Donald trump

Tuesday

Daniel DePetris

Can Europe persuade Trump to see sense over Iran?

The Europeans always held an inkling that sooner or later, a time would come when an impatient Washington would announce to the world that any country or entity buying or dealing with Iranian crude oil would be kicked out of the US financial system. The threat of US sanctions hung in the air like a Sword of Damocles, a warning to governments in Europe and Asia to tread lightly.   And, sure enough, the Trump administration’s patience has finally run. On April 22, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo walked up to the State Department podium and announced that Washington would no longer tolerate overseas purchases of Tehran’s crude. “Today

Wednesday

Taki

High life | 17 April 2019

New York On 21 April 1980, Rosie Ruiz won the fabled Boston Marathon in record time and looked as fresh as a daisy when the media descended on her after she had been crowned with a wreath à la ancient Greece. Rosie answered all the questions. She loved running. This was only her second marathon. No, she had never been tired or doubtful of victory during the two hours and 32 minutes of the race. The newspapers and the hacks went wild. Well, the reason for Rosie’s freshness, it later transpired, was that she had entered the race half a mile from the finish. She had missed all the checkpoints

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 11 April 2019

Home Theresa May, the Prime Minister, wrote to Donald Tusk, the President of the European Council, asking for an extension until 30 June of the period under Article 50 for which the United Kingdom should remain in the European Union. She hoped for parliament to agree to an ‘acceptance of the withdrawal agreement without reopening it’, perhaps through reaching a consensus by means of ‘a small number of clear options on the future relationship that could be put to the House in a series of votes’. She thought her talks with Jeremy Corbyn, the Leader of the Opposition, might reach such a consensus. Not only that, but she hoped that

Roger Stone

Diary - 11 April 2019

Undisclosed location, Florida In January, when heavily armed FBI agents swarmed my south Florida home to arrest me for a series of process crimes, it changed my life far more than I ever imagined. The judge in my case has issued a gag order so I am not permitted to discuss the case, the prosecution, the court or the specific charges against me and will not do so here. As the judge said, the place for talking is in court — and that time will come. *** A vast American television audience was allowed to view the spectacle of my arrest, because CNN arrived 15 minutes before the FBI swat

Thursday

Piers Morgan

Diary - 4 April 2019

I voted Remain, and still don’t think Brexit is a good idea. However, if there were to be a second EU referendum, I would vote Leave. Not because I’ve experienced some Damascene conversion to the Brexit cause — I haven’t met anyone who has changed their mind about it and suspect these people don’t exist outside Alastair Campbell’s hysterical Remoaner mind — but because I would be so furious at a second referendum happening at all. What’s going on now is a disgrace: a House of Commons packed with Remainer MPs trying everything in its power to reverse the 2016 result or dilute Brexit so much that it ceases to

Thursday

Freddy Gray

The vindication of Donald Trump

   Washington Robert Mueller’s two-year investigation into ‘Russiagate’ was meant to bring down President Donald Trump. That was the plan. For almost two years, the various ranks of the Democratic and ‘Never Trump’ Republican establishment have insisted that Mueller would prove the Trump campaign had colluded with Vladimir Putin’s government to win the 2016 election. President Trump would then be ousted from the White House, justice served, order returned to the cosmos. But the cosmos had other ideas. Mueller has found no damning evidence of collusion, though not for want of trying. It was FAKE NEWS all along, as Trump himself said, often in capitals. Far from destroying the President,

Thursday

Taki

High life | 21 March 2019

New York   Goodbye, snow-capped peaks; hello, swampy brown East River. So long, fresh alpine air; greetings to choking diesel fumes. Adios, cows and cuckoo clocks; welcome, filthy island packed to the gills with angry, mean, squat Trump haters who live in decrepit buildings they share with rats. Yes, I’m back in the city that never sleeps, and whose residents are perennially offended. That is the bad news. The good news is that the word Brexit means nothing over here — nada, as our Hispanic cousins say. Instead of the B-word we have the S-word, as in the college admissions scheme that turned into a scandal. More than 50 people

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

This will hurt

When reviewers call a work ‘important’ they mean ‘boring’ and ‘earnest’. And in those terms Shipwreck is one of the most ‘important’ shows I’ve ever seen. It’s not a play but a series of monologues and conversations spoken by a group of American liberals stuck overnight in a rural farmhouse. ‘It’s a red zone,’ they shudder when they learn that they’re in a Republican county. They pass the night carping loftily about the faults of Trump’s campaign and of his presidency between the inauguration and his dismissal of James Comey on 9 May 2017. It’s unclear why this arbitrary time period is chosen, and by ignoring more recent events the

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 7 February 2019

Home Theresa May, the Prime Minister, went off to Brussels again to talk about ‘alternative arrangements’, for which parliament had voted, to the Irish backstop in her EU withdrawal agreement, which parliament had rejected. First she gave a speech in Northern Ireland, saying: ‘There is no suggestion that we are not going to ensure in the future there is provision for this insurance policy… the backstop.’ Lord Trimble (once an Ulster Unionist, now Conservative), the winner of a Nobel Peace Prize, said he was ‘exploring’ the possibility of a legal challenge to May’s deal on the grounds that it undermines the Belfast Agreement of 1998. The coroner for Northern Ireland

Martin Vander Weyer

The Fed’s U-turn on rates is a reality check, not a sop to Trump

Has ‘Jay’ Powell gone wobbly, or does he know something we don’t? That was the question being asked after the US Federal Reserve, of which Powell is chairman, kept dollar interest rates on hold last week — rather than continuing to notch them upwards as it has been doing for two years — and hinted that the next move might actually be downwards. Trade tension with China, the impact of Donald Trump’s government shutdown and the risk of a no-deal Brexit were all cited as ‘cross-currents’ affecting the decision, but pundits led by Wall Street ‘bond king’ Jeffrey Gundlach declared the Fed to be ‘caving in’ to the demands of

Thursday

Freddy Gray

The women lining up against Trump

 Washington, DC It’s no secret that President Donald Trump has women problems. His relationship with his wife seems strained. Feminists loathe him. His popularity among the opposite sex is lower than ever, according to the polls. And, to rub salt into his wounded machismo, he appears to have just lost a fierce political battle over the government shutdown to Nancy Pelosi, the newly reinstalled Democratic speaker. All week, the commentariat has gushed over the way Pelosi ‘schooled’ Trump in the art of politics by forcing him to reopen the government without giving him the funds he wants to build a wall on the Mexican border. She ‘spanked him’, they say.

Thursday

Freddy Gray

Wrinkled, white, and wrong — this is the face of the Democratic party

Ignore the colourful and fresh-faced Democrats filling up your social media feed. The new face of their party is the same as the old one. It is a white, wrinkled face that no amount of plastic surgery can reconfigure. It is Chuck & Nancy; Schumer and Pelosi, the dinosaurs who don’t die. They aren’t likable, to use a word Democrats really don’t like. Trump’s first Oval Office speech was flat, in the end — he didn’t drop a news bomb. He didn’t call a national emergency. He reiterated his position with lots of facts and figures about illegal immigrant crime. He sniffed a bit (this seems to be a regular feature of

Lloyd Evans

Thinking outside the box | 10 January 2019

Sweat, set in the Pennsylvanian rust belt, looks at a blue-collar community threatened by a factory closure. The script uses the flashback device. Scene One informs us that two lads were found guilty of doing a Bad Thing eight years ago. What Bad Thing? The author won’t tell us because the play needs suspense but the revelation is delayed so long that our patience is tested to the limit. The flaccid writing doesn’t help. Scene Two lasts 30 minutes and introduces us to the main characters, who visit the same bar every evening to get hammered and scream at each other. The only dramatic point in this lengthy scene is

Wednesday

Daniel DePetris

Why Europe is now top dog in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process

About this time every month, diplomats, UN delegates, and humanitarian officials sit around the circular table in the UN Security Council chamber to take stock of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The meetings are a constant fixture on the Security Council’s agenda, yet the lack of any tangible diplomatic progress in the Middle East’s oldest dispute means that the sessions usually adjourn in much the same way.  The UN special envoy warns the chamber about the violence hovering just around the corner; the United States blames the Palestinian Authority for obstructing the process; and the rest of the Security Council reiterates stale talking points about a two-state solution. Yesterday’s meeting carried on

Steerpike

Jeremy Hunt's direct channel to Trump

The past few months have been testing for the so-called special relationship. President Trump’s visit to the UK ended in disaster for Theresa May when the US President gave an interview to the Sun in which he declared that her proposed Brexit deal would kill any chance of a UK/US trade deal. However, not all Cabinet ministers had a wholly bad experience. On Tuesday night, Mr S headed along to Jeremy Hunt’s Foreign Office Christmas reception at Lancaster House – also known as the ‘Foreign Secretary’s leadership launch,’ according to a fellow Cabinet minister. In his speech, Hunt told guests how his own relationship with Trump had flourished on that

Thursday

Taki

High life | 13 December 2018

Here we are, 41 years down the road, and I’m once again writing for The Spectator’s Christmas issue. This is a triple one, so I want to make it count. In my sporting days, trying too hard was as counterproductive as not trying hard enough, so let’s see if this principle also applies to the written word. Eighty-five thousand Yemeni children may have died of hunger, and 10,000 men, women and children have been killed, most of them by indiscriminate and disproportionate air strikes targeting civilians, and that murderous megalomaniac Mohammed bin Salman and his Gulf allies are responsible. Just think of the enormity of the crime: 85,000 under-fives starved

The Spectator

Portrait of the year | 13 December 2018

January Four young men were stabbed to death in London as the New Year began. The Crown Prosecution Service was to review rape cases, after several prosecutions collapsed when evidence was not disclosed to the defence. Carillion went into liquidation. London Zoo delayed its annual stock take after a fire killed an aardvark called Misha. Turkish forces shelled the Kurdish enclave of Afrin. The supreme court of Iceland upheld an import tariff on potato chips of 76 per cent. The Grand Mufti of Egypt said that bitcoin was forbidden by Islam. California legalised recreational cannabis. February The Charity Commission launched an inquiry into Oxfam staff paying for prostitutes in Haiti

Christopher Caldwell

Why are Americans so unhinged about Christmas?

The most obnoxious advert on American television this Christmas season features a thirtyish man telling his wife he ‘got us a little something’ at a holiday sale. He leads her out to the colossal driveway of their newly built modernist mansion to show her just what: two brand-new GMC pickup trucks, a boxy, blue one for him and an effeminate, red one for her. Anyone who has watched more than an hour of American TV over the past decade will know what comes next. She happens to like the blue ‘man’s’ one, leaving him to admit meekly that, well, he’s fond of red. In the world of American corporate copy-writers,

Thursday

Freddy Gray

Run, Beto, run

 Washington, DC   Ever since America elected Donald Trump, Democrats have fantasised about removing him from power. They’ve dreamed of impeaching him; of declaring him insane; of arresting him and parking tanks on the White House lawn. They’ve even thought about assassinating him. If you think that is an exaggeration, look up Kathy Griffin, the feminist comedian, who held up a severed Trump head, Isis-style. She wasn’t joking. The latest fantasy is more democratic in spirit. It takes the form of Texan congressman Beto O’Rourke, a skinny former punk-rock guitarist who oozes star appeal. Progressive America is going wild for him. Beto is now widely talked about as the man

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Sounds of war

Amid all the remembrance, Radio 3 came up with a simple yet effective way of reflecting on war’s impact. Threaded throughout the day on Sunday were ‘sonic’ memorials, three minutes of silence, or rather opportunities to stop and reflect. Not the music of a requiem mass, or a lonesome bugle, but the sounds of those places where the worst battles in recent history — from Antietam in America (during the Civil War) to Huaihai (between the Kuomintang and communists in China) via the Somme, Stalingrad and Afghanistan — were played out. Allan Little introduced each pause in the day’s schedule, explaining in the barest outline what happened, how many were