America

Thursday

Lionel Shriver

From Trumpism to lockdown, people believe in the craziest things

Following his disgruntled supporters’ rampage through the Capitol, Donald Trump’s fate hangs in the balance. But one artefact of this disreputable administration will survive Trump himself: doubt over the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election, shared by some 39 per cent of the electorate, including two-thirds of Republicans. However refuted in the courts, Republicans’ pervasive conviction that the election was ‘stolen’ must be partially rooted in their rollercoaster emotions while watching the returns. On election night, Trump seemed to be winning. Trump himself declared victory. Only across the following four days, as counts of mail-in ballots dribbled in, did the President’s lead slip agonisingly away. It’s far more upsetting to

James Forsyth

We’re starting to see a new foreign policy for Brexit Britain

What will Brexit Britain do differently? This is going to be the most important question in our politics for the next decade. If the answer is that nothing much will change, it would be hard to argue that the disruption of the past four and a half years has been worth it. But if Brexit means the country becomes quicker at adapting to changing circumstances, then the electorate’s decision in 2016 will have been vindicated. The quick decision to remove VAT from tampons and sanitary towels is a small, early sign of how Brexit enables parliament to respond more directly to public pressure. The decision not to join the EU’s

Lara King

The political power of America’s First Dogs

From the moment Donald Trump’s presidency began, he was lacking something. But Joe Biden is about to make up for it — twice over. Trump was the first president in more than a century not to have a dog in the White House. Biden’s German shepherds Champ, 12, and two-year-old Major will be filling the vacancy left by Barack Obama’s Portuguese water dogs, Bo and Sunny, and continuing a tradition of First Dogs that can trace its pedigree back to George Washington. Far from being mere political poodles, many First Dogs have made history in their own right. Calvin Coolidge’s collie Rob Roy was the first dog to feature in

Saturday

Mark Gettleson

Will Republicans impeach Trump?

Renewed moves to impeach President Trump in his final days in office, following the storming of the Capitol Building, are gathering steam in Washington. To add further to the drama of the past week, Twitter announced yesterday that it was permanently suspending the President. Nancy Pelosi went as far as calling on the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to limit Trump’s access to the nuclear codes, as some had attempted with Nixon at the height of his Watergate meltdown. As for the Republican establishment – especially those in the orbit of Senate Leader Mitch McConnell – they have wanted Trump out of the picture ever since Election Day.

Tom Slater

Josh Hawley and the new world of book cancellations

Book burning has not historically been considered an anti-fascist gesture. But in the wake of the storming of the Capitol Building in Washington DC by crazed Trump supporters, perhaps that’s set to change. This is the news that Republican Senator Josh Hawley, who indulged Trump’s conspiracy theories about the election being ‘stolen’, has had his book deal with Simon & Schuster terminated. It might not be a book-burning per se, but it’s certainly the 21st-century, polite-society equivalent of it. Simon & Schuster said it decided to pull Hawley’s forthcoming book, titled The Tyranny of Big Tech, in response to the ‘disturbing, deadly insurrection’ at the Capitol on Wednesday, and what

Thursday

Freddy Gray

The Democratic takeover is nearly complete

In the days following the US presidential election in November, political centrists reached a hasty verdict. Never mind all the squabbling about voter fraud — they had won. The extremes had lost. Donald Trump, the maniac, was out; Joe Biden, the moderate, was in. Yes, the increasingly radical Democratic party still controlled the House of Representatives, but as long as the Republicans won one of two Senate run-off races in Georgia in January, the crazies would be checked by a Republican majority in the Senate. The markets rallied. All was well in establishment la-la land, despite the pandemic. Well, guess what? On Wednesday morning, it became clear that the Democrats

Tuesday

Mark Gettleson

Trump has given the Democrats a chance in Georgia

Senate runoffs are being held today in Georgia, due to a peculiar state law which says that if no candidate gets over 50 per cent of the vote (as neither seat did in November), the top two go on to a second round. It’s the first time ever that two Senate runoffs are being held on the same day – and the first time a runoff will decide which party controls the Senate. Polls close at 7pm local time (midnight in the UK), with results coming in the following hours, though the large volume of mail-in votes, as in November, could mean a close race remains uncalled for days. Both

Thursday

Dominic Green

Biden’s burden: can he save the free world?

Joe Biden talks a lot about restoring America’s standing in the world. But the truth is that if he now has the chance to reshape America’s relationships for a new era, it’s because Donald Trump has already done the awkward stuff. The question is: can Biden and his team swallow their collective pride and build on Trump’s legacy, or will vanity and partisanship send the American Atlas tumbling to his knees? Trump won the 2016 election by forcing the difficult questions on to the national agenda. In office, he developed an alternative to the spent consensus of the 1990s. Call it vulgar realism, the lowest common denominator of American interest.

Thursday

Paul Wood

Iran vs the rest: the Middle East has reached a tipping point

Last year, in the cigar bar of an opulent London hotel much favoured by visiting Arabs, an interesting conversation took place. My friend was rich enough to have two private jets and claimed to be doing private shuttle diplomacy between Israel and one of the Gulf states. Smoke curled around our heads and a young Qatari in Gucci trainers passed by with a woman my friend assured me was a Russian prostitute. My friend’s phone was out now and he was on a video call with a man he said was a senior official in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. He asked him about a drone strike on Saudi Arabia’s two

Thursday

Freddy Gray

Here comes President Joebama

‘So you’re seeing a team develop that I have great confidence in,’ said former president Barack Obama this week when asked about Joe Biden’s incoming administration. Obama sounds a bit of a World King these days, but you can’t blame him for feeling chipper. He has his third book of memoirs out (he only writes about himself, it seems), he’s making millions through publishing and Netflix deals, his great nemesis Donald Trump appears finally to have been vanquished — and his gang is taking charge of Washington again. Biden revealed a number of his cabinet ‘picks’ this week, and it’s a case of jobs for the old Obama boys and

Thursday

Deborah Ross

Like a never-ending episode of The Jerry Springer Show: Hillbilly Elegy reviewed

Hillbilly Elegy is an adaptation of the best-selling memoir, published in 2016, by J.D. Vance and it’s quite a story. He was brought up in the American rust belt amid poverty, violence, addiction, trash heaps, burning cars, hopelessness and, on top of all that, a grandma who, we now know, was the spit of Catherine Tate’s Nan. (It’s Glenn Close, but check it out.) Still, if you can get past Nan — if, if — this film should be an emotionally stirring and moving account of, ultimately, achieving the American dream. (Vance went on to Yale and became a successful investment banker.) But as directed by Ron Howard it isn’t

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Cummings goes, Corbyn returns and pigeon sells for £1.4m

Home Dominic Cummings, the chief adviser to the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, left Downing Street after a week in which the public learnt that Lee Cain was the director of communications at No. 10, and that he had resigned after his appointment as chief of staff was withdrawn. The imbroglio directed focus on the performance of the Prime Minister and gave an opportunity for politicians to air their grievances. Mr Johnson then went into 14 days of quarantine, having been contacted by the national Test and Trace system after breakfasting with Covid-ridden Lee Anderson, MP for Ashfield. Mr Johnson’s own Covid test proved negative. He had intended to set out

Douglas Murray

Donald Trump won’t leave me alone

Ever since I saw him in Pensacola, Florida the other week, Donald J. Trump will not leave me alone. Each morning I wake up, turn on my phone and find more messages sent overnight. On just one morning this week I rolled over to find emails from him titled ‘Chaos’, ‘Rigged’ and ‘We’re gaining momentum.’ Another said ‘The left hates you, Douglas.’ He doesn’t know the half of it. Clearly my email address has been shared. Because in just one morning I also got emails from Mike Pence (‘We’re closer than ever’), Eric Trump and bewilderingly — for I cannot see what fresh constituency she brings — Eric’s wife, Lara.

Rod Liddle

The march of the fascist mushrooms

It has been too long coming. While conscientious and decent liberals have tried to explain why, to their horror, millions of people in Europe and the USA have embraced populist causes in recent years, none has really got near the nub of the issue, dug down to the very core. For example, I have long been of the opinion that the Brexit vote, along with the 2016 election of Donald Trump and the continued popularity of right-wing governments in Poland and Hungary, are almost entirely the consequences of the malign influence of fungi. I have attempted to advance this argument in political debates but am never taken seriously. Now at

Thursday

Freddy Gray

My post-election drink with Nigel Farage

Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, is a useful stop for journalists looking for some rust-belt Americana not too far from New York. The city feels a bit like a museum. Not so long ago, Bethlehem Steel was one of the biggest steel and ship-building companies in the world. Today the vast mill, which shut down in 1995, is a cultural events centre. Next to the mill is a replacement economic hub for Bethlehem — the Wind Creek mega-casino. My colleague Matt and I spent a couple of days in and around west Bethlehem, Northampton County. Northampton voted for Barack Obama in 2012 and Donald Trump in 2016. Last week, by less than 1

Lloyd Evans

Racists will love it: National Theatre's Death of England – Delroy reviewed

Death of England: Delroy is a companion piece to Death of England, which ran in February at the NT and examined the white working classes. Here the focus is on a successful black Briton, Delroy, who votes Tory and feels at home in multicultural society. The charismatic Michael Balogun plays him as a complex, shrewd and humane figure. He likes to mock white people who judge others according to superficialities like accent and pronunciation. And he recalls his horrified excitement when a white girl at school calmly placed her finger inside his boxer shorts. Delroy has plenty of white pals including his girlfriend, Carly, who is expecting their child. The

Lionel Shriver

What the three types of Trump supporter really want

As Democrats’ colossal collective sigh of relief drives wind turbines even over in Britain, let’s not lose sight of the big story. However welcome, Joe Biden’s win was supposedly a dead cert. Even conservative commentators like Andrew Sullivan were hoping for a landslide. The real big story is that Donald Trump came within about 73,000 votes of winning the Electoral College. Democrats have celebrated the fact that their man got more votes than any other presidential candidate in history. But who got the second largest number of votes in history? Donald Trump. Of all people. And a 75 million vs 71 million popular vote gap is hardly yawning. Had a

Andrew Sullivan

Trump may have lost, but his agenda is here to stay

Donald Trump is now showing exactly why he had to be defeated. Well after the votes have been counted, with no evidence of anything but the usual minor glitches — none of which is sufficient to dent Joe Biden’s margin of victory — the President of the United States is doing what he did for four years: sabotaging American democracy because of his pathological narcissism. Trump remains what he has long been — a purely destructive force, a vandaliser, not a builder. But Trumpism? It did far better than anyone expected. The polls were off — again — missing Republican strength. Down-ballot, many Republicans seriously outperformed their nominal leader. During

Rod Liddle

Voters have lost their nerve

Elections teach us nothing. Instead, each tribe dredges succour from the minutiae, proving that they had been right all along. The moderate left — here and in the US — insists that tacking to the centre is the way to beat a populist right-winger, despite the fact that Joe Biden won by the skin of his teeth, through the votes of people who couldn’t be arsed to go to the polls on polling day and against a candidate of whom the most charitable description would be ‘fundamentally deranged’. The woke far left, meanwhile, argues the reverse, implying that the tightness of the vote was down to a lack of progressive

Friday

Daniel DePetris

Joe Biden should prepare for gridlock

The Democratic Party was anticipating a blue wave this fall, a victory of such magnitude that Republicans would be spending the next two years fighting amongst themselves rather than controlling the purse strings. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the top Democrat in the House of Representatives, was so confident of this blue wave scenario that she sent a memo to her Democratic colleagues outlining a list of bold policy proposals that unified Democratic government in Washington could achieve in the first several months. At the top of that list: a new coronavirus relief package and defending – and building on – the Affordable Care Act. Pelosi, however, got ahead of her skis.