Donald trump

Saturday

Violet Hudson

In defence of Melania Trump

We all love Michelle Obama. Of course we do. For the last eight years she has been ‘mom in chief’ of America – and the world. She has personified grace, courtesy, warmth, humour and, not incidentally, shown us what a good marriage looks like. Tirelessly supportive of her husband, but successful in her own right, she has become a symbol of what a modern woman can be. She rose from a working-class background to attend Princeton and Harvard. She overcame racism and sexism to become a hugely successful lawyer. As First Lady, she was endlessly elegant and engaged, working to promote healthy eating, educational opportunity and women’s rights.

Friday

The Spectator

Farewell Obama, a president who promised unity but left a legacy of rancour and division

The irony of Barack Obama’s presidency is that while it began at a time when it seemed America’s fortunes could only improve, his inauguration day turned out to be his personal high water mark. The retiring President’s speech in Chicago last week contained flashes of the optimism that he brought to a country and a world which was reeling from the banking crisis and mired in the deepest recession since the 1930s. It recalled the sense of hope that he would lift America’s reputation abroad, shattered as it was by the Iraq war. Yet eight years on, even Obama’s keenest supporters are struggling to answer: what exactly is his legacy? ‘Yes, we did,’ he roared to the crowd, in reply to his old rallying cry of ‘Yes, we can.

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 19 January 2017

Starting cold Why is US Presidential Inauguration Day always on 20 January? — The date was moved from 4 March in the 20th amendment to the US constitution, passed on 23 January 1933, but it is hard to find any significance to the date. The change was made in an attempt to reduce the lame-duck period of an outgoing president, though it did increase the risk of a repeat of what happened in 1841 when William Henry Harrison was sworn in. Choosing not to wear a coat, hat or gloves, he made the longest inaugural speech of any president, at two hours. Three weeks later he was reported to be suffering from a cold, which developed into pneumonia and then pleurisy, leading to his death on 4 April — although some doubt the connection with inauguration day.

Tanya Gold

Trumped!

Trump Tower sits between Gucci and Tiffany on Fifth Avenue in New York City. It looks like infant Lego, the Duplo brand, but black — porn Duplo, then. It is militarised; by the door are the fattest police officers I have ever seen. They look like they have been dragged out of Overeaters Anonymous and given automatic weapons; and I wonder how much the NYPD really want to keep him alive. He is in the penthouse. The obvious comparison is with Al Pacino’s penthouse in The Devil’s Advocate, in which Pacino played a devil in a penthouse in New York City, but Trump Tower is less subtle than that, and I cannot decide whether it is more or less sinister.

Michael Gove

Diary – 19 January 2017

Donald Trump was gushing about one European leader in his Times interview this week. But it was the wrong one. The President-elect told me that he was delighted that he’d been congratulated on his election by the ‘very fine gentleman’ who was the ‘head of the European Union’. ‘Mr Juncker?’ I ventured. ‘Ah, yes,’ he replied. Inaccurately as it turns out. For the European president who’d rung to congratulate the American president-elect was not the European Commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, but the European Council president Donald Tusk. Many of my colleagues will, I’m sure, regard Mr Trump’s error as proof of the folly of electing an unschooled barbarian to the White House.

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 19 January 2017

It is hard to be shocked by anything in these tumultuous times, but I was brought up short by the ‘attic’ headline of Tuesday’s Times, advertising the paper’s T2 section: ‘Up close and personal with Donald Trump — Michael Gove’ , it said, and continued, ‘Sex after 50: it’s fabulous’.. The earliest members of Alcoholics Anonymous offered their famous Twelve Steps, which the drunkard must take in order to recover, born of their own experience. The Twelve Steps are still the foundation of AA. They work because they are taken by people who have hit rock bottom and realise it. The first step says, ‘We admitted we were powerless over alcohol — that our lives had become unmanageable.

Freddy Gray

A renewed special relationship

Freddy Gray, Paul Wood and Kate Andrews discuss Trump's arrival at the White House:   As president, Barack Obama was too cool for the special relationship. The romantic bond between the United States and Great Britain, which always makes Churchill fans go all soggy-eyed, left him cold. Obama was more interested in globalism, ‘pivoting’ to Asia and the European Union. Donald J. Trump is a very different creature. The new US President seems to cherish Great Britain, whereas the EU annoys him. Brexit is beautiful, he believes — and the EU is falling apart. Trump may or may not know the name of the British Prime Minister but, as he told Michael Gove this week, he is determined to strike a free trade agreement with Britain ‘very quickly’.

Paul Wood

The plots against Trump

The ‘most deadly adversaries of republican government,’ wrote Alexander Hamilton, arise ‘chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils. How could they better gratify this, than by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union?’ Hamilton’s warning against ‘intrigue, and corruption’, published in 1788, speaks eerily to the Washington of today, where Donald Trump’s enemies imagine he is a Russian ‘agent of influence,’ bought or blackmailed by the Kremlin.

Martin Vander Weyer

As the rich get richer and Trump takes power, Davos Man should be very afraid

I’ve objected before to the fact that supporters of Oxfam shops are unknowingly funding not only an aid charity but also a left-wing thinktank that promotes its beliefs with considerably more zest and clout than Jeremy Corbyn does. Its latest paper, An Economy for the 99%, issued to coincide with the gathering of the global elite at Davos, offers a killer factoid: that whereas three years ago the richest 85 people on the planet ‘had the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of humanity’, today that equivalence applies to just eight mega-billionaires, led by Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Amancio Ortega, founder of the Spanish fashion chain Zara.

Hugo Rifkind

Piers Morgan is a shameless brown-noser. But maybe he’s on the right track

A few weeks ago I was having an argument with Piers Morgan on Twitter. Oh God, is that really how I’m going to start this column? What have I become? I was, though, and it started because he was brown-nosing Donald Trump. We’re talking a real nasal frottage here. I expressed derision, and he expressed fury at my derision, and on it went. At one point he called me ‘tough guy’. It was all very manly. Although it wasn’t a one-off, because he’s been at it — I mean the brown-nosing — ever since, including in this very magazine. A column here, a TV appearance there. Last weekend, he was bickering about Trump with Alastair Campbell on Peston. And I’ve been wondering what’s going on. Morgan is not Farage.

Kate Womersley

Thoughts on the human condition

This past autumn has felt more uncomfortable than usual to be a woman looking at men looking at women. From Hillary Clinton’s ‘overheating’ episode (‘Does she have Parkinson’s? Is she wearing a catheter?!’) to Donald Trump’s assessment of female limbs as if they were building materials, election season finished with the male members of our new first family peering over the voting booth to check on their wives. Siri Hustvedt has long been interested in how the way we look at the world privileges certain political, gendered, artistic and scientific agendas, while excluding others. These dynamics are at play between a reader and a writer, a doctor and a patient, a neuroscientist and the brain she studies.

Friday

Steerpike

Question Time’s golden moment

As David Dimbleby decamped to Solihull for the first Question Time of the year, it was Donald Trump's washing habits that were top of the BBC news agenda. With an ‘unverified and potentially unverifiable’ document suggesting Russian spies have compromising information on the President-elect, Dimbleby began by asking the panel -- comprised of David Lidington, Gisela Stuart, Arron Banks, Paul Mason and space scientist Monica Grady -- whether Trump was fit to be president. Alas Dimbleby struggled to keep a straight face as he asked Banks about his trip to the golden lift in Trump Tower: DD: I'll be careful what I say here, the golden lift... AB: If you could not linger on the word golden... DD: In the golden lift of Trump Tower, what were you talking about?

Thursday

The Spectator

No, he didn’t

The irony of Barack Obama’s presidency is that while it began at a time when it seemed America’s fortunes could only improve, his inauguration day turned out to be his personal high water mark. The retiring President’s speech in Chicago this week contained flashes of the optimism that he brought to a country and a world which was reeling from the banking crisis and mired in the deepest recession since the 1930s. It recalled the sense of hope that he would lift America’s reputation abroad, shattered as it was by the Iraq war. Yet eight years on, even Obama’s keenest supporters are struggling to answer: what exactly is his legacy? ‘Yes, we did,’ he roared to the crowd, in reply to his old rallying cry of ‘Yes, we can.’ But did what?

Dot Wordsworth

Nativism

The title of America’s first woman bishop was claimed in 1918 by Bishop Alma White, leader of the Pillar of Fire Church, noted for her feminism, anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism, for her alliance with the Ku Klux Klan, and for her nativism. I was puzzled by the word. After all, Native Americans are what we used to call Indians. Native American is not a new piece of terminology. Sir Fulke Greville in his Life of Sir Philip Sidney, published in 1628, inveighed against the Spaniard as a race for suppressing ‘the poor native Americans’ with heavy impositions. But these American Indians, no matter how heavily suppressed, hardly seemed the sort of native that Bishop White would have championed. Nor had I heard that Donald Trump was a big fan of Native Americans.

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 12 January 2017

At the Golden Globes ceremony, Meryl Streep attacked Donald Trump because he ‘imitated a disabled reporter’. ‘When the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose,’ she added. It has not been explained over here that hers is a disputed version of what happened. The controversy began in November 2015, when Trump, campaigning, alleged that ‘thousands and thousands’ of Muslims in Jersey City had publicly celebrated the attack on the Twin Towers in September 2001. The allegation caused outrage, and it seems that Trump’s idea of numbers was wildly exaggerated. However Trump’s people did produce evidence that such a celebration had taken place. One piece was a contemporary report in the Washington Post by Serge Kovaleski.

Theo Hobson

America won’t forget Obama’s message of hope

Those who sneer at Obama for promising more than he could deliver have little understanding of the nature of moral idealism. They accuse him of naivety but they are themselves naive. They fail to grasp that Obama expressed the basic moral idealism that unites the vast majority of people in the West. He expressed it more eloquently than anyone else had for decades. To say that he created unrealistic hopes is inept. Those ‘unrealistic hopes’ are intrinsic to the basic creed of the West – ‘liberty and justice for all’ sums it up. Such intense idealism is a crucial aspect of the politics of the West, however awkward this is. It’s risky for a politician to express such ideals with real verve, for a backlash is pretty likely.

Tom Goodenough

What the papers say: Donald Trump hits back

Donald Trump is dominating the headlines once again after he hit back furiously at reports that Russia had compromising videos of him in a Moscow hotel room. The president-elect denied the claims, branding BuzzFeed, who revealed the dossier detailing the allegations, a ‘failing piece of garbage’. So should the claims have come to light? No, says the Sun, which attacks the website for publishing the unverified allegations and in so doing making a ‘mockery of journalism’. The paper questions why the website - whose editor-in-chief admitted they could not stand up the claims - gave the go-ahead to release the information anyway.

Freddy Gray

Trump’s family favourites

Donald Trump will not find satisfaction as the 45th President of the United States of America. He really wants to be king. Just look at the gilded-bling madness of his penthouse on the 66th floor of Trump Tower in Manhattan, or the sprawling exuberance of his holiday palace in Mar-a-Lago, Florida: Trump aspires to be an American emperor, the Big Mac Rex with triple cheese. Winning the White House is great, but it’s not enough. Trump now seems determined to treat the Oval Office as just one of his courts — the principal court, perhaps, at least for four years, but one of many. He wants to lord it over Washington DC in partnership with his daughter princess, Ivanka, and her dashing husband, Mr Jared Kushner.

Fraser Nelson

Don’t ask the experts

Michael Gove never intended to make his most famous remark. In an interview during the EU referen-dum campaign, the then justice secretary was told that the leaders of the IFS, CBI, NHS and TUC all disagreed with him about Brexit. He had tried to reply that people have ‘had enough of experts from organisations with acronyms saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong’. But he was picked up mid-sentence by his appalled interviewer. ‘Had enough of experts? Had enough of experts?’ Gove’s partial quote was held up to ridicule, as if it embodied Trump-style populist rage; the battle of emotion against reason.

James Delingpole

How the Donald will beat the Green Blob

Just before Christmas I popped over to Washington DC to test the waters of the Trump administration. I spoke to key members of his transition teams; I hung out with thinktankers, journalists, scientists, conservative activists; I wangled an invitation to a top-secret lunch hosted by card-carrying members of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy; I drank cocktails, lots of cocktails, from the Four Seasons in Georgetown to the new Trump Hotel in the Old Post Office; I went to that Americans for Tax Reform meeting that Grover Norquist hosts every Tuesday. And I came back feeling very positive indeed. Why? The fact that I even have to ask this question in a conservative publication speaks volumes about anti-Trump prejudice, even from many right-wing commentators who ought to know better.