Donald trump

Friday

Cindy Yu

The Spectator Podcast: plots, politics, and the pains of leadership

This week, Tory in-fighting comes to the fore, but could the party be even more divided than we thought? Meanwhile, across the Pond, Donald Trump continues to cause backlash. Is he to blame for an ideological shift to the left in the country? Thankfully, our own Head of State isn’t on Twitter, though that doesn’t stop people speculating about her Majesty’s personal opinions. Is the Queen a Eurosceptic? First, the Conservative Party is taking up arms against each other. This week, back room plotting came to the fore with the Brexiteer group the ERG openly discussing Mrs May’s demise and Boris Johnson dominating headlines. But James Forsyth reveals in this week’s cover piece that there are more fractures in the party than merely a Chequers/Brexiteer divide.

Thursday

Rick Wilson

What Trump hath wrought

 Washington, DC Republicans observing a rising wave of liberal and progressive candidates, policies and election results in the United States may wish to blame Democrats such as Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, or billionaire donors like George Soros or Tom Steyer. They’re missing the mark. The real cause of political disaster coming at the GOP like a Cat 5 hurricane is none other than President Donald J. Trump. Everywhere American Republicans turn, they see progressives and liberals more energised than in any election cycle in recent memory and for one reason: Trump. Like so much of what Trump does, the effect he promised to have on American politics is the opposite of what he has delivered.

Thursday

Byron York

The impeachment trap

 Washington, DC No one knows who will prevail, but the 'hang 'em high' crowd seems to have an advantage The Democrats will face a dilemma if they win control of the House of Representatives in November’s midterm elections. Should they impeach President Trump over the Russia affair? Or should they impeach him over the Stormy Daniels porn-star payoff? Or should they impeach him over something else? There’s no doubt the party’s base of voters is more than ready to stick it to Trump. A recent poll by Axios found that 79 per cent of Democrats believe Congress should begin impeachment proceedings. And that’s now. Imagine how they will feel if they are fired up by victory in November.

Thursday

Paul Wood

Desperate Donald

Donald Trump’s Twitter feed was oddly silent as the news came that his former campaign manager and his former lawyer were going to jail. Perhaps his staff have finally seized control of his phone. Perhaps his lawyers have convinced him that every time he tweets on anything relating to the Russia investigation, he is dancing on a precipice, with special counsel Robert Mueller just waiting to push him off. Whatever the reason, this was the equivalent of Trump entering a stunned, catatonic state, while his world spins out of control around him. The President merely tweeted to note that he was going to a Make America Great Again rally in West Virginia, slipping into a warm bath of affirmation from his most loyal supporters: ‘Thank you West Virginia!

Rory Bremner

Edinburgh Notebook

The brilliant Irish comedian Andrew Maxwell describes doing stand-up at the Edinburgh Fringe as ‘exams for clowns’, and even though I first appeared there in 1981 (when the Cambridge Footlights Revue featured Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry, Emma Thompson and Tony Slattery), I felt an overwhelming surge of nervousness as I began my short run this year with the peerless mimic Jan Ravens (who herself had directed that illustrious 1981 cast). By the middle of the week, I’d finally managed to reach the zone that stand-up requires, being both relaxed and focused.

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Edinburgh round-up | 9 August 2018

Trump Lear is a chaotically enjoyable one-man show with a complicated premise. David Carl, an American satirist, has arrived on stage to perform King Lear when Donald Trump’s voice interrupts him from the wings. The President threatens to kill him unless he delivers an accessible version of the Shakespeare classic ‘that isn’t boring’. With improvised puppets, Carl rattles through the play while Trump interrupts and offers directorial notes. Something weird happens. A curious mutual admiration springs up between the artist and his patron. Despite its messy presentation, the show works because Carl is a superb impressionist and his wide-ranging gags hit the mark more often than not.

Thursday

James Delingpole

Top Trump

The thing I most regret having failed ever to ask brave, haunted, wise Sean O’Callaghan when I last saw him at a friend’s book launch was ‘So tell me about Shergar.’ It has long been known, of course, that the legendary racehorse — one of the five greatest in the last century, according to Lester Piggott who rode him to victory in the Irish Derby — was kidnapped in 1983 by the IRA and never seen thereafter. What I didn’t realise, till after O’Callaghan died last year, was that the ex-IRA man is the only insider ever to have gone on the record as to his fate. Turns out that poor Shergar was executed within hours.

Thursday

Rod Liddle

The more extreme the left’s screeches, the greater the populist surge

The latest exciting news is that it may very soon be possible for surgeons to perform uterine transplants, so endowing a man who has ‘transitioned’ into being a strange approximation of a woman with the ability to gestate a child. And to give birth, after a fashion. The benighted child would need to be hacked out of the man’s midriff, because there’s not enough room down there for a child to come out naturally (yes, because he’s a man). Sweden — the world leader in uterine transplants — is anxious to reclaim the title of the world’s most batshit crazy nation, which the Canadians and that simpering idiot Justin Trudeau currently have in their grasp. The uterus stuff will undoubtedly help.

James Delingpole

Sacha Baron Cohen

Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest series Who Is America? isn’t funny. But then, nor was his terrible 2016 movie The Brothers Grimsby. Nor was his rubbish 2012 film The Dictator. Nor, let’s be honest, were his classic original characters Borat, Brüno or even Ali G. Obviously, they had their moments: the ‘mankini’ — that bizarre, electric green, giant-thong-like swim wear worn by Borat; the classic late-Nineties catchphrase ‘Is it because I is black?’ And sure it must have taken some nerve — even in character — to explain to a clearly impatient and unimpressed Donald Trump his business plan for some anti-drip ice-cream gloves. But how often, even at his best, does Baron Cohen ever make you laugh?

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

On the offensive

‘I’m an amateur,’ Barry Humphries tells me. The Australian polymath uses the word in its older sense of ‘enthusiast’ rather than ‘bungler’ and he feels no need to point out the distinction. He’s in London to perform a three-week residency at the Barbican — Barry Humphries’ Weimar Cabaret — with his fellow Australian Melissa Madden Gray, who uses the stage name Meow Meow. The show was inspired by Humphries’ fascination with Germany’s culture during the interwar years. ‘It was the last song before the nation slid into moral squalor.

Taki

High life | 19 July 2018

New York I am seriously thinking of moving back to London. The family insists on it. New York, they say, is much too far away and much too shabby. Basically, the Bagel’s attractions are the karate, the occasional judo session, and the weekly Brooklyn parties chez Michael Mailer. The women are better in London, but the real draw are the friends. I have many in London, very few in New York. The past fortnight in London was magical. Then the scene went sour, as parasites and social-justice warriors such as Bianca Jagger and Ed Miliband jumped in to hog the headlines, joining protesters in calling Trumpa racist, a sexist, an Islamophobic bigot and a hate-monger. La Jagger was described in the media as an actress. Funny that.

Cindy Yu

The Spectator Podcast: Trump’s peace plan

Earlier this week, Trump met Putin. But beneath the outcry against Trump’s press conference, a peace plan for Syria was slipped out. Is America withdrawing its troops and leaving Assad in place? We also ask – should we push back the March 2019 deadline for Brexit negotiations? And last, why is communism still chic? While the Twittersphere obsesses over Trump’s Helsinki press conference, a peace plan for Syria was designed, one that would see President Assad stay in place after years of civil war. Middle East expert John R Bradley explains the complex regional relations in this week’s cover – Israel and the US both want Iran out of Syria, and Russia has agreed to help with that, provided it gets access to the warmwater ports in Syria it has always wanted.

John R. Bradley

The rehabilitation of Assad

Amid the confusion and the almost deafening cries of treachery and collusion over Donald Trump’s relations with Russia, few noticed the most tangible outcome of this week’s Helsinki summit. In the lead-up to his face-to-face talk with Vladimir Putin, senior US and Russian diplomats — in close coordination with leaders from mutual ally Israel — brokered a deal among all the warring parties (bar the Islamist terrorists) finally to end the devastating seven-year Syrian civil war. As is often the case with Trump, the hype tends to drown out the message but it was there for anyone paying close enough attention. The US, Russians and Israelis have agreed on a solution to Syria. His name is Bashar al-Assad.

Sunday

Katy Balls

Theresa May fights for her premiership – and reveals Trump’s advice

Theresa May appeared on the Andrew Marr sofa with her premiership at its most vulnerable point since the disastrous snap election. After a week of frontbench resignations, a US Presidential visit that resulted in humiliation, a growing eurosceptic rebellion and a downturn in the polls, May belatedly tried to sell her Brexit blueprint to the public. The Prime Minister began by attempting some honesty – she told Marr that she did accept that the position agreed at Chequers last Friday was different to what was set out in her Lancaster House speech. However, she insisted that the change was minimal and that competitive free trade deals were still possible – she refused to explicitly say that the common rulebook would make trade deals harder to forge.

Friday

Katy Balls

Donald Trump becomes No 10’s nightmare guest

Oh dear. After some incendiary comments earlier in the week, Donald Trump has delivered a sucker punch towards Theresa May and her Brexit plan. As the Prime Minister pulled out all the stops for the US President with a black tie dinner at Blenheim Palace, the Sun published its front page – in which Trump declares that May has 'ruined' Brexit and the US/UK deal is off. https://twitter.com/tnewtondunn/status/1017522456523956224 The US president goes on to add insult to injury by saying May's rival Boris Johnson would make a great Prime Minister. As for that deal, he says: 'If they do a deal like that, we would be dealing with the European Union instead of dealing with the UK, so it will probably kill the deal.' Trump's bad manners have made Theresa May's bad week even worse.

Thursday

The Spectator

Disruptor-in-chief

It is appropriate that the 45th President of the United States has come to Britain this week on a working visit rather than the state visit that was originally intended by Theresa May. Donald Trump’s habit of expressing his frank and impolite thoughts through early morning tweets is undiplomatic and demeaning to his office. It is hard to imagine another leader of a western democracy taking the opportunity to undermine a Prime Minister shortly before arriving in Britain, as Trump did this week by describing the country as being ‘in turmoil’. He then appeared to take sides with Boris Johnson just after the former foreign secretary had resigned in protest at Mrs May’s attempt to unite the cabinet on a shared vision of Brexit.

Helena Morrissey

Diary – 12 July 2018

Well, we did it. No, not Brexit, the World Cup or my (somewhat less) ambitious scheme at Legal & General to interest the nation in investing. Not yet at least. But we did reach the end of term — and the end of the school year. With three out of our nine children leaving their respective schools, my husband, Richard, and I have been staggering towards the finish line, with the usual sports days and summer concerts interspersed with leavers’ picnics, drinks, dinners and cricket days, all of course held in uncharacteristically glorious sunshine. On occasion we had to draft in the cavalry: one daughter took my place at the mothers-and-sons tennis tournament (a welcome substitute for the son in question, since she can actually play).

Steerpike

Trump protests: Ash Sarkar vs Piers Morgan – ‘I’m a communist, you idiot!’

As the protesters gather for President Trump's impending visit to the UK, a debate is going on over whether it's all got a bit too much. Given that the US president managed to visit Emmanuel Macron in France with little hoo-ha, are some Brits overreacting over this instance of international diplomacy? That was the topic of conversation at least on the Good Morning Britain this morning. In an interview, Piers Morgan accused Ash Sarkar – the left-wing blogger – of hypocrisy for protesting Trump's visit over his policy of splitting families on the Mexican border when she hadn't done the same for her 'hero' Obama's previous visit over his own border policy. Only there was one problem – Sarkar isn't an Obama fan, she 's a 'communist – you idiot!': https://twitter.

Paul Levy

Trump Notebook | 12 July 2018

For more than 40 years we’ve lived in a beautiful, listed, Cotswold stone, Stonesfield slate-roofed farmhouse in Oxfordshire. The trouble is it’s an ex-Blenheim house, within earshot of the palace, and the current duke is having Potus — that unlovely acronym for ‘President of the United States’ — to dinner. Locals are muttering about this World Heritage Site being used to fete a pantomime villain. On Thursday we’re invited to a friend’s 70th birthday party at the Athenaeum, and there’s also a press night at the National Theatre. I wonder whether we’ll be able to manage either of these, as our village is almost certain to be in lockdown then.

Tuesday

Katy Balls

President Trump: UK is in turmoil, Boris is my friend

Theresa May's bad week just got worse. After two Cabinet Brexiteers – David Davis and Boris Johnson – resigned on Monday, the Prime Minister attempted today to suggest it was business as usual tweeting of a 'productive Cabinet meeting this morning - looking ahead to a busy week'. However, right on cue, President Trump has arrived on the scene to enter some drama. Ahead of the US president's working visit on Friday, Trump has been commenting on the UK political situation which, by the way, is in 'turmoil'. The part that will particularly concern No 10 is not Trump suggesting his trip to Helsinki to see Putin will be easier than the UK one. Instead, it's Trump's comments on the former Foreign Secretary.