Politics

In the White House on Tuesday, with the world just where he wanted it — eyes on the TV, transfixed by his boldness — President Trump uprooted the Iran nuclear deal. Under this agreement, which was signed in July 2015 by Iran and the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, plus Germany, the Iranians mothballed significant parts of their rapidly advancing nuclear industry in return for sanctions relief. The country is now considerably further away from a bomb than it was before, and its nuclear facilities are subject to inspections of unusual intrusiveness. In March Gadi Eisenkot, Israel’s chief of the general staff, affirmed that the agreement ‘is working and is putting off realisation of the Iranian nuclear vision by ten to 15 years’.

The only time I met Donald Trump was at a small event for politically mature journalists at the White House last April. After milling about with my fellow scribes in the press room—it’s a lot smaller and shabbier than it looks on TV, like Jim Acosta—we were ushered into the Roosevelt Room near the Oval Office. The President, secretary of commerce Wilbur Ross, and a few aides (Steve Bannon, Michael Anton, Reince Priebus: wot larks!) soon joined us. After a brief presentation, the President took questions. Mine was about Iran.   During the campaign, I noted, the President had regularly decried the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, i.e, the 2015 Obama Iran deal in which the U.S.

Donald Trump is not known as a champion of women, but he thinks he should be.  The President wants the deputy director of CIA, Gina Haspel, to succeed Mike Pompeo in the top job, and the Democrats are raging against her appointment. Predictably enough, Trump is enjoying the irony, tweeting on Monday morning:  “My highly respected nominee for CIA Director, Gina Haspel, has come under fire because she was too tough on Terrorists. Think of that, in these very dangerous times, we have the most qualified person, a woman, who Democrats want OUT because she is too tough on terror. Win Gina!” Needless to say, it isn’t quite the fact that Haspel is a woman which is bothering the Democrats about her appointment.

‘Honour,’ the French poet Nicholas Boileau wrote in 1666, ‘is like a rocky island without a landing place; once we leave it, we can’t get back.’ Especially, Donald Trump might add, when the outlook is Stormy. But Trump’s concept of honour is perhaps closer to that of Stormy Daniels’ fellow artist and near-namesake, the Elizabethan poet Samuel Daniel, who in 1592 called honour an ‘empty sound’, an ‘idle name of wind’. These early modern attitudes still define how we think about honour. Either it’s a unique defence against life’s ethical challenges, or it’s an instrument, a luxury—an affectation that is, as Trump is alleged to have found Stormy Daniels, desirable but negotiable.

John McCain is dying, and with him is dying a Republican Party that was never born. The Arizona senator has to be understood in relation to the GOP because he has never really been the “maverick” that pundits made him out to be after his first White House bid eighteen years ago. Before then, he was seen as a reliably conservative Republican, albeit a more hawkishly internationalist one than was the norm for the GOP in the Bill Clinton era. Those were the days when Republicans like George W. Bush swore on an oilman’s bible that they were against “nation building.” McCain was more honest about his interventionism, which made him the neoconservatives’ first choice in 2000.

It’s unkind to speculate over somebody’s mental health. Still, given the stakes, it seems worth saying what everyone is thinking – that Rudolph W. Giuliani’s extraordinary performance on Fox News last night suggests he is a man not fully in control of his mind. The former New York Mayor, 73, who was hired as Trump’s lawyer less than two weeks ago, dropped a news bomb on Sean Hannity’s show. Giuliani said that Donald Trump repaid $130, 000 hush money that his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, had paid to ‘some Stormy Daniels woman’ over her alleged affair with the now president of the Unites States. Rudy Giuliani: Trump reimbursed Michael Cohen $130K for expenses, but it was not campaign money pic.twitter.

Pop quiz: how many branches of government are there in the United States? If you said “Four,” go to the head of the class. As of May 17, 2017, the traditional three branches of  Congress, the Executive, the Judiciary, are joined by the Office of Robert S. Mueller III, Special Counsel in charge of destroying the president. It’s been a fun year. It’s not everyone, after all, who so thoroughly commands the police power of the state that he can order a predawn, guns-drawn raid on people he doesn’t like. Usually, that drama is reserved for dangerous criminals—terrorists, murders, major drug dealers. But Paul Manafort, a businessman, was close to Donald Trump, so he and his wife got the SWAT-team treatment on suspicion of a white-collar crime.

Readers of Spectator’s USA’s mothership, the venerable yet sprightly London Spectator, will know that one of the secrets of the Spectator’s endurance and popularity is the promiscuity—ideological, of course—of its columnists.Turn the page from Matthew Parris to Rod Liddle, and you undergo a whiplash of the most bracing kind. Parris is an ex-Conservative MP who, if not one of the ‘wets’ that Margaret Thatcher dismissed for ideological ploppiness, is certainly well irrigated with metropolitan manners. Rod Liddle, having worked at the BBC and being a member of the Labour Party, is on a Genghis Khan-like rampage against political correctness, Islamism and the decline of pop music.

The Trump administration may be heading into an infinity war. Europe is gearing up to retaliate against American on the trade front. China is indicating that it will refuse to negotiate on several key Trump trade demands. The Iran deal may be ripped up on May 12. And national security adviser John Bolton seems intent on sabotaging any negotiations with North Korea, something he did in the George W. Bush administration when he helped to terminate the 1994 nuclear deal that the Clinton administration had negotiated with the North.This past weekend, Bolton proclaimed that North Korea should follow the precedent of Libya when it comes to denuclearization.

You have to give it to Donald Trump. Not for pushing North Korea towards negotiations, or for holding China to account over dumping low-grade steel onto the American market, or even for healing the diplomatic breach between France and the United States—but for missing the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner on Saturday night. People accuse Trump of being capricious and having a poor sense of judgement, but he’s consistent when it comes to the Correspondents' Dinner. The crassness of Michelle Wolf’s jokes makes you wonder whether it’s the press, not the president, whose judgement is askew. Trump dodged the dinner last year too, and is presumably already filling his calendar for the next two years. This year, Trump addressed a rally in Michigan.

Like all stereotypes, the “sneaky Jesuit” is truer than not. And as a practicing Catholic, I’m grateful to the Society of Jesus for its work refining the art of equivocation. It’s gotten me out of several difficult conversations with housemates without outright lying, such as: “Who drank the last of the Maker’s Mark?” Not me! (It wasn’t the last, after all. There are thousands more bottles all over the world.) So, defenders of the Jesuit priest Patrick Conroy aren’t wrong when they condemn Speaker Paul Ryan, who recently dismissed the Congressional chaplain for being “too political”.

For France and Germany, the contrast could scarcely be starker. For three days Emmanuel Macron was wooed and fêted by Donald Trump, treated to marching bands and banquets. Today, Angela Merkel made a brief two-and-a-half hour stop-off at the White House, then flew away again. So does this mean President Macron is Trump’s New Best Friend and Chancellor Merkel is just his sideman (or should that be sidewoman?)? As always, in international diplomacy, this is a question to which the answer is: well, yes and no.Sure, the dramatic difference between these tête-à-têtes was no coincidence. Yes, Macron’s was a full state visit, Merkel’s was merely a working meeting, but the disparity is deeply symbolic, and the timing makes it even more so.