America

Thursday

Andrew Sullivan

The magic of The Spectator

Not since South Park Elementary’s election campaign between a Giant Douche and a Turd Sandwich has an election bedevilled me as much as this one. On the one hand, the choice is disarmingly simple. One of the candidates is obviously mentally unhinged, delusional, malignant and contemptuous of the rule of law. One of the candidates hasn’t just broken norms. He has broken the norm, the indispensable norm for the continuation of the republic: accepting the results of an election. This is the third time Donald Trump has told us in advance he won’t do that if he doesn’t win. And the second time, he incited a mob to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power.

Thursday

Owen Matthews

What does ‘victory’ for Ukraine look like?

This week in New York Volodymyr Zelensky will present Joe Biden with a ‘Victory Plan’ for Ukraine. But how to define what ‘victory’ actually means? A fundamental and fast-widening distance is opening up over that question between Zelensky and his western allies – as well as inside Ukraine itself. Zelensky insists that the bottom line of a Ukrainian victory remains ‘the occupation army [being] driven out by force or diplomatically, in such a way that the country preserves its true independence and is freed from occupation’. He has also rejected the idea of a ceasefire, saying that any ‘freezing of the war or any other manipulations… will simply postpone Russian aggression to a later stage’.

Thursday

Douglas Murray

Are the Tories brave enough to be conservative?

The Conservative party is out of power – and that’s not easy if you’ve been in power for more than a decade. Even after a short spell in government there are certain aspects of life that you miss. The drivers and others who used to manage your life and get you around. The legions of advisers. The security detail (if you held one of the high offices of state). And the civil servants who do your bidding. That last one is a joke, of course. I know most readers will, like me, have found it difficult to listen to Conservative ministers complaining about civil servants during their 14 years in power. There might well have been cause to moan that civil servants were all a bunch of lazy lefties for the first couple of years.

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: State pension to rise, prisoners released early and a new owner for The Spectator

Home The government won by 348 to 228 a Commons vote on limiting the winter fuel allowance for pensioners to those who qualified by poverty: 52 Labour MPs didn’t vote, one voted with the opposition; five MPs suspended from the Labour party also voted with the opposition. Three million people who began receiving the ‘new’ state pension after 2016 will be given £460 a year more from April 2025, in line with wage growth of 4 per cent. A bill was published to exclude the 92 hereditary peers from the House of Lords.

Wednesday

Katy Balls

Trump vs Harris debate: who won?

14 min listen

Last night saw the first Trump vs Harris debate and the consensus seems to be that Harris came out on top. She managed to avoid sticky issues about her political past and goaded Trump into some rambling and – at times – outrageous remarks. What did we learn?  Also today, we have had new figures on the economy with GDP flatlining for the second month in a row. Does this vindicate Rachel Reeves' tough decision on the winter fuel allowance?  Katy Balls speaks to Kate Andrews and John McTernan.  Produced by Oscar Edmondson.

Tuesday

Jude Cook

The pitfalls of privilege and philanthropy: Entitlement, by Rumaan Alam, reviewed

Money can’t buy you love, the Beatles sang. But that doesn’t matter so much if you’re not interested in love, like Brooke Orr, the 33-year-old heroine of Rumaan Alam’s fourth novel, Entitlement. In contrast to Alam’s wildly successful, lockdown-resonant Leave the World Behind, the latest book is set in 2014, during the era of ‘Obama’s Placid America’, a world depicted as a virtually frictionless pre-Trump utopia in which ‘black, gorgeous, serious, passionate’ young women such as Brooke can thrive. When she leaves her teaching job and joins the charitable Asher and Carol Jaffee Foundation – started after the benign octogenarian billionaire Asher Jaffee lost his daughter – she realises that money is where her heart lies.

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: The dark side of chess players

Spinning a line Sir: Roger Alton is too enthusiastic about the Hundred tournament (Sport, 24 August) – I can’t recall another sport that has so successfully alienated its entire support base. Before the season ends, I encourage Roger to watch his local cricket team and ask for their thoughts about the Hundred. He will find that most are terribly unhappy. While it has attracted a few big names in the men’s, we have no Indian powerhouses and few Australian heavyweights; other franchises round the world are, simply put, outcompeting us. Overseas investment will inevitably increase the number of teams and widen the window of play into most of July, similar to the length of the Indian Premier League.

Tuesday

Sam Leith

Can W.H. Auden be called a war poet?

Nicholas Jenkins takes, as a point to navigate by in this rich and ingenious study of the early Auden, a remark by the poet’s friend Hannah Arendt. Auden, she said, had ‘the necessary secretiveness of the great poet’. You can’t always trust what Auden, in his prose and in his later interviews, claimed to have been getting at in the poems. And in Jenkins’s account, you can’t even trust what the poems think they’re getting at. Jenkins seeks to put Auden back in his own time, and embed the verse in his life. Auden said in public, for instance, that the first world war had little effect on him; and it’s seldom explicitly referenced in the verse. But in Jenkins’s version he’s a war poet.

Wednesday

James Walton

Ambitious, bold and confusing: BBC4’s Corridors of Power – Should America Police the World? reviewed

Narrated by Meryl Streep, Corridors of Power: Should America Police the World? announced the scale of its ambition straight away. Before the opening titles, we’d already heard from Hillary Clinton, Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright and the late Henry Kissinger. We’d also seen the lines drawn up as to how its bold subtitle might be answered. It is an authentically confusing programme, where any firm moral position doesn’t stay firm for long As Clinton put it, in 1945 a question emerged whose implications would dominate post-war US foreign policy: ‘Why didn’t we do more to try to prevent the transport of the Jews?’ The immediate response was the heartfelt yet potentially glib declaration: ‘Never again.’ But what would that actually mean in practice?

Thursday

Lionel Shriver

Will the real Kamala Harris please stand up?

About five minutes ago, the one Democrat more certain to lose to Donald Trump than Joe Biden was his widely ridiculed vice president. Party wonks despaired that their elderly candidate was handicapped by a veep whose prospective ascendence to the presidency terrified voters. Dems anguished about needing to sideline an unpopular ‘woman of colour’. Remember the many theories about how best to get shed of the woman – perhaps with the booby prize of a Supreme Court seat? Five minutes ago, Republicans gleefully celebrated that, by honouring the crude rubrics of identity politics, Democrats had burdened themselves with an incompetent diversity hire. I, too, briefly shrugged off Biden’s endorsement of his VP to replace him atop the 2024 ticket.

Tuesday

Madeleine Feeny

Absinthe and the casual fling: Ex-Wife, by Ursula Parrott, reviewed

‘Ex-wives like us illustrate how this freedom for women turned out to be God’s greatest gift to men,’ quips Patricia, the flapper heroine of the American novelist Ursula Parrott’s 1929 bestseller, which, republished nearly a century later, reveals striking contemporary resonances. Both timeless and unmistakably of its time, this candid portrait of marital breakdown, and the life of a girl about town in Jazz Age New York, took the US by storm at a moment when dawning sexual liberties jostled with lingering Victorian values. Parrott married in 1923, before birth control was legal, and had a son in secret, against her husband’s wishes. She left him with her family, until her husband discovered his existence and divorced her.

Cindy Yu

The rootlessness that haunts the children of immigrants

As a child, Edward Wong had no idea that his father had been in the People’s Liberation Army. The only uniform the young Wong associated with his parent was the red blazer of Sampan Café, the Chinese take-away his father worked at in Virginia. China was seldom spoken of, with Wong getting only snatches and hints of what seemed like a painful family history – one the adults were keen to brush over. But, like many second-generation immigrants, Wong gravitated towards his father’s homeland in a bid to better understand the man. His parents’ silence only compounded the enigma.

Thursday

Mary Wakefield

Why Elon Musk is right to leave California

Not long before Joe Biden finally accepted defeat, Gavin Newsom, the 56-year-old governor of California, was on the stump for him in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, shirt undone two daring buttons, sleeves rolled up, silver hair gelled just so. Newsom, who is now being mentioned as Kamala Harris’s running mate, models himself on Bill Clinton. People who’ve worked with him say he practises Clintonian gestures in the mirror, though the look he’s achieved is more Harley Street gynaecologist. How can Gavin Newsom sleep knowing he’s encouraged children to think of their parents as the enemy? ‘If Donald Trump succeeds, God help us, we will roll back the last half-century,’ Newsom told the Pennsylvania crowd. ‘It’s America in reverse.

Yascha Mounk

How supporting Trump became cool

For the past decade, the basic lines of conflict in American public life seemed clear. Donald Trump was pitted against the establishment, the ‘basket of deplorables’ who supported him against the elites. The reality was more complicated. Yes, plenty of rich and powerful Americans supported Trump and plenty of poorer Americans on the fringes of society were against him. But in a certain section of society the disdain for Trump was unequivocal. Among the country’s elite – at Harvard and Stanford, at Google and Goldman, near the beaches of the Hamptons and the mountains around Aspen – anyone who defied the anti-Trump consensus could expect swift consequences for their social standing. There have been constant melodramas over this form of social ostracism.

Douglas Murray

Will we always have Paris?

There are times when you might be fooled into believing all is well. I had a moment of such weakness the other day when I saw our new Prime Minister welcoming his European counterparts to a summit at Blenheim Palace. When Keir Starmer came down the steps to greet King Charles, he even did a pretty good job of pretending he wasn’t just Airbnb-ing the place for a few days. At such points our country can look at peace. The English baroque architecture stood out against a blue sky and everything in England seemed to go on as it should. If the Olympics go off safely it will be because of months of preparation by every arm of law enforcement Of course, at the same time people in Leeds were turning over police cars and burning the place down.

Michael Wolff

The mystery of Melania Trump

While everybody at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee was preoccupied with Donald Trump’s triumphal story after the assassination attempt and the prospect of near-certain victory in November, I dwelled on that low-rumble question of the 2024 election: where’s Melania? She had not made one campaign appearance, nor been at her husband’s side for his myriad courtroom dates. A theme of the proceedings was the adoration of Trump family members for their patriarch. From the stage, his sons and their wives extolled him as the greatest family man of all time. But no Melania. Finally, at the last moment on Thursday, when her husband had already left the VIP box, sphinx-face as always, she showed. No explanation or excuses were offered – and never are.

Kate Andrews

The curious rise of Kamala Harris

I’m struck just in your presence,’ a news anchor gushed to Kamala Harris in January. The Vice President beamed, nodding for her interviewer to continue. ‘You hear candidates suggesting that a vote for President Biden, because of his age, is a vote for you.’ The reporter paused: ‘And that is hurled as an insult.’ Harris explained that this is the price women pay for professional success – in her case, rising from first female attorney general in California to state senator to Vice President of the United States. ‘I love my job,’ Harris concluded, wrapping up the kind of hard-hitting interview the media tends to throw her way. Insult or not, the suggestion that a vote for Biden was a vote for Harris turned out to be true.

Freddy Gray

Does Donald fear Kamala?

On Monday, Donald J. Trump sent out an urgent campaign memo. ‘Joe Biden just dropped out of the race, and now, his replacement has just been announced,’ it said. ‘It’s me!’ How typically Donald. If Trump were worried about the sudden replacement of Biden with Kamala Harris at the top of the Democratic ticket, he’d never show it. He’s already busy pointing towards polls that suggest ‘Lyin’ Kamala’ is the least popular vice president in history. He’s calling her ‘Dumb as a rock’ and emphasising her abysmal performance as Biden’s ‘border tsar’. Trump’s campaign staff, meanwhile, are insisting that they knew all along Harris would at some point be the Democratic nominee and their attack lines are well-rehearsed.

Wednesday

Freddy Gray

Will Kamala Harris implode? With Alex Castellanos

36 min listen

Freddy Gray is joined by political consultant Alex Castellanos to discuss the candidacy of Kamala Harris as the Democrats' nominee for President and why, at this moment, she is the biggest threat to Donald Trump – but how long will that last? This was originally recorded for Spectator TV.  Produced by Natasha Feroze and Patrick Gibbons.

Thursday

Douglas Murray

David Lammy’s Trump problem

There’s no shortage of people who have spent recent years comparing Donald Trump with Adolf Hitler. Among other places, the comparison has been made on magazine covers from America to Germany. Neither is it uncommon for people to say that Trump is planning to usher in an authoritarian state and is a Nazi, neo-Nazi or similar. After the attempted assassination of Trump last Saturday the people who went in for this sort of thing are in a certain bind. On the one hand they seem to sense that urging on the assassination of a political opponent is not a good look. On the other they can’t just reverse course and declare: ‘Of course it was just hyperbole.