Politics

Commentators in many mainstream media outlets started criticising Melania Trump’s tenure as first lady as soon as she moved into the White House. No, scratch that—the commentariat began predicting first lady failure as soon as Donald Trump was inaugurated on January 20, 2017, while his wife didn’t move back in with him for nearly five months. “Her choice to remain in the couple's New York City penthouse until their son, Barron, 11, finished the school year,” a CNN story said, was “unprecedented.” But even after Melania and Barron joined Donald in the White House that June, critics complained she was little seen and, worse, couldn’t be taken seriously on the issue she’d chosen to highlight—cyberbullying.

She was the angry one from Sex in the City, and now Cynthia Nixon is venting her spleen on behalf of the voters of New York. Last month, Nixon launched her pitch to challenge incumbent Andrew Cuomo as the Democratic candidate for the governorship of New York, invoking the wrath of many New Yorkers over the state’s crumbling transport links and cash-starved schools. And why not? In an era when a real estate mogul turned reality TV star occupies the White House and a chat show queen is the great black hope to replace him, why shouldn’t Nixon segue from sipping martinis with Carrie and the gang to juggling New York’s $168 billion budget?

It’s all relative with Saudi Arabia. Everyone who matters is related to everyone else. Even relative to the degraded standards of Afro-kleptocracy and Arab dictatorship, the Saudi state is nothing more than the al-Saud family business, plus its clerical and military appendages. And relatively speaking, the Saudis are hypocrites even by the low standards of Arab governance. They have always divided the world into those with whom they are prepared admit economic relations, and those with whom they claim not to have relations of any kind, but secretly do. The former include Saudi Arabia’s slave class of imported servants and construction workers, oil-hungry governments.

California, once a citadel of conservatism, now a bastion of liberal progressivism, continues to harbour a few intellectual redoubts on the right. Up north you can find the Hoover Institution, which is located on the Stanford University campus. And down south, near Los Angeles, there is the Claremont Institute, another scholarly outfit which also happens to view President Trump with general approbation. On Thursday I met one of Claremont’s leading lights, Charles R. Kesler, for lunch at an Italian establishment near Beverly Hills. Kesler was kind enough to supply me with a copy of the new issue of the Claremont Review of Books, which contains a spirited riposte by him to the Never Trump faction of conservatives.

Context is everything. But if you’re a busy person trying to navigate the personal and professional traps of modern life – and aren’t we all? – you don’t always have time to read a lot on every topic. You rely on the media to tell you succinctly what you most need to know. But that might be one of the worst traps into which you can fall in Donald Trump’s Washington. Take the latest news as an example. “Trump picks his doctor to replace Shulkin as veterans secretary,” the BBC announced. The Washington Post headline was similar: “Trump ousts Veterans Affairs chief Shulkin, nominates personal physician to replace him.

“President Trump ordered the expulsion of 60 Russian officials from the United States and ordered the closure of the Russian consulate in Seattle, the White House announced Monday” was how NPR started its report on the surprise story that started the week in Washington, and most outlets followed suit. In this way, the press emphasised the White House’s preferred narrative of the news. Donald Trump hasn’t uttered a word on Twitter, his favorite medium of communication, about the attempted assassination in Britain of a former Russian spy with a Soviet-era nerve agent. Neither did he bring it up during his phone call to Vladimir Putin last week, in which he congratulated the Russian president on his recent reelection.

It seems like only yesterday Donald Trump was buttering up Vladimir Putin. His congratulations on Putin’s victory and failure to mention the nerve agent attack in Salisbury sent the foreign policy establishment in Washington into high dudgeon. Now the administration has expelled 60 Russian diplomats and shuttered the Russian consulate in Seattle. This is only, top administration officials say, ‘the first step.’ The government could also go on to release nasty details about the financial holding that Putin has squirrelled away abroad, a move, incidentally, that could provoke retaliation against Trump by the Kremlin. What gives?

The hysteria from the Left over Donald Trump’s appointment of John Bolton as National Security Advisor to replace Lt. General H. R. McMaster has been partly hilarious, partly alarming to behold. From The Guardian in this country to The New York Times, CNN, Slate, Salon, and beyond in the United States, we are presented with a scarecrow figure who makes Jack D. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove look like Albert Schweitzer after a nap. 'Yes', screamed an editorial in The New York Times, 'John Bolton Really Is That Dangerous'. Bolton is a 'hawk’s hawk', an 'extreme ideologue' and 'warmonger' whose appointment 'scares people' and 'puts us on a path to war'.

Another massive America news blizzard yesterday: Trump lawyer quits, tariffs tariffs tariffs, stock-market slide, former alleged mistresses of the President speaking out, McMaster out (finally), Bolton in (finally). And then, as a night cap, the Senate approves a $1.3 trillion spending plan to prevent a government shutdown. The Bolton news has, so far, been the most headline grabbing, even if people in the know — and readers of Spectator USA — have known it was about to happen for some time. Donald Trump has rather sweetly let it be known that he has hired Bolton on the condition he didn’t start any wars: ‘now, now John, don’t you go nuking.’ But people who cherish world peace are right to be alarmed.

This week marks 15 years since the start of America’s war in Iraq. Regime change was George W. Bush’s objective, and Saddam Hussein was duly removed, tried, and executed. But Bush could not have counted on how much regime change would also come to Washington as a result of the war. It contributed to the Republicans’ loss of Congress in 2006 and to the failure of Bush’s party to keep control of the White House in 2008. Yet it did even more: it helped to give Barack Obama, an antiwar candidate—and premature winner of a Nobel Peace Prize as president—an edge against Hillary Clinton among the activist left in the 2008 Democratic primaries. As a senator, Mrs. Clinton had, after all, voted for the war. And then there is Donald Trump.