American queen | The Spectator

The Mueller inquiry was an attempted coup

This article is in The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. More official reports, reprimands and (probably) indictments are to come in the Great Get Trump imbroglio of 2016 to 2019. But it is not too early to begin an autopsy of the greatest political scandal in American history. The patient is dead, dead, dead, and the last doctors in the room are the pathologists. The lawyers crowding the corridor outside the operating theater are interested not in resuscitating the corpse but in distributing and gorging upon its assets.

Andrew Cockburn

Joe Biden’s fractious relationship with the truth

This article is in The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. ‘He ran twice for president and lost when he didn’t have dementia,’ a veteran Democratic party operative remarked to me earlier in the year apropos Joe Biden. ‘So why should we think he’d win now he does have dementia?’ It was a fair question, to which the answer could be: (a) maybe he does have dementia, but so what? Ronald Reagan had dementia for at least part of his presidency (how early this manifested is open to argument — first or second term?

Bridget Phetasy

An open letter to the Democratic party

This article is in The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. Dear Democrats, I’m mad at you. I was raised a die-hard, bleeding-heart liberal. My grandmother was an Irish Catholic New Englander who worshipped JFK almost as much as Jesus. My dad and his nine siblings sang for the Kennedys at Hammersmith Farm. For decades, I was a loyal regular at your bar until suddenly you started ignoring me. You took my support for granted and dismissed my concerns, focusing instead on courting the young city hipsters with their scooters and their designer weed and their craft beers. You began overlooking pragmatic moderates and catering to loud extremists who favor rewriting the Constitution and accelerating our lurch towards socialism.

Will Lloyd

The age of LOLitics

This article is in The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. One thing is now as obvious as a brick through a window: politics is the new comedy. Who in America believes that the road to 2020 will be paved with prudence, solemnity and fair campaigning? Nobody does. This election season will be defined by below-the-belt hits, salty jokes and juvenile comebacks, all delivered with the subtlety of an air horn blast. Already we have seen doddery Joe Biden challenge the president to a push-up contest on national television, while Bernie Sanders wants to take on Trump at a mile-long footrace. The president, according to the cerebral Andrew Yang, is ‘so fat’. This is not an American phenomenon.

Julie Bindel

The horror of Big Porn

This article is in The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. We used to have big tobacco. Now we have big porn. The adult industry has enormous soft cultural power today — just as the tobacco industry once did. Recall The People vs. Larry Flynt, in which the megabucks head of the Hustler empire was portrayed as a free speech hero? We see that trope over and over in Hollywood movies. In most popular entertainment, in fact, it’s only prudes and killjoys who don’t appreciate porn. The tobacco giants once peddled propaganda about how cigarettes were glamorous. They convinced many that smoking could cure a cold or sore throat.

Rod Liddle

Please America, take Meghan Markle back

Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, is suing a British newspaper for publishing a handwritten letter to her father. Prince Harry, for his part, has attacked the press for waging a campaign against his wife ‘with no thought to the consequences’. But it isn’t just the tabloid media that is turning on the American duchess. She’s turning into a royal nightmare. In the cover piece of the first US edition of The Spectator, Rod Liddle argues that the ‘Princess of Woke’ is rubbing up the British the wrong way. Please America, take her back? The great triumph of recent American politics is for the people of your fine country to have elected as president a man who is the precise embodiment of what supercilious Europeans think Americans are really like.

Daniel McCarthy

Romney Republicanism could never win

This article is in The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. As Donald Trump strides toward his fourth year in the White House, his enemies have yet to answer the most basic questions of 2016. Why is Trump president? Why not a nice Republican like Mitt Romney or Jeb Bush? Two maps tell the tale. The first is the obvious one, the map of states whose electoral votes Trump won, a map that includes states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin that no other Republican presidential aspirant had won since the 1980s. But the second map is even more important — it shows not why Trump won but why the Republican party was doomed to lose without Trump and Trumpism. It’s the map of George W.

James Adams

Space is the place — for war

This article is in The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. You have no phone service, no television, no GPS for the car and no road atlas because you threw it out in 2009. Planes aren’t flying, and that spinning sound you can’t hear is the sound of space hardware floating out of our control. So dependent have we become on satellites for everything from communications to traffic control that a day without them would mean catastrophe. In the new space race, victory won’t mean landing on the moon or sending a rocket to Mars, but developing a new arsenal to wage and win war in space.

Ross Clark

Will China meddle in the 2020 election?

This article is in The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. Vladimir Putin, as we all know, has become chief electoral strategist in the western world. When he wanted Donald Trump president, he merely set his army of trolls to action and the American public was fooled into backing a candidate who would never have got anywhere near the White House otherwise. That is what the media has been telling us since 2016, anyway. But the idea that Russia can swing a sophisticated electorate of 300 million people with the aid of a fake-news tweet factory in St Petersburg was always fantastical. Even the Mueller inquiry could not prove it — not for want of trying.

Paul Wood

Felix Sater, superspy

Felix Sater is mad at me. He telephones to say that after I called him a ‘mobster’ in The Spectator, his kids were unable to leave the house. ‘Paul, I am not a mobster. Do I know mobsters? Absolutely, lots of them...I was involved with all five [New York crime] families...I’ve known a lot of unsavory characters in my life...I was never a mobster.’ As one of the characters he’s known is Donald Trump — they were in business together — Sater’s life became public property as soon as Trump announced he was running for president. Since then, the labels stuck on Sater include: violent felon, stock fraudster, money-launderer, FBI informant, spy, double agent, triple agent, the Russian Mafia’s connection to the Trump Organization.

Toby Young

Colleges should be ‘islands of excellence’

This article is in The Spectator’s October 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. America’s colleges and universities are in crisis. According to the latest data released by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, enrollment is down 1.7 percent compared with 2018, following a drop of 1.8 percent the previous year. If you contrast 2019 with 2017, that’s more than half a million fewer students. The brunt of this decline is being felt in New England, the center of America’s higher-education sector. In eastern Massachusetts, eight colleges have either closed or merged in the past four years, while in Vermont three colleges have gone to the wall in 2019 alone. Most experts think things will get a good deal worse.

The Spectator

Where are world leaders educated?

This article is in The Spectator’s October 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. Leading minds Where are world leaders educated? According to an analysis by the UK-based Higher Education Policy Institute, the US has just overtaken Britain in the number of world leaders educated at the country’s universities. — 62 world leaders (monarchs, presidents or prime ministers) were educated at US universities. — 59 were educated at UK universities. — Two years ago, the respective figures were 57 and 58. — 40 current world leaders were educated in France, 10 in Russia and 9 in Australia. The burning question Is climate change making wildfires worse? Acres burned in US wildfires: 1928 43.54m 1938 33.81m 1948 16.56m 1958 3.28m 1968 4.

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