Donald Trump means different things to different people. To his core supporters, he’s the man who will make America great again. To his diehard opponents, he is a dangerous juvenile with authoritarian tendencies. Ultimately, these descriptions are secondary to how Trump sees himself: a tough, dealmaking Svengali who has the experience and power of persuasion … Read more
‘That was some weird shit,’ George W. Bush is said to have muttered after Donald Trump’s desolate inauguration speech of January 2017. ‘I couldn’t have agreed more,’ wrote Hillary Clinton in What Happened. Americans cannot agree on what has happened to their country, other than that everything has gone wrong. Is it ‘white supremacy’ and … Read more
So much for the “World Peace” that Donald Trump bragged he would create at the June 12 Singapore summit. In a wildly inappropriate letter that veered between a bullying and lachrymose tone, Trump bowed to the inevitable in canceling the summit with Kim Jong-un. He had to do it before Kim did. Already Kim had … Read more
We need only look to London for lessons in how oligarchs apply pressure.
‘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 … Read more
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 … Read more
President Donald Trump and Brexit Britain have a spooky synergy. After all, the last time Donald Trump came to Britain was the day after the Brexit vote. Was it a coincidence? A shrewd bit of PR? Or destiny? Trump himself seem to believe it was written in the populism stars. ‘I think I see a … Read more
Celebrity apologies are all the rage. Such is the power of Twitter, that stars without round-the-clock PR surveillance and teams of media advisors will often find themselves in hot water. This week, it’s pop-country singer Shania Twain who has fallen foul of the perpetually offended. Why? Twain had the audacity to talk about supporting Trump in … Read more
The former mayor of New York has at last secured himself a position in Trump’s White House—but the role is an unenviable one
The subtitle of Lawrence Wright’s splendid God Save Texas (‘A Journey into the Future of America’) would be alarming if I found it entirely convincing. It’s hard to imagine a future where the Catholic Texan spirit of individualism would seriously overwhelm Yankee Puritanism, however mutated. In New England it’s about hard-earned old money shrewdly invested. … Read more
Uh-oh. President Trump is wading into diplomatic waters in North Korea that he may have trouble navigating. Yesterday, he proudly revealed that talks with North Korea have been taking place at the “highest levels.” He also gave his blessing to the prospect of a peace treaty between the two Koreas, which currently only enjoy an … Read more
It’s shrinking. A new Washington Post-ABC News poll indicates that the Democrats’ edge over the Republicans in the forthcoming midterm election has dwindled among registered voters, from a 12-percent lead to 4-points. Donald Trump’s own approval ratings have edged up slightly to 40 percent, but his disapproval rating remains at a daunting 56 percent. So is … Read more
Donald Trump finally had something positive to say on Twitter. After nearly a week of dithering, the president made a decision and announced it, to a fair amount of surprise, on national television on Friday night: The United States, in concert with the United Kingdom and France, would launch targeted strikes on Syrian chemical weapons … Read more
When Anthony Scaramucci announced that he was writing a book about his time with Donald Trump, the joke was that it should be entitled ‘Ten Days That Shook the World’. This, he says, does him an injustice because he managed 11 days as White House communications director before being fired — after a lava flow … Read more
Poor Paul Manafort. Manafort, who tried to extricate himself from the Mueller investigation by filing a civil case alleging prosecutorial overreach, was skewered by federal judge Amy Berman on Wednesday. By the time Manafort showed up in court, his lawyer was furiously back-pedalling about what they were demanding. ‘I don’t really understand,’ Berman said, ‘what … Read more
New York If Albanian television had shown the programme CBS did last week — with a woman who has sex on camera for a living describing how she had unprotected Bing-Bing with the president — I think even Albanians would feel so diminished they’d move to Kosovo. But this is America, and it’s a woman’s, … Read more
California, once a citadel of conservatism, now a bastion of liberal progressivism, continues to harbour a few intellectual redoubts on the right. Up north you can find the Hoover Institution, which is located on the Stanford University campus. And down south, near Los Angeles, there is the Claremont Institute, another scholarly outfit which also happens … Read more
The hysteria from the Left over Donald Trump’s appointment of John Bolton as National Security Advisor to replace Lt. General H. R. McMaster has been partly hilarious, partly alarming to behold. From The Guardian in this country to The New York Times, CNN, Slate, Salon, and beyond in the United States, we are presented with a scarecrow figure … Read more
From the outside it all looked haphazard and frenzied. A campaign that was skidding from scandal to crisis on its way to total defeat. That’s not how it felt inside the ‘Project Alamo’ offices in San Antonio, Texas where Trump’s digital division — led by Brad Parscale, who’d worked previously with Trump’s estate division setting … Read more
This week marks 15 years since the start of America’s war in Iraq. Regime change was George W. Bush’s objective, and Saddam Hussein was duly removed, tried, and executed. But Bush could not have counted on how much regime change would also come to Washington as a result of the war. It contributed to the … Read more
