Politics

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 of Massachusetts, 2012 Republican presidential nominee, and wealthy businessman, is reportedly preparing to announce his formal campaign to be the next US Senator from Utah.  And with no serious Republican in the heavily-Mormon state willing to throw a hat in the ring to challenge Romney, it is a virtual assurance that he will win the election.

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, after a year of him in charge, his message is reassuring and upbeat. It’s not the same as Reagan’s sunny optimism — it’s more post-modern and surreal than that — but it’s not far off. You could call it Trump’s electric sunbed optimism. It’s feel-good, it’s a bit orange, and it seems to be rubbing off on the world. ‘Our families will thrive,’ he said in conclusion.

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 his Republican colleagues on Capitol Hill that he is a take-charge kind of guy — somebody who has bold, transformational plans for America’s infrastructure and for the country’s immigration system. To Democrats and independents, he wanted to exhibit a kind of conciliatory persona, not one of his favourite character traits.

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 all weekend as Republicans and Democrats seek to resolve the shutdown — and blame each other for having caused it. But who will Americans blame? The President? The Republican Party? Or the Democrats? The answer is everybody, probably.

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, he wrote the following piece about meeting various American presidents. It was his last contribution to The Spectator. RIP. I feel a bit of a fraud writing about the ‘presidents I knew’, since journalists do not really get to know the great figures they interview or shake hands with. Indeed the relationship between journalist and great personage is about as false as any relationship can be, since each is trying to make use of the other.

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. After the 2016 election, a wealthy Trump supporter offered the new First Family a gift of an especially adorable Goldendoodle. On a visit to Mar-a-Lago, the supporter showed a photo of the dog to Trump. The President-elect asked her to show the photo to his then ten-year-old son, Barron. ‘Barron will fall in love with him,’ Trump said. ‘Barron will want him.’ That’s just what happened.

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 Donald J Trump, and now, a few days after the publication of his comments in Michael Wolff's book, he has stood down as head of Breitbart news. The power that Bannon represented turned out to have been the Mercer family, who had bankrolled Bannon, Breitbart and Trump's campaign.

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 speech that pointed to 'a time when no one will have to say “Me Too” ever again'. 'A new day', she said, 'is on the horizon'. The kudos keep pouring in. Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, an inveterate Never Trumper, called it 'spine-tingling'. She’s certainly locked down the Hollywood contingent: Reese Witherspoon said: 'It sounds right'.

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 at Hillary Clinton’s former aide Huma Abedin, declaring that she should be locked up for email malfeasance, an old charge that he periodically resuscitates. For good measure, he fulminated about the 'Deep State' at the Justice Department that be believes, or purports to believe, is conniving to shield Hillary Clinton from prosecution and to undermine him.

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 conciliatory Christmas spirit, I wish to offer five ways that the Donald could surprise his critics and come out on top in the new year.First, the stock market. The professional naysayers are almost unanimous in saying that the era of big gains is over. Then again, they said that last year. What if Trump’s audacious tax cut really works, propelling Reaganite growth? The stock market, in this case, would not have priced in all the forthcoming gains.

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 for Alabama. The victory gives the Democrats a clean sweep in statewide elections in 2017. The party won the special elections in Virginia and New Jersey in November, and success in Alabama now gives them great momentum going into the mid-term elections of 2018. Trump can keep pointing at the economy and saying he is making America great again. The Democrats can keep pointing to what’s happened at the ballot since his inauguration and say he’s losing.

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 does, the media will have to content itself with publishing distressing images and videos of the shooting and reporting what few facts we know. There isn't anything else to say. It is worth noting, however, that Trump supporters have taken to pointing out that, while there have been around 40 terrorist attacks in Europe in 2017, in America there have been none -- not one terrorist atrocity since the 45th president was inaugurated.

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 reads to her young boy, his hand on his scabbard. Only in adulthood have I done a double take. I was raised in a slightly weird place. In an era of fungible Walmarts, regional distinction in the US is hard to come by, and I treasure Raleigh’s funk factor. Yet I didn’t grow up around folks who wished the South had won the Civil War and wanted to bring back slavery.