Donald trump

Sunday

Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: This country needs another referendum and I’d vote Remain, says Sam Gyimah

Sajid Javid - Our priority 'must be law and order' The Tory leadership race is becoming a crowded field, with thirteen candidates now setting out their stalls as they aim for the premiership. Andrew Marr spoke to two of the hopefuls, including Home Secretary Sajid Javid. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Javid wished to talk about boosting resources for the police if he attains the country's highest political office: https://twitter.com/BBCPolitics/status/1135132342643650562 AM: If you'd had your own way, we'd have more police on the beat now? SJ: Yes... A priority must be crime and law and order... If I was leader and Prime Minister, I would want to see more police on the streets, and I think it's justified.

Steerpike

Trump pledges to “go all out” for a UK-US trade deal if Brexit talks fail

The message from the EU is clear: there will be no improvement to the deal rejected by Parliament. And if talks fail? Donald Trump today makes an offer: that the United States, the UK's No 1 customer, is standing by with its own free trade deal. It needn't take even a year, he says, as he'd go “all out” so Britain can do a lot more trade with the world's largest economy. The EU's deal, he says, is anyway ludicrous: the £39bn is too much money. And why, he asks, would the UK government agreed to a two-year moratorium on signing free trade deals? In an interview with the Sunday Times, he elaborates on the art of the deal. "If they don’t get what they want, I would walk away. Yes, I would walk away.

Friday

Steerpike

Will Trump and Boris meet next week?

Trump and Boris; Boris and Trump – the two men have a lot more in common than funny hair, an appetite for women, and a magical ability to offend left-liberal sensibilities. But the hot question in Westminster at the moment is whether these two big beasts will meet when the American President visits London next week. Will they? Won’t they? The British press is teeming with reports that Trump and Boris are to meet privately, possibly at a meeting mediated by Nigel Farage. The new Special Relationship, populism-style. Mr Steerpike understands that, on the American side, officials are standing by to organise the meeting, but it hasn’t been formalised.

Thursday

The Spectator

The Trump card

The day after Britain voted to leave the European Union, Donald Trump arrived by helicopter at Turnberry, his golf course in Scotland. The financial markets were in crisis and David Cameron had resigned in a panic. The Dutch Prime Minister, Mark Rutte, said that Britain had ‘collapsed: politically, monetarily, constitutionally and economically’. The then candidate (still not even party nominee) Trump put it differently. ‘You just have to embrace it,’ he said. ‘It’s the will of the people. I love to see people take their countries back.’ Perhaps his advice should have been taken more seriously. Huge numbers of people, including many Americans, think that Trump is unfit for the office of president. But why do so many support him?

Robert Hardman

Trumped

The Queen has seldom had more holes in a state banquet seating plan. The leader of the opposition, the shadow foreign secretary, the Speaker and the leader of the Liberal Democrats have all ostentatiously refused ‘Her Majesty’s command’ to attend her banquet in honour of Donald Trump next week. The fact that the dinner is in honour of our greatest ally — and in the week we celebrate D-Day — seems to matter less than virtue points on social media. Few will appreciate the irony of this petty posturing more than the Queen herself. For it is that same tranche of the liberal elite who remain responsible for the worst state visit of her reign.

Thursday

Conrad Black

Diary – 23 May 2019

I owe my return to these pages to the pardon I have received from the President of the United States. When he called me, he referred to my ‘miraculously shrinking crime’ of 17 counts, to 13 (including racketeering), to four, to two; and to the quantum of my alleged transgressions from $400 million to $60 million, to $6 million, to $285,000 (which was approved by independent directors and published in the company’s filings). The President stressed that the White House counsel and his legal staff had analysed the legal material and concurred that I received ‘a bad rap (and) an unjust verdict’.

Taki

High life | 23 May 2019

Goody goody gumdrops! The Donald has pardoned Lord Black and I couldn’t be happier. Conrad got a bum deal and spent three and a half years behind bars for charges I always believed to be phoney, most of which were overturned. Never mind. One can’t get back the years wasted in a cell for as good a mind as Conrad’s, but one does emerge from the pokey stronger. The Big Bagel Times reported the Black pardon in a manner that can only be described as constipated. Black is a conservative, which is a red flag to envious lefties. But there’s something else. I have spoken to medical experts about the envy shown by lefty hacks, and I have been told that its origin is not only ideological, but also physical.

Christopher De Bellaigue

Iran alone

On 20 May, Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, predicted that Donald Trump would fail to subdue Iran just as Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan had failed before him. That Alexander burned Persepolis to the ground and Genghis and his descendants wrought devastation before colonising the Persian plateau doesn’t connote defeat in the Iranian long view; neither the Macedonians nor the Mongols were able to extinguish Iran’s vigour and creativity, which reasserted themselves as soon as the invaders had moved on or been assimilated by the superior civilisation around them. ‘Iranians have stood tall for millennia while aggressors all gone (sic),’ was how Zarif concluded his aspersion on American staying power.

Paul Wood

Donald Trump vs British spies

The Daily Telegraph this week has a ‘scoop’ about the UK government giving permission for the Mueller inquiry to talk to former MI6 officer Christopher Steele about his evidence, which said Donald Trump was compromised by the Kremlin. The Telegraph story certainly sets the mood for President Trump’s state visit to Britain in eleven days’ time, and has some important new details, but it is not quite an exclusive. I wrote in The Spectator a year ago that Mueller’s team had been in the UK in late 2017 to question Steele, a meeting that was set up ‘through official channels’. Nevertheless, one of the sources I quoted said that in general ‘Mueller’s team...

Thursday

Daniel McCarthy

America’s war games

 Washington, DC Trump, believe it or not, is smarter than the last two presidents, who started fires they couldn't extinguish Donald Trump has an itchy trigger finger, and his name is John Bolton. The President’s national security adviser is a lifelong war hawk who, unlike Trump, was a diehard supporter of the Iraq War. Now Bolton has Iran in his crosshairs. He’s not the only member of the administration drawing a bead on the mullahs. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is also a throwback to the mentality of the George W. Bush years of high misadventure in the Middle East. But Trump, believe it or not, is smarter than the last two presidents, who started fires they couldn’t extinguish in Iraq and Libya.

Thursday

Louis Amis

To hell in a handcart

An immortal faery queen from a magical gynocratic island arrives in Los Angeles to track down her missing daughter. This is actually the entire plot of a novel entitled Only Americans Burn in Hell. Of course, as in Jarett Kobek’s previous book, I Hate the Internet, the fictional element is a foil, with most of the pages devoted to sociopolitical diatribe laced with various kinds of life writing. It’s also basically the same diatribe in both books, against a global society in which ‘everyone’s life is still dominated by the whims of the very rich and the social mores of the slightly rich’.

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 I am announcing that we will no longer grant any exemptions,” Pompeo said.

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 but, perhaps in view of the fact that she was a Cuban American and a woman to boot, the race marshals had blamed themselves for missing her.

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 parliament would give its agreement before the elections to the European Parliament, due on 23 May, in which case they would be cancelled.

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 team. CNN denies it was tipped off, instead chalking its good fortune up to a ‘hunch’. President Trump asked in a tweet ‘Who alerted CNN?’ Who indeed?

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 resemble anything that Leavers voted for.

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.

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.

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.

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.