Donald trump

Thursday

Taki

High life | 15 March 2018

From our UK edition

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 — a man I much admire but a man none the less. ‘That makes two of us,’ answered the great one, ‘and we used to go out with the same girl....’ Like a gent, he never mentioned her name, and I didn’t ask.

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 people wanted.

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 the Midlands. In Norway it snows every day of the winter and half of the days of autumn and spring. The last time a train was cancelled there was during the German invasion in 1940.

Toby Young

We’re being destroyed by tribalism

From our UK edition

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 tack, arguing that the ascendancy of identity politics on the right and the left of American politics is threatening to destroy the Republic.

Monday

Steerpike

Watch: Michael Wolff’s earpiece fail

From our UK edition

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...

Thursday

Michael Moorcock

Texas Notebook

Returning to the United States a short while ago I received a stern talking to from an immigration officer. Why had I been in Paris longer than usual? I’ve lived in the US for nearly 25 years. I originally moved to be closer to my son, who was being educated nearby, and to my American wife’s relatives in Houston. We bought an old house in a small town about an hour from Austin. Built for his new bride by the only Confederate governor of Texas after he came back from the civil war, it’s rather eccentric. We fell in love with it immediately, planning to live there for at least as long as my son was in the US.

Thursday

Taki

High life | 1 February 2018

From our UK edition

Gstaad I caught a whiff of it as it rolled in from the east, the smell of hypocrisy being different from others that penetrate our olfactory nerves in everyday life. It was coming from Davos and it had a Graeco-Roman flavour to it. The prime ministers of those once upon a time great countries, Greece and Italy, asked for a Marshall Plan for Africa to solve the root cause of the migrant crisis that threatens the old continent’s existence. Just think of it, dear readers. Tsipras and Gentiloni, the former a liar, the latter unelected, both leading two basket-case countries, asking for a vast programme of wealth transfer so that Europe and the rest of the world can enjoy visits by African oligarchs, colonels, generals and their whores enjoying their new-found wealth.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 1 February 2018

From our UK edition

Home The EU published its negotiating position on Britain’s period of transition, from 30 March 2019 until 31 December 2020. Britain would have to abide by the rules of the single market, customs union, free movement and decisions of the European Court of Justice, as well as new EU laws. Britain would have no representatives at the table. Jacob Rees-Mogg, the chairman of the European Research Group among the Conservatives, said: ‘This will be the first time since the Norman Conquest the UK has accepted rules imposed by a foreign power without having any say over them.’ The UK economy expanded by a half per cent in the last quarter of 2017 according to the Office for National Statistics, which was better than expected.

The Spectator

Trump vs Trump

From our UK edition

It’s easy to see why Donald Trump gets angry. He is presiding over a robust economy, growing at the fastest rate of any major economy. His recent tax cut has encouraged jobs and investment to come back to the United States. Apple alone is redirecting an extra $38 billion in tax towards the Treasury’s coffers. Other employers are using the tax cuts to pay workers a bonus: AT&T is handing 200,000 of its staff a payout averaging $1,000 each. There’s so much economic optimism that even Democrat voters say they feel better about the economy than they did under Barack Obama. But Trump isn’t taking much credit. He is still very much blamed — and his approval ratings are still very low, worse than any other President going into his second year.

Roger Kimball

Trump is working

From our UK edition

In London last week I had the opportunity to talk about President Donald Trump with several politically mature friends. Most were sceptical, even slightly appalled, by him. It was my task to help them overcome this prejudice. I am delighted, dear reader, to attempt the same service for you. I was not always a fan. For most of the 2016 campaign, I supported Ted Cruz, a choice that many thought only marginally less bad than Mr Trump. But politics is the art of the possible and it turned out that the only two possibilities were Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. For me, that meant that the only possibility was Donald Trump. Why? First of all, Clinton was the most corrupt serious candidate in history. Her elevation would have tainted the presidency beyond recall.

Thursday

Katy Balls

Breaking: UK/US relationship upgraded from ‘special’ to ‘very special’

From our UK edition

Brexit doom-mongers step aside. After weeks of speculation, the relationship that exists between Britain and the US has just been upgraded from 'special' to 'very special'. Speaking at a joint press conference, Theresa May and Donald Trump were at pains to prove they had not fallen out –as recent reports had suggested following Trump's decision to cancel his trip to open the new US embassy in Vauxhall. Heaping the treacle on thick, the US president dismissed such reports as 'false rumours' and praised the British Prime Minister: 'We have great respect for everything you're doing and we love your country, we think it's truly great.

Sunday

Freddy Gray

US government shutdown: Trump’s presidency begins to resemble Obama’s

Donald Trump had hoped to mark his first anniversary as president basking in surprisingly positive media headlines and enjoying a lavish party at his Mar-a-Largo estate in Florida. Instead he must contend with a government shutdown and another major political crisis in Washington, the political swamp he promised to drain. Congress has remained in session all weekend as Republicans and Democrats seek to resolve the shutdown -- and blame each other for having caused it. But who will Americans blame? The President? The Republican Party? Or the Democrats? The answer is everybody, probably.

Friday

Freddy Gray

Trump, May, and the sinking of the so-called ‘Special Relationship’

From our UK edition

Another week, another blow to the so-called Special Relationship. The latest sorry news is that Number 10 has been trying to orchestrate a meeting with President Donald Trump at Davos — but President Donald Trump reportedly isn’t interested. He’d rather hang out with President Macron of France instead. Oh dear. It looks as if the President wants us to grovel, and we probably will in the end. It’s hard not to feel for May. She spent a lot of political capital in being friendly to Trump in the early weeks of his presidency. While Macron got elected essentially by posing as ;'anti-Trump, she tried to present herself as a sort of middle ground between Trump's populist nationalism and Davos's neoliberalism.

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

Shithole

From our UK edition

In Polite Conversation, Jonathan Swift presents dialogues made up of clichés, banalities and catchphrases. When Miss Notable makes a remark seen as witty, Mr Neverout exclaims: ‘Why, Miss, you shine this Morning like a shitten Barn-Door.’ Perhaps we might not admit such an adjective, even in this archaic form, to polite company — except that among the chattering classes no word is entirely ostracised. In 2001, Barbara Amiel, Lady Black of Crossharbour, wrote in the Daily Telegraph that ‘the ambassador of a major EU country politely told a gathering at my home that the current troubles in the world were all because of “that shitty little country Israel”.

Thursday

Peter Jones

Madman at the helm

From our UK edition

Whatever one makes of the accuracy of the journalist Michael Wolff’s depiction of President Trump, it cannot all be the product of an overheated imagination. What makes it so interesting is that his picture of total dysfunctionality is typical of Roman historians’ accounts of many emperors. Suetonius (d. c. ad 125), for example, was a high-ranking imperial secretary to the emperor Hadrian. In his Lives of the Caesars, he covered the period from Julius Caesar, Augustus and all the other early emperors — most notoriously Caligula and Nero — through to Domitian (d. ad 96). Take his portrait of the viciously self-indulgent Caligula. His desire to humiliate senators and officials and to put on shows, dress up, act, sing and dance, made him very popular with the people.

David Frum

Diary – 11 January 2018

From our UK edition

Like every journalist in Washington, I’m enthralled by the new Michael Wolff book, Fire and Fury, which depicts Donald Trump as a president in steep mental decline, derided and despised by his entire entourage, family included. I read with perhaps special attention because I have a book of my own about the Trump phenomenon being released on 16 January, just over a week after Wolff’s. The experience is a little like being the next presenter at the Golden Globes immediately after Oprah Winfrey’s speech. Wolff is interested in personalities, not politics. But while Trump may be stupid or crazy, the people enabling him are neither of those things.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 11 January 2018

From our UK edition

Home Theresa May, the Prime Minister, tried to shuffle her cabinet, but Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, refused to become Business Secretary and stayed put with the words ‘Social Care’ added to his title. Sajid Javid, the Communities Secretary, had ‘Housing’ tacked on to his. Justine Greening spent three hours with Mrs May and emerged without her job as Education Secretary, having turned down Work and Pensions, which went to Esther McVey. David Lidington was made Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, taking over tasks that had been performed by Damian Green, and was replaced as the sixth Justice Secretary in six years by David Gauke, the first solicitor to be made Lord Chancellor.

Martin Vander Weyer

Wolff told us the US awaited a president who could cast a spell on markets: now it has one

From our UK edition

I once commissioned Michael Wolff —currently the world’s most talked-about journalist as the author of the White House exposé Fire and Fury — to write for The Spectator. It was just before the 2004 presidential election in which Republican incumbent George W. Bush looked set to see off the Democrat challenger John Kerry, and I invited Wolff to tell us the implications for the stock market. His thesis was that the Democrats had become ‘the party of wealth and Wall Street’ while the Republicans had become ‘non-players’, Bush having turned his back on business to be ‘a God-squad cheerleader’. America was waiting in vain for a president who could ‘cast a spell of optimism over consumers and markets’.

Friday

Steerpike

Fire and Fury of the Trump book ‘exclusives’

From our UK edition

It's fair to say that Michael Wolff's explosive biography of Donald Trump has caused a stir ahead of its publication. It's a struggle to find a news site that isn't splashing on its claims – from Trump's supposed desire to lose the election to Steve Bannon's comments on Russia. Despite the US President's lawyer has issued a cease and desist letter to block the official release of Fire and Fury, the publisher has decided to release the book today four days ahead of schedule. Hacks are now at pains to show that they managed to bag their copy ahead of schedule. Although the Times has the official UK serialisation, the Guardian managed to scoop the paper and publish first after they 'obtained a copy of Fire and Fury from a bookseller in New England'.

Thursday

The Spectator

Where Trump succeeds

From our UK edition

Among the many new political maladies of our age, one has been left largely undiagnosed. This is Trump Derangement Syndrome, a condition whereby intense dislike of the 45th president renders sufferers unable to understand what he is trying to do or allow that he is capable of success. Trump is hard to admire, it’s true, and seems to revel in his ability to appal. But therein lies the secret of his power: with a few tweets, he can set the world’s news agenda and drive his critics to distraction. Take this week, when he tweeted that his nuclear arsenal is larger than that of Kim Jong-un. His comments were seized upon as yet another example of his idiocy and his playground logic.