Donald trump

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Britain’s Trumpists should be careful what they wish for

From our UK edition

When I visited Toronto with a UK delegation last winter, conversation focused on the issues of immigration, housing and inflation that were contributing to the unpopularity of Justin Trudeau, who finally announced his resignation as prime minister last month. The prospect of Donald Trump’s return to the White House was the slumbering python in the chandelier above the conference table: I sensed our hosts preferred not to think about how bad it might turn out to be. Well, now they know. In response to Trump’s declaration of 25 per cent tariffs on Canadian goods, plus 10 per cent on imported energy, Trudeau retorted with tariffs on many billions worth of US products.

Kara Kennedy

MAGA Kids: How America’s youth went right

From our UK edition

Washington, D.C. ‘What made you open a restaurant?’ I ask Bart Hutchins, the owner of Butterworth’s, a French-style bistro turned Republican hangout, frequented by the youthful wings of the Grand Old Party. It’s home to figures from the intellectual right such as Curtis Yarvin and darlings of New Right media including Natalie Winters, the increasingly slim White House correspondent for Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast. ‘Have you read Death in the Afternoon?’ Bart says. ‘No,’ I say. ‘It’s by Hemingway.’ ‘I know.

Alexander Raubo

Why young MAGA supporters are flocking to Remilia

From our UK edition

The MAGA social scene was defined on the eve of Donald Trump’s inauguration by the Coronation Ball – perhaps the most exuberant celebration of the new ‘Golden Age’. The principal speaker was, unsurprisingly, Steve Bannon, the architect of Trump’s first victory and the voice of the neo-reactionary core of the President’s movement. More surprising perhaps though was the Ball’s principal sponsor, Remilia Corporation, a conceptual art movement. It was as if a Reform UK rally were sponsored by the Turner Prize. After Bannon’s speech, a representative of Remilia, an artist operating behind the pseudonym L.B. Dobis, stood at the podium to speak about internet art and to outline Remilia’s plans to remake the world one meme at a time.

The Spectator

Britain could learn from Trump’s approach to foreign policy

From our UK edition

The Foreign Secretary describes his approach to diplomacy as ‘progressive realism’. One can legitimately ask what is progressive about a closer accommodation with the slave-labour-deploying Leninists of Beijing or what is realistic about ceding the UK’s sovereignty over the Chagos Islands to China’s ally Mauritius. But David Lammy seems happy in his work. His choice of words serves to give an updated gloss to what most observers would readily recognise as the Foreign Office’s traditional approach – appeasement of our enemies and embarrassment at anything which appears to be a reminder of our colonial past. Whatever the aptest description of this government’s foreign policy, it is fair to say Donald Trump is piloting a different approach to international affairs.

Charles Moore

Trump is like Shakespeare’s Fool

From our UK edition

President Trump’s role in relation to other countries resembles that of the Fool in Shakespeare. He provides a sort of running satire on how rulers behave, and his antic wit expresses, amid the foolery, certain truths. In relation to Gaza, the prevailing idea of the ‘international community’ is that, because of the 7 October massacres and Israel’s subsequent decapitation of the Hamas leadership, the answer is ‘a two-state solution’. This orthodoxy is tragi-comic in its lack of reality. Mr Trump looks at the matter differently.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Shoplifting surges, Trump eyes Gaza Strip and Norway’s government collapses

From our UK edition

Home Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, flew to Brussels for an EU summit, sought a ‘reset’ of relations and had celeriac soup and sea bream for dinner. AstraZeneca dropped plans to invest £450 million in a vaccine manufacturing plant in Speke, Liverpool, blaming the government’s ‘final offer compared to the previous government’s proposal’. Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said that she supported the expansion of Leeds Bradford Airport; she had already backed a third runway at Heathrow and the reopening of Doncaster Sheffield airport. Water bills in England and Wales will rise to an average of £603. Some councils will be allowed to raise their tax by more than 5 per cent – Bradford by 10 per cent.

Oren Cass

What economists don’t get about Trump’s tariffs

From our UK edition

We already knew that most economists are quite bad at economic policy. Unfortunately, foreign policy appears not to be much of a strength either. Indeed, it appears most financial experts may not even know the difference, based on their criticism of Donald Trump’s recent tariff threats against Mexico, Canada and China. Of course, a nation can introduce tariffs to generate revenue, promote domestic production, shift international supply chains and ‘decouple’ itself from an undesirable trading partner. But a nation can also use tariffs as powerful leverage to make other states change their behaviour. That is a negotiating tariff, not an economic one, and it is designed not to minimise potential domestic pain but to maximise potential cost for the counterparty.

Sunday

Kate Andrews

Donald Trump kicks off the tariff wars

From our UK edition

He did it, Joe! Following on from the $79 billion worth of tariffs he implemented in his first term – which went largely untouched by Joe Biden’s Administration –  last night Donald Trump made good on his election promise to opt for another round of tariffs: this time, a 25 per cent tax on imports from Canada and Mexico, with China facing an additional 10 per cent levy on its goods. Despite whispers that the President might water down his plans in the last hours, he carved out very few exceptions for his new tax orders, which include Canadian oil and energy supply. It is now expected that America will be in a trade war with all three of its largest trading partners It’s a staggering tax, the cost of which experts have been desperately trying to calculate overnight.

Saturday

Cindy Yu

Was Peter Mandelson the right pick for ambassador to the US?

From our UK edition

22 min listen

‘An absolute moron’ – those were the words used by Chris LaCivita, a senior campaign advisor to Trump, to describe Peter Mandelson. Lord Mandelson is Keir Starmer’s choice for the next ambassador to the US, but Trump may yet refuse his letters of credentials. How wise is this appointment at the dawn of an uncertain era of US-UK relations? Cindy Yu talks to James Heale and Sophia Gaston, UK foreign policy lead at the security think tank ASPI. Produced by Cindy Yu.

Thursday

Matthew Parris

How to solve a problem like the Chagos Islands

From our UK edition

Very soon – as soon as the mutual courtesies now being exchanged between the new American President and his British counterpart are over – our government is likely to be at loggerheads with Donald Trump over our plan to cede the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT), the Chagos archipelago, to Mauritius, then take out a long and expensive lease on the island of Diego Garcia so we can secure the operational status of our base there. This accommodates an American base of great importance to US defence. The agreement with the new Mauritian government has yet to be signed.

Charles Moore

My message to the Trumpists

From our UK edition

Social media benefit from creating continuous belligerence in politics. For them, Donald Trump is the perfect politician. As I wrote last week, I think he is doing exciting things and I feel relieved that Kamala Harris lost. But it is impossible to support everything Mr Trump says or does. He never regards himself as bound by what he has previously said, so why should his followers seek to justify each piece of Trumpery? Since his victory in November, I have noticed several otherwise intelligent friends, all of them men, going crazy-culty about the dawning era – defending, for example, the removal of the security detail of Mike Pompeo, John Bolton and Brian Hook, or his pardon for all those convicted in the 6 January riots. It is nasty score-settling.

Rodric Braithwaite

Peter Mandelson’s rocky path to Trumpworld

From our UK edition

The muddle about who’s to be the next British ambassador in Washington has been only a small part of the grandiose confusion which surrounds Donald Trump’s assumption of power. Sir Keir Starmer announced that Lord Peter Mandelson would bring ‘unrivalled experience to the role and take [the Anglo-American] partnership from strength to strength’, apparently without checking first that President Trump would be willing to accept him. The US President’s campaign manager, Chris LaCivita, said Mandelson was ‘an absolute moron’ who should ‘stay home’. He did nothing to improve his prospects when he described Trump as ‘reckless and a danger to the world’ How ambassadors get appointed is a mystery to most people. Why do we waste the money on them anyway?

Monday

Freddy Gray

How is round one of Trump’s deportations plan going?

From our UK edition

33 min listen

Colombia has agreed to accept military aircraft carrying deported migrants from the US – avoiding a trade war between the two countries. Donald Trump had threatened sanctions on Colombia to punish it for initially refusing military flights following a rapid immigration crackdown. What are the challenges of deportation flights, and what's Trump's vision for Latin America? Freddy Gray is joined by Todd Bensman, Fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, and author of 'Overrun'.

Cindy Yu

Is Donald Trump warming to Keir Starmer?

From our UK edition

16 min listen

Starmer and Trump have finally spoken, with a 45 minute phone call taking place between the two leaders. The pair reportedly discussed the ceasefire in Gaza, and trade and the economy, with Starmer attempting to find common ground by talking up his plans for deregulation. Cindy Yu speaks to Katy Balls and Kate Andrews about their relationship. Do these early signs suggest it will be wholly positive, or are there thornier issues to come?  Also on the podcast, Rachel Reeves is set to deliver a speech this week outlining her plans for growth - just how important is this week for her? Produced by Patrick Gibbons and Cindy Yu.

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Would it be worth Trump buying Greenland?

From our UK edition

London’s capital market needs a kick in the pants, as I write every week, and ‘activist investors’ are no bad thing if they provoke sharper corporate performance. The assault by the New York hedge funder Boaz Weinstein on seven UK investment trusts – demanding shareholder votes to replace directors with his own people and take the management of the trusts into his own firm, Saba Capital – looks like the kind of intervention that might bring positive change to the UK’s historic investment trust sector, which accounts for a third of FTSE 250 companies but according to critics offers lacklustre returns, with share prices too often stuck at discounts to the underlying value of trusts’ asset portfolios (NAV).

Douglas Murray

Britain is losing friends – and making enemies

From our UK edition

Whatever way you voted in 2016, I suspect that many of us have the same image of post-Brexit Britain. It is easier to capture in a cartoon than in prose but it looks something like this. A chap tries to make a leap across a canyon, falls ever so slightly short and as a result gets wedged in a crevice. And there he is – stuck. Neither on one side or the other and gaining the benefits of neither ledge. The Conservative party obviously carries a large amount of responsibility for this – not least for the fact that European law still dictates our insane migration policy. But the current government must also take its share of responsibility. If we were run by competent men and women of vision then getting out of the spot we are in could be possible.

Damian Thompson

The Pope’s revenge: why the new Archbishop of Washington is such a controversial choice

From our UK edition

For an 88-year-old man who has spent only five days in the United States and doesn’t speak English, Pope Francis is a surprisingly partisan observer of American politics. For most of his life he was, like a typical Argentinian, viscerally but vaguely anti-American. Robert McElroy’s nickname among Catholic conservatives is ‘the wicked witch of the west’ But by the time he became Pope in 2013 both he and the Democratic party had embraced the ideology of the globalist left. And so they became allies. In 2016, Francis gave his blessing to the Hillary Clinton campaign’s Catholic front organisations, motivated not just by a shared obsession with anti-racism and climate change but contempt for Donald Trump.

Toby Young

The Trump I (barely) know

From our UK edition

I can’t say I know the new President of the United States very well, but during the five years I lived in New York between 1995 and 2000 we were on nodding terms. That is to say, when I turned up at a party and he was there too, we would politely acknowledge each other. This was for two reasons, neither of which reflects particularly well on me. The first is that I was briefly the party columnist for Vanity Fair, deciding whose photos should appear in the monthly round-up. Donald Trump was keen for his picture to appear as often as possible, obviously, hence the nod. The second and more important reason is that my girlfriend for some of that time was Lucy Sykes, a British ‘It Girl’ that Trump had a soft spot for. He would actually cross the room to talk to her.

Bruce Anderson

The Reagan effect on wine lists

From our UK edition

Let us indulge in a slight paraphrase. What rough beast slouches towards the White House to be reborn? The inauguration ceremonies remind us that many Americans still hanker after monarchical splendour. Even as contentious a figure as Donald Trump is accorded the dignities appropriate to a head of state. The same of course is true of M. Macron, who carries them off better. The dignified portion of the constitution, or the efficient one? It could easily be argued that President Trump is better in the latter role. In his early phase, President Macron wanted us to see him as a Napoleonic figure. Indeed. Napoleon le Petit. If a bottle was old enough to drink, restaurants might even apologise and offer a discount When the Trumpians hit town four years ago, comparisons were drawn.

Charles Moore

Will Trump remember his allies?

From our UK edition

I had thought that having to be inaugurated indoors would have cramped Donald Trump’s style. Not so. The rhetoric with which he would have tried to fill the chilly air on the steps of the Capitol was even more exciting inside the crowded Rotunda. Only feet away from Trump, poor Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and behind them the Clintons shrank in their places, like captives paraded in ancient Rome after a military triumph. I experienced contradictory reactions.