Donald trrump

So, the Pew Research Center polled more than a dozen allies and, guess what, the allies — from the UK and France to Germany, Japan and Australia — don’t like Donald Trump. I know, you are as astonished as I am. The Pew Research Center is reporting that people abroad — and not only people abroad, Americans, too: really everybody — dislikes Donald Trump. ‘The United States’ image has soured within the international community, hitting all-time lows among key allies,’ Business Insider reports in its précis of Pew’s findings. Other key points: ‘The results showed that people have less confidence in Trump as a leader than Russia's Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping’ — sounds bad, what?

At the Republican National Convention last month, Donald Trump was repeatedly described as the ‘most pro-life President ever’. According to some rather sensational leaked official notes in Sunday’s Daily Telegraph, however, Trump has said he regards abortion as ‘such a tough issue’. Addressing the then British prime minister Theresa May, who is childless, Trump said in January 2017: ‘Imagine some animal with tattoos raping your daughter, and then she gets pregnant.’ Aside from the staggering crassness of this remark to a woman who is on the record about her inability to have children, it also suggests that Trump is not as pro-life as many in his party would have voters believe.

In most cases, prediction in politics is a mug’s game. Maybe that is why it is such a popular game. I forbear to speculate. But if you step back from the fray and ponder, I think you’ll agree that politics (like most human things) is so fraught with uncertainties that accurate prediction is well nigh impossible. Of course, you might be right in any given case. And if you make more than a couple of correct guesses, you can look forward to being hailed as a genius. But deep down you know that your predictions, whatever elaborate models you deployed to lend them an air of inevitability, remain but guesses.  Luck, not rational probability, is the primary motor of your success.

The Republican National Convention kicks off Monday in the hope of offering voters an alternative to the unfocused, self-serving Democratic counterpart that took place last week. President Trump's best chance of accomplishing this lies in following the blueprint of a speech he gave in Pennsylvania this past Thursday. The Democratic party's convention attempted to appeal to everyone and thus appealed to no one, stacking excessively woke and anti-American screeds in the daytime with establishment figures giving vapid, hyperbolic anti-Trump speeches during the primetime national broadcast. Missing was an expression of a cohesive policy platform, which would seem key in a year where a division between the moderates and progressive left defined the primary.

When 83-year-old New Jersey congressman Bill Pascrell shared a photo of American lawmakers meeting a Chinese trade delegation in Washington in 2018, he probably didn’t expect it to go viral on Weibo. (You wonder, rather cruelly, if the congressman is familiar with the term ‘viral’ at all.) But it did go viral — gleefully and potently viral — on Chinese social media. Why? The picture showed two delegations at a table. The Chinese look young, or at least they do when sat opposite the Americans. They look grizzled in the original sense of the word: like gray-haired old men. This image was cannily juxtaposed on Weibo with another one, taken in 1901 in Beijing, at the close of the Boxer Rebellion.

More than half of registered voters support President Trump using executive action to bypass Congress and extend coronavirus relief measures, according to a new poll. Trump opted to sign a series of executive orders this past Saturday rather than wait for Congress to reach an agreement on legislation as a prior relief package was set to expire. Democrats and the White House met repeatedly over the past couple of weeks, but despite making 'progress' both sides said they were still too far away to be even close to making a deal. A new poll conducted by Redfield & Wilton Strategies and provided exclusively to The Spectator found that 51 percent of voters agreed that it was right for Trump to take executive action under these circumstances, while just 24 percent disagreed.