Donald trrump

We were four minutes in, somewhere on the outskirts of Mideast foreign policy, when the boredom began to take hold. ‘They couldn’t find some of Iowa’s world-renowned meth to spice this stage up at bit’, I muttered, as I cracked open another beer and wondered who I crossed at The Spectator that I’m asked to watch these damn Democrat debates each month. Just 19 days before the Iowa caucuses, we finally reached the inevitable: Andrew Yang getting the boot, as the white savior party shed the last of its racial minority aspirants, having decided that none was qualified to take the helm this cycle. Better luck in 2024, blacks.

This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. If we can’t be governed, we may as well be entertained. That’s become the ethos behind the Donald Trump presidency. The national debt might continue to bulge, our military might remain pointlessly overextended, our healthcare system might stay ablaze, but at least politics has become funny in a nothing-matters, Rick and Morty kind of way. Americans upvoted a man who’d spent hours on the Howard Stern show boasting about his sexual prowess, and we expect to be amused, dammit. So why has the news lately been so dreadfully boring? The fault certainly doesn’t lie with Trump.

This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. America has a problem, and it’s not Donald Trump. Suicides and deaths by overdose are up; life expectancy is down. The country that led its allies to definitive victory against both Nazi Germany and imperial Japan in just four years has now been fighting in Afghanistan for nearly 20, with no end to the Taliban in sight. Wall Street prospers but young Americans are deep in debt, manufacturing employment is in decline, and the Great Recession of a decade ago revealed how fragile and irrational the whole financial system is. For all the talk we hear about ‘polarization’, the policies that led to these grim results were born of bipartisan consensus.

This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Thanksgiving Day, the most American of holidays, found President Trump performing one of the nation’s few remaining civic rites: supporting the troops. When the President secretly flew to Afghanistan to feed and thank servicemen at Bagram Air Base, he got a cheering hangar full of airmen in return. Those turkey-stuffed troops were a captive audience, of course. Still, enthusiasm for Trump among American servicemen, both active-duty and veteran, seems to be one of the more genuine things about this surreal phase of American politics. In polls, support for the president among veterans far outpaces that among Americans at large.

Did we just witness an historic event, the impeachment of only the third president in the entire history of the Republic? Or was this a case of accusatio interrupta: impeachment interrupted by an untimely withdrawal from Nancy Pelosi? The speaker of the House, unhappy at Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s obvious contempt for the House proceedings, has suggested that she might not file the charges with the Senate. In which case, the Senate could not hold a trial. In which case, Donald Trump could neither be exonerated nor convicted. In which case, he would not have been impeached by the House, but only 'impeached'. It’s amazing what semantic potency can reside in a pair of quotation marks.

People are seeing a comparison between Boris Johnson’s Conservatives and Trump Republicans. In the Wall Street Journal, Dominic Green tells us that both are populists, as if the Brits were emulating Americans. But it’s the other way around. We’re emulating the Brits. On the right, we’re enjoying a Tory Moment. Trump put together a coalition that was right-of-center on social issues and middle-of-the-road or left-of-center on economic issues. It was, as I explained at the time, the sweet spot in American politics, the place where presidential elections are won. Previously, we’d been asked to choose between extreme social liberals on the left and free market libertarians on the right, and the voters were tired of this. Trump gave them what they had been looking for.

‘Breaking news’ sirens sounded over the Twitter webs when Nancy Pelosi announced she is instructing House Democrats to draft articles of impeachment against President Trump. I hope you’re all sitting down. I’m as shocked as you are. Shocked!Of course, no news is breaking here. Pelosi is doing what anyone with a political pulse knew was inevitable when the Democrats took the House in 2018. It was only ever going to be a question of how and when. The head-scratching part of the ‘when’ is that Pelosi’s announcement comes only a day after the House committee hearings featured a professor at Hogwarts and a woman throwing full-sized cats at Rep. Matt Gaetz.

It’s almost Nato as usual when Emmanuel Macron calls Nato ‘brain dead’. It’s Nato as usual, and Donald Trump as usual, when Trump, who not long ago called Nato ‘obsolete’, chastises his bromantic partner Macron for being ‘insulting’ and ‘disrespectful’. It is unusual for Nato when Trump calls off a press conference and calls blackface artist Justin Trudeau ‘two-faced’.

It’s been a refreshing time for Gordon Sondland, the US ambassador to the European Union, hotel magnate and, not least, $1 million donor to the Trump inaugural committee. It's a long way from Brussels, where Sondland was stationed, to Kiev, but Sondland, who testified before the House Intelligence Committee a few weeks ago that he didn’t really know anything about a quid pro quo, has apparently provided several pages of new testimony that was released today in which he suddenly 'refreshed my recollection'. Sondland, in other words, has recollected that nefarious things were happening or, to put it more precisely, wants to save his own hide. He's flipped. Donald Trump holds strong views about this kind of behavior.

An easy, crowd-pleasing opinion column would maintain that banning political adverts from social media platforms is wrong because it implies that voters are anything less than impeccably rational in their decision. We like to think our votes are based on our pure objective reason. Simultaneously, we like to think the votes of people that we disagree with are based on the outrageous propaganda of our opponents and the sheeplike and emotional qualities of their supporters.Balderdash. None of us have a Spock-like devotion to logic or an assiduous grasp of evidence when we vote. We are all prey to biases that bubble out of our stew of grievances, tribal loyalties and tribal hatreds, sensitivity to rhetoric and keen desire for social status.

The Republican party is trying to box the Democrats in over impeachment. This morning, as the Washington Post reports, the National Republican Congressional Committee hand-delivered moving boxes to House Democrats such as Virginia’s Jennifer Wexton and Abigail Spanberger. Committee spokesman Chris Pack explained, ‘We gave moving boxes to the Democrats who are going to be packing up their offices next November due to their obsession with impeachment.’ But the person who actually appears to be moving on is President Trump himself. It seems he filed papers in September to change his official residence from New York to Florida, which has no state income tax. Ivanka, Jared, Don Jr.

Bright eyes, burning like fire Bright eyes, how can you close and fail? How can the light that burned so brightly Suddenly burn so pale? Bright eyes. It seems poignant that this was the song playing on my Spotify playlist when I watched Donald Trump’s vulgar and insensitive speech announcing the tragic probable death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. It’s so like Trump to find the death of a minority something to celebrate. ‘Something very big has just happened!’ he had tweeted an hour before, in the same way a child would announce to their parents they’d gone poopy in their potty for the first time. I dared to hope that perhaps he had accidentally impeached himself, but no such good fortune was to be forthcoming.