Donald trump

Thursday

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 the stock market and the President.

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. She ‘kicked his behind’ and ‘brought him to his knees’.

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 his big TV moments). He tried to sound sombre but that’s not his forte.

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 the revelation that two lovers had a big row about a fish tank.

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 much the same.

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 visit. The reason? It's not that Hunt hit it off with Trump in person.

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 to death in the cruellest way possible by those overfed criminals in Riyadh. Then picture George W.

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 in 2011.

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.

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 to beat Trump in 2020.

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.

Thursday

Taki

High Life | 8 November 2018

New York   An old-fashioned party is a gathering of friends invited by the host or hostess, who foots the bill. Old-fashioned parties are very rare in New York nowadays. Actually, they are non-existent, having been replaced by the charity shindig: the guests pay, the host or hostess profits, the gossip columns get to write about it, and the charity sometimes even gets to see some of the moolah the climbers paid to get in. Last week I went to an old-fashioned party given by Prince Pavlos of Greece and his princess, M-C. The occasion was the princess’s sister Pia Getty’s birthday. I ran into a lot of old friends I hadn’t seen in years, and sat at a table with four ladies, some of whom I pursued when my hair was still salt and pepper.

Lionel Shriver

A hamstrung Trump is the best-case scenario

At my lecture in Sheffield last week, the final question in an otherwise temperate Q&A was antagonistic. My last Spectator column led the man to conclude that I was a Trump supporter. Was this true? I was affronted. And let me tell you, these millennials are on to something. I spend way too much time causing offence, and far too little taking it. Huffing and puffing in indignation is so much fun. Because I am not a Trumpster, I naturally rooted for the Dems to take the House in Tuesday’s midterms. Less intuitively, I did not want Democrats to take the Senate. I believe that DC is in such a perilous, fractious, hysterical and dysfunctional state that we are all safest with the American federal government in a state of maximum paralysis.

Thursday

Lionel Shriver

The march of the migrants poses a dilemma for the US

Trump has hinted that Democrats may have been secretly funding the ‘caravan’ of more than 7,000 Honduran immigrants trooping towards the United States. I don’t think so. In the lead-up to the midterms, if any party would sponsor by far the largest organised mass migration to the US on record, Republicans would. For politically, the spectacle is a gift. Thousands of clamorous would-be asylum seekers crammed onto a bridge with no toilets, stampeding, breaking into fights, demanding to cross the Mexican border, the better to gatecrash the US: it was a premier photo op for anti-immigration Republicans. Trump has threatened to close the American border and bring in the military.

Freddy Gray

American nightmare

 Washington, DC As if American politics were not scary enough, the prospect of President Hillary Rodham Clinton has once again reared its frightful head. The woman is a proven horror, politically speaking. One senior Democrat strategist calls her the ‘kiss of death’. She loses elections she ought to win because people don’t like her. Just over a week away from the midterm elections, Democrat candidates in various states are said to be relieved that she isn’t conducting one of her vanity tours of the country. She has even fallen foul of the #MeToo movement, after she dared to say her husband, Bill, had not abused his power over Monica Lewinsky. Still, like death, Hillary never goes away.

Lara Prendergast

Was your Halloween costume woke?

Halloween used to be easy. It was a fancy-dress party: you could wear whatever you liked. The idea was to have fun. As teens, my friends and I would dress up as ghouls, spiders or witches, with cones of black paper on our heads. When we became more mature, Halloween turned into a tarty affair. We thought this seemed authentic, somehow all-American. Our costumes became flimsier and more flammable. One girlfriend made a habit of always going dressed as ‘sexy cat’. Inevitably, somebody would dress as a zombie Princess Diana or Amy Winehouse, or another celebrity who had died unpleasantly. The more risqué the better. I was once served a drink by a man with a toy doll tied to his lower half. He had come as Jimmy Savile. But Halloween is changing.

Thursday

Matt Ridley

Diary – 18 October 2018

When I land on the east coast of America, people tell me they’ve never met a Trump voter. When I land in the middle, as I did last week in Kentucky, I meet lots. I chatted with my driver, who did not like Trump at first, but would vote twice for his re-election if he could, because of the jobs boom and the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. He’s a retired salesman who tutors kids from poor backgrounds in reading and maths. ‘I guess that makes me a conservative,’ he says. I had to lecture in semi-darkness in Louisville, after a power cut plunged most of the university into darkness.

Roger Kimball

Melania stays true to herself

I am not sure that Melania Trump had the introduction of Henry IV Part 2 in mind when she sat down for her free and frank discussion with the jackals of the — er, with a respected ABC correspondent during her recent trip to Africa. But time and again she dilated upon the ‘unpleasant’, erring and intrusive ‘speculation’ of the media. In Shakespeare’s play, the action starts with a warning: ‘Rumour is a pipe/ Blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures/ And of so easy and so plain a stop/ That the blunt monster with uncounted heads,/ The still--discordant wavering multitude,/ Can play upon it.’ There are a lot of chattering, still discordant heads on view in Tom Llamas’s sit-down with the First Lady.

Tim Stanley

Capitalism in America: A History

Donald J. Trump has sparked some soul- searching among US historians: has this happened before? Does it mean America has changed? Cue the self-laceration, cue the book deals. Two impressive volumes illustrate both agreement and disagreement, both concurring that America represents the search for something — but the jury’s out as to precisely what. Capitalism in America: A History is by an Economist writer (Adrian Wooldridge) and a former chair of the Federal Reserve (Alan Greenspan), so you can guess where they’re coming from. The book celebrates the American thirst for self-improvement and argues that the country has long benefited from a ‘creative destruction’ driven by the market and entrepreneurs. Here’s the story.

Thursday

Tarek Hamoud

As Trump cuts funding to the UNRWA, the EU must fill the vacuum

On 31st August, in a move celebrated by Benjamin Netanyahu as a ‘blessed change’, the Trump administration announced it would cut all funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). It was a decision with far-reaching and catastrophic implications: the US has long been the largest individual donor to the UNRWA, which serves millions of Palestinian refugees and their dependents in the Middle East. Despite putting at risk the schooling, healthcare and social services on which these refugees rely, Jared Kushner was dismissive and unapologetic. ‘This agency,’ he said, ‘is corrupt, inefficient, and doesn’t help peace.’ That isn’t the case.