pompeo signals  a much bolder and more activist Trump foreign policy. At the most basic level Pompeo will work to restore the depleted ranks of the foreign service. His close ties to Trump—he has visited him daily at the White House—means that he will not be at the receiving end of Trump’s barbs as was Tillerson. He will be able to restore some lustre to a once proud institution. Pompeo will also influence policy.

For two years we’ve been hearing that Donald Trump is an 'isolationist', whatever that word is supposed to mean. Only now two op-ed writers in the New York Times have discovered that he isn’t — instead, Thomas Meaney and Stephen Wertheim write, 'Let’s call Mr. Trump’s vision what it is: radical American imperialism.' Let’s not, because it isn’t true. On the contrary, Donald Trump is the most anti-imperialist president in a generation, even if he is also far from being a mythical 'isolationist'. North Korea is isolationist, and perhaps Meiji Japan was, too. But Great Britain had a world empire when 'splendid isolation' was a maxim of Conservative leaders’ foreign policy in the 19th century.

I can understand some people not liking the current president of the United States. As Conrad Black put it recently, ‘Donald Trump is a strange cat and an acquired taste.’ What I don’t understand is people who should know better being afraid of Donald Trump. For example, how can it be that among all the experienced, eccentric and supposedly visionary denizens of Silicon Valley, only Peter Thiel recognised that Donald Trump is cut from the same cloth as the most celebrated tech titans: a disruptor, an innovator, a maverick, and an up-and-coming ‘crazy one,’ in the mould of the myth-makers to whom the famous 1980s Apple ads paid homage?

Is Texas, the Lone Star State, about to get a little lonesome for the GOP? There’s been lots of talk in recent months that Senator Ted Cruz may face a stiffer challenge for reelection than he had anticipated. But now a wave of Democratic voter enthusiasm today in primary elections is adding further credibility to that notion. The Washington Post reports that of almost 900,000 ballots cast in early voting, over 52 percent were for Democrats, a substantial boost over the last primary election in 2014. The question that looms for Republicans is this: will Texas turn blue? Is it going to become another California? Republicans are sounding alarms. Texas Senator John Cornyn says it would be “malpractice” not to ramp up Republican efforts to ensure turnout in November.