Donald trump

Thursday

The Spectator

Rocket men

After spending most of his presidency posing a nuclear-armed hothead, Kim Jong-un is now presenting himself as a man of peace. ‘I came here to put an end to the history of confrontation,’ he said on his historic visit to South Korea. Which might be so. But his real agenda may be to gain acceptance for North Korea’s status as a nuclear power: holding an olive branch in one hand, and a seven-kilotonne bomb in the other. The visit to the south comes ahead of his trips to meet Donald Trump, who has referred to Kim Jong-un as a ‘little rocket man’ and tweeted a photo boasting that his own nuclear

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week - 26 April 2018

Home No. 10 insisted: ‘We will not be staying in the customs union or joining a customs union.’ The undertaking came after a defeat for the government on the matter in the House of Lords and before a vote in the House of Commons. The government proposed two alternatives: one being a ‘customs partnership’ in which the UK would collect tariffs on the EU’s behalf on goods coming from other countries, and the other being a ‘highly streamlined customs arrangement’. Jacob Rees-Mogg called the notion of a customs partnership with the EU after Brexit ‘completely cretinous’ and remarked that Theresa May, the Prime Minister, ‘is carrying out the will of

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 19 April 2018

A week ago I plucked my eight-year-old grandson Oscar from the bosom of his rumbustious young family and took him on an orange aeroplane to Nice, and from there up into the hills of the upper Var to spend 11 days in our breeze-block shack. His second visit. On his first, last August, the temperature hit 45 degrees Celsius and we were roasted alive. This one, though, was relentlessly cold and wet and the mop and bucket were in constant use in the living room. Confined to barracks, we played Dobble, a card game akin to snap, but more complicated and requiring sharper wits. Several games of Dobble revealed beyond

Dominic Green

A bipartisan bungler

Americans forget their corruption in order to savour their innocence. When Republicans and Democrats are struggling to find ways forward and the presidency is all over the road, the combat of ex-FBI director James Comey and reality television star Donald Trump is almost heartening. For, despite partisan division and the rise of China, the drama of the American psyche survives. The puritan grips the porn-ographer, and the spirit of the civil servant contends with the flesh of the president. The excitement over last Sunday’s ABC News interview with Comey was almost as much as that around Michael Woolf’s Fire and Fury. So much has happened since that worthy mishmash of secondhand

Michael Moorcock

Lone Star individuality

The subtitle of Lawrence Wright’s splendid God Save Texas (‘A Journey into the Future of America’) would be alarming if I found it entirely convincing. It’s hard to imagine a future where the Catholic Texan spirit of individualism would seriously overwhelm Yankee Puritanism, however mutated. In New England it’s about hard-earned old money shrewdly invested. In Texas it’s about striking it rich on a hunch, and new money rashly spent. There are contradictions in Texas which allow you to select almost any argument you like from her. She is beautiful and she is barren; corrupt and honourable. Whatever you want to say about her, she will supply abundant evidence. Texans

Friday

Katy Balls

Theresa May is losing the PR battle on Syria

After Theresa May’s Cabinet agreed on the ‘need to take action’ in Syria, it seems a matter of when, not if, military strikes against the Assad regime take place. But the strikes won’t be the end of the matter politically. Labour have been quick to stir up trouble, with Jeremy Corbyn describing the government as ‘waiting for instructions’ from Donald Trump. The British government is also struggling to keep up with a Russian propaganda barrage. Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has rejected claims that there is evidence proving the Assad regime is behind the alleged attack – instead claiming its specialists have evidence that it had been faked: ‘We have

Thursday

Cindy Yu

The Spectator Podcast: War Games

In this week’s episode, we talk about the escalating situation in Syria and ask, would counter strikes actually help? We also look into ‘drill’ music, a genre of rap popular with the London youth most vulnerable to gang activity. Last, we talk Spice Girls and Beyoncé – what is modern ‘girl power’? President Trump is facing a major foreign policy test in the Middle East. Reports came in over the weekend of a brutal chemical weapons attack in Douma, Syria. The most likely suspect is President Assad, or as Trump likes to call him, ‘Animal Assad’. But, Paul Wood asks in this week’s cover, how certain can we be that

Freddy Gray

En marche

Remember the never-ending handshake? It was 14 July 2017, Bastille Day, and Emmanuel Macron and Donald Trump opened their formal relationship as leaders of their respective countries by interlocking palms and refusing to let go. They kept at it for a good 30 seconds. They didn’t release even as Trump began kissing Macron’s wife. It looked like the beginnings of a bitter rivalry. But Trump and Macron weren’t clashing. They were flirting. The night before, the two men — plus wives — had had an intimate dinner in the Eiffel Tower, and they bonded. A great bromance had been born. For all his posturing, Macron treated the US President like

Fraser Nelson

Meeting the Mooch

When Anthony Scaramucci announced that he was writing a book about his time with Donald Trump, the joke was that it should be entitled ‘Ten Days That Shook the World’. This, he says, does him an injustice because he managed 11 days as White House communications director before being fired — after a lava flow of stories that seemed extraordinary even by Trumpian standards. But he remained loyal to the President, and has been speaking in his defence ever since. This book promises to reveal one of the deepest mysteries in American politics: how Trump’s mind works. ‘I’m almost done with the manuscript,’ he says, fresh from a meeting with

Thursday

Taki

High life | 5 April 2018

New York If Albanian television had shown the programme CBS did last week — with a woman who has sex on camera for a living describing how she had unprotected Bing-Bing with the president — I think even Albanians would feel so diminished they’d move to Kosovo. But this is America, and it’s a woman’s, woman’s, woman’s world! Or perhaps a frontal lobe is missing. The degree of reverence afforded to a porn actress by Anderson (kiss me) Cooper was astonishing. His smouldering gaze of restraint was touching, as was his phony squint of chagrin that no protection was used. See what I mean about moving to Kosovo? But this

Martin Vander Weyer

A US-China tit-for-tat hardly amounts to a serious trade war

‘Stocks plunge as China hits US goods with tariffs,’ said a headline after the long weekend, and the FTSE100 duly dipped below 7,000. But I wonder what a serious trade war would look like — and how markets would respond if the White House and Beijing took the gloves off. Last year, China exported $500 billion worth of goods to the US, while US exports to China amounted to $135 billion. Last month, President Trump announced import tariffs on $50 billion worth of Chinese steel and aluminium, 10 per cent of the total import bill. China has hit back with tariffs on US steel tubes plus an eclectic product list

Wednesday

Rory Sutherland

The long and the short of political advertising

Nine years ago, before Cambridge Analytica existed, I caught wind of a research project at Cambridge involving the online measurement of the ‘big five’ personality dimensions. These are usually listed by the acronym OCEAN or CANOE: Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Neuroticism, Openness and Extraversion. I made a note to go to Cambridge to learn more but, being low on conscientiousness, I never got around to it. Perhaps I dodged a bullet by not getting involved. When people say ‘It’s the early bird that catches the worm’, I always reply, ‘Yes, but what about the early worm?’ Besides, does personality alone predict behaviour? Perhaps not as much as Cambridge Analytica promised. True, had

Bruce Anderson

No place like Rhône

As often, a good glass stimulated good talk. We were drinking some promising young Rhônes and the discussion ranged wide, moving onwards from the Rhône itself, to the differences between the UK and our sweet enemy France, then to the merits of democracy and the challenges facing it. Democracy has the overwhelming merit of providing governments with legitimacy, thus ensuring that conflicts are resolved in the legislature rather than on the streets or the battlefield. Though this does not always work — see Germany in the 1930s — it does so often enough to justify the Churchillian maxim: the worst form of government apart from all the alternatives. Yet there

Thursday

Jamie Bartlett

Big data is watching you

From the outside it all looked haphazard and frenzied. A campaign that was skidding from scandal to crisis on its way to total defeat. That’s not how it felt inside the ‘Project Alamo’ offices in San Antonio, Texas where Trump’s digital division — led by Brad Parscale, who’d worked previously with Trump’s estate division setting up websites — was running one of the most sophisticated data-led election campaigns ever. Once Trump’s nomination was secured, the Republican Party heavyweights moved in, and so did seconded staff from Facebook and Google, there to help their well-paying clients best use their platforms to reach voters. Joining them were 13 employees from the UK-based

Thursday

Peter Jones

Kim’s unwise offer

President Trump’s acceptance of talks about denuclearisation must have been as big a shock to Kim Jong-un as his offer was to the USA. So Kim is probably scrambling, too. And if there is a positive outcome, he will live to regret it. In the 2nd century bc the two big Mediterranean players were Rome and the vast Hellenistic ‘empire’ to the east, left behind by Alexander the Great and ruled by assorted ‘kings’ descended from his generals. The Hellenistic king Antiochus IV had ambitions to extend his power west into Greece and Egypt. Knocked back by Rome, in 168 bc he took advantage of disunity in Judaea to establish a power base

Taki

High life | 15 March 2018

Gstaad I never made it to Zurich but met up with Steve Bannon through the miracle of technology, thanks to my hosts at the Swiss weekly Die Weltwoche, who gave him my telephone number. He rang at a civilised time and we had a very cosy chat for an hour or so. I don’t know how it was done, and don’t ask me for details, but I could see him and apparently he could see me too. The first things I said were that I was 100 per cent heterosexual and what a pity it was that I had to be initiated into this technology while talking to a man

Nicholas Farrell

‘Populism, fascism – who cares?’

We are in a hotel suite at the Park Hyatt Hotel in Zurich when Stephen K. Bannon tells me he adores the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. But let’s be clear. Bannon — as far as I can tell — is not a fascist. He is, however, fascinated by fascism, which is understandable, as its founder Benito Mussolini, a revolutionary socialist, was the first populist of the modern era and the first tabloid newspaper journalist. Il Duce, realising that people are more loyal to country than class, invented fascism, which replaced International Socialism with National Socialism. He was thus able to ‘weaponise’ — to use a favourite Bannon word — what the

Thursday

Taki

High life | 8 March 2018

Gstaad The muffled sound of falling snow is ever-present. It makes the dreary beautiful and turns the bleak into magic. Happiness is waking up to a winter wonderland. From where I am, I can’t hear the shrieks of children sledding nearby but I can see the odd off-piste skier and the traces they leave. I can no longer handle deep snow, just powder. But I can still shoot down any piste once I’ve had a drink or two. For amusement I listen to the news: flights grounded, trains cancelled, cars backed up on motorways, people stocking up on food and drink as if an atom bomb had been detonated over

Toby Young

We’re being destroyed by tribalism

Amy Chua’s latest book, Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations, is a difficult read for anyone who is concerned about the current state of British politics. Chua is an American law professor and her previous book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, was about the effectiveness of the Asian approach to bringing up children. In that book, she praised her own parents for giving her a sense of pride in her Chinese heritage, claiming that one of the reasons Asian-Americans are more successful than other ethnic groups is because they feel that to fail would bring shame on their community. In Political Tribes, she takes a different

Monday

Steerpike

Watch: Michael Wolff's earpiece fail

Oh dear. It’s a common sight nowadays to see a politician down the line struggle to hear what their interviewer is saying as soon as the questions start to get difficult. Whether it’s bad weather or bad signal, there’s a long history of earpieces failing at the most convenient times. So, spare a thought for Michael Wolff. Donald Trump’s unofficial biographer appeared to experience a technical problem during an interview with the Today Show. The broadcaster, however, has now released an audio which they claim is what Wolff was hearing when he claimed he couldn’t hear the question: https://twitter.com/BenFordham/status/967963280462381056 Mr S will leave readers to decide for themselves…