All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
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 … Read more
For Donald Trump, yesterday was a bad day to bury good news. While Rex Tillerson’s resignation as Secretary of State dominated the headlines, the biggest and most important story of the day came from Devin Nunes and the Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee. Their news was good for Trump, and very bad indeed for … Read more
The special election for Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional District has ended in a photo finish. There are absentee ballots still to be counted, perhaps a recount to be demanded. But it looks as if the Democrat, Conor Lamb, has won in this district that just two years ago voted for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton by … Read more
Stephen Hawking has died at the age of 76. Here, Kate Chisholm describes listening to the Cambridge professor deliver the 2016 Reith Lectures: You don’t expect to be brought close to tears by the Reith Lectures, which are after all at the most extreme end of Radio 4’s commitment to ‘educating’ its audience. Yet when Stephen
Robert Mueller, the former Director of the FBI and special counsel in the soap opera that is the Russia collusion investigation, has been on the case for ten months now. His team of attorneys and Washington prosecutors has interviewed dozens of witnesses, scanned hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, sent an unknown number of … Read more
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
Sometimes it’s almost as if Donald Trump wants the world to think he’s a Russian patsy. Yesterday, Rex Tillerson, as Secretary of State, warned Putin that Russia’s alleged assassination attempt on British soil would trigger ‘a response’. Today he’s been sacked. Mike Pompeo, Director of the CIA, will become our new Secretary of State. He
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, … Read more
British Prime Minister Theresa May has given Russia until Wednesday to explain why a nerve agent that it has developed was used in an attack in Salisbury, Wiltshire. She told the House of Commons that it was ‘highly likely’ that Russia was responsible for the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter. She said that
Donald Trump’s acceptance of Kim Jong-un’s invitation to meet is a master stroke. It’s exactly the kind of thing Ronald Reagan liked to do. Reagan, you may recall, announced his pursuit of a missile defence system in March 1983 on national television without alerting his advisors beforehand. Liberals went crazy. Then he decided to end
You would have to be quite odd not to approve of the sudden surge of solidarity amongst Hollywood stars of the female persuasion. (Though I did wonder, when Frances McDormand called so movingly during her Oscar-winner speech ‘Meryl, if you do it everyone else will!’ whether she meant ‘Suck up to Weinstein for years’ or
Gstaad The muffled sound of falling snow is ever-present. It makes the dreary beautiful and turns the bleak into magic. Happiness is waking up to a winter wonderland. From where I am, I can’t hear the shrieks of children sledding nearby but I can see the odd off-piste skier and the traces they leave. I
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 … Read more
In my reporting on John Bolton, the hardline former US Ambassador to the UN, I have noticed a trend. Bolton very clearly wants in. And he has a very specific way of going about it. Some context: despite being a George W. Bush alum, Bolton has largely vociferously backed President Donald Trump. Bolton has been … Read more
The AIPAC conference, that annual celebration of the triangular romance between America, Israel and American Jews, concluded last night with the traditional protestations of undying love, democratic compatibility and common values. Meanwhile, AIPAC’s identity crisis deepens, and a redefinition of the goals of the American-Israeli relationship looms. AIPAC is studiously bipartisan, but the maladroit policies … Read more
The weeping and wailing that is greeting Trump’s imposition of tariffs on steel and aluminum products entering the US is evidence that no one in America knows anything about the history of the Grand Old Party. Paul Ryan and the libertarian right are acting as if the President is betraying some long and distinguished tradition. … Read more
We should by now be used to Trump’s modus operandi. But we aren’t. We should all know the art of his deals. But we don’t. He is the counterpuncher who quite often smacks first and then retreats. Look at the tariffs story now unfolding. It goes like this: Trump makes fierce opening gambit. This shocks … Read more
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 … Read more
Should taking rights away from innocent people be a first resort or a last resort—or no resort at all—in response to a spate of heinous crimes? If we were talking about the First Amendment rights of religious minorities or of free speech, most liberals would insist that people who had committed no crime shouldn’t forfeit … Read more
Not many world leaders can claim to be on friendly personal terms with Donald Trump. There are fewer still who would regard a visit to this particular president’s White House as a crowning achievement, and one which would increase their popularity at home rather than being seen as a moral failing. So the lesson of
If accounts in the press are to be believed, President Trump has reached a fresh nadir. “These are the darkest days in at least half a year,” reports The Washington Post. “Sources close to President Trump say he is in a bad place,” chimes in the impressively-sourced Axios. Buried in the Post story is a … Read more
It was always going to be difficult for this year’s Oscars to balance politics and entertainment, the sweeping declaration with the plunging cleavage. The host, Jimmy Kimmel, got through his opening routine well enough, and without showing his cleavage either, but the strain was already showing. The décor and the script were like a moral
Tomorrow night, TV viewers will take to their couches for a night of Hollywood glamour, razzmatazz and gross hypocrisy. A bunch of vain halfwits who make millions waving guns around or taking off their clothes will preach to us about gun control and sexual morality. Yes, it’s the 493rd annual Oscar Awards. I have the
Parson Weems, the popular author of the early American republic who invented the apocryphal story of George Washington and the cherry tree, achieved his greatest commercial success as a pamphleteer with Hymen’s Recruiting-Sergeant; Or the New Matrimonial Tattoo for Old Bachelors (1799). In this booklet, the amiable old clergyman suggested that young people ought to
U.S. Defence Secretary Jim Mattis is blocking former Ambassador John Bolton from taking over as National Security Advisor, Cockburn has learned. John Bolton was first reported as heir apparent to McMaster by The National Interest in January. McMaster was nearly ousted from the White House summer of last year, ostensibly by a faction lead by … Read more
A friend who works for a prominent, hardline conservative think tank writes: ‘So, can we all admit that Trump is basically a Democrat now on guns?’ On Wednesday, I wrote that American gun reform is close to happening. In the intervening hours, that view has been buttressed by a series of comments from the president … Read more
Has Donald Trump sparked off a trade war? His plans for a 25 percent tariff on steel imports and 10 percent tariff on aluminum have shocked friend and foe alike. China is outraged; so are Canada, Japan, and South Korea—allies that in fact export more steel to the U.S. than China does. They stand to
‘Whatever complicates the world more — I do,’ Donald Trump once said. As President, that still seems to be his mantra. Everybody knows that he feels America has been ripped off for decades when it comes to global trade — and that he intends address imbalances that hurt his country wherever he can. But his
Only very rarely in today’s Washington, D.C. is a cause so strong that it brings together America’s most famous progressive with one of the country’s most ideological conservatives. But the nasty, bloody, and intractable proxy war in Yemen – and the U.S. military’s involvement in it – is one of those causes. Yesterday afternoon, Vermont … Read more
Every week is extraordinary in the Trump administration — but this week seems stranger than most. Matters are rumbling in the belly of the beast. On Tuesday, we learned that Jared Kushner had his security clearance downgraded. Today, we learn that Hope Hicks, famously Trump’s most trusted aide, has resigned, a day after she testified
It seems a perverse fate that Donald Trump, the bogeyman of progressive America, should turn out to be the president who ends up delivering a measure of gun reform. In the wake of the Valentine’s Day massacre at Stoneman Douglas High School in South Florida, President Trump has delivered a series of remarks promising a
He did not address how he might respond to the inevitable debate that will now consume America over the legality of assault weapons. Again, here he differs from Obama, who for instance used his speech in the wake of the Umpqua Community College shooting in Oregon to make an appeal for what he called ‘common-sense … Read more
It was always ridiculous that Jared Kushner, an amiable 37-year-old who had no diplomatic, political or military experience, should have had top-level ‘SCI’ security access as a senior member of the White House — just because he happened to be the President’s son-in-law. Well now, he’s been downgraded, as Politico reports. He continues to have
Donald Trump recently disparaged Britain’s National Health Service for “going broke and not working,” leading Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt to express his pride in a system “where all get care no matter the size of their bank balance.” But the news has been filled for months with stories of people unable to access care they