Donald trump

Saturday

Mary Kissel

What has happened to Trump’s ‘America first’ policy?

From our UK edition

So much for Donald J. Trump, ‘America first’ isolationist. Gone is the man who, as a civilian, repeatedly endorsed a speedy withdrawal from America’s longest-running war (2012 tweet: ‘Afghanistan is a complete waste!’), who railed against George W. Bush’s intervention in Iraq and advocated leaving Syria to the whims of the Russkies and others. On Monday night, in his first nationally televised address as Commander-in-Chief, Trump declared that he was ordering more troop deployments to South Asia, for an unspecified period of time, to fight the war in Afghanistan. The Afghanistan commitment isn’t the only puzzler.

Sunday

Jacob Heilbrunn

The Trump revolution is devouring its own children

From our UK edition

Steve Bannon is out. H.R McMaster is in. It's now starting to dawn upon some of Donald Trump's most ardent admirers that they've been had. The main accomplishment of the Trump revolution has not been to forward populism. It has been to devour its own children. Trump entered office declaring that 'this carnage ends now'. Not so. He's been producing it in the form of lopping off the head of one adviser after another. Bannon is now promising 'war' against the 'New York Democrats' that he says are running the White House. If so, it will be a fratricidal one. Bannon was of course the brains behind Trump's defeat of Hillary Clinton, something that the president could never entirely forgive. Trump wants all the credit for himself.

Thursday

Philip Hensher

Whatever happened to Alice?

From our UK edition

In 1987, the art of opera changed decisively. John Adams’s opera Nixon in China was so unlike the usual run of new operas in its concept that many people, on first hearing about it, assumed it had to be a joke of some sort. Turning the preposterous and reviled figures of Richard and Pat Nixon and Henry Kissinger into operatic heroes — they were all still alive in 1987 — seemed preposterously at odds with the dignity of the form. It was entirely serious. Though the concept was in part that of Peter Sellars, the opera director, the exquisite refinement of treatment was that of the librettist, Alice Goodman. Unlike almost all contemporary operas, it quickly spread across the world.

The Spectator

Barometer | 17 August 2017

From our UK edition

Big bong theory Big Ben, otherwise known as the Great Bell, is due to fall silent on Monday for renovations to be carried out on the Palace of Westminster’s Elizabeth Tower, in which it is housed. Why is it called Big Ben? —According to one version, Sir Benjamin Hall, who oversaw the installation of the bell in 1859, also happened to be nicknamed Big Ben. He made a long and rambling speech on what the bell should be called, whereupon another MP interjected: ‘Why not call it Big Ben and be done with it?’ The comment is not, however, recorded in Hansard. Inside left Pressure groups representing the left-handed held an international left-handedness day. How does the percentage of reported left-handedness vary? Netherlands 13.2 UK 12.2 New York State 12.

The Spectator

America’s identity crisis

From our UK edition

Long before student activists started talking about pulling down statues of Cecil Rhodes, a cultural war was being waged in America over monuments honouring General Robert E. Lee and other leaders of the Confederacy. In 2001 there was a petition to remove some of these statues from the University of Texas on the grounds that their presence might ‘lead people to believe that the university is tolerant of the Confederate ideology regarding slavery’. The arguments that started on campus then branched out beyond it. To some, the statues were a symbol of Southern heritage and pride. To others, they were a monument to racism. In recent years this argument has intensified, gathering a momentum that few of America’s political leaders fully understood.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 17 August 2017

From our UK edition

Home Regulated rail fares will rise by 3.6 per cent in January, bringing the price of annual tickets from Oxford, Colchester or Hastings to more than £5,000. The rise depended on the annual rate of inflation in July as measured by the Retail Prices Index, which had risen to 3.6 per cent; as measured by the Consumer Prices Index it remained unchanged at 2.6 per cent. A passenger train was derailed near Waterloo station but none of the 23 on board was injured. A train from Royston hit the buffers at King’s Cross. Richard Gordon, the author of Doctor in the House, died aged 95. The landlord of the Mallard in Scunthorpe became the third person at the pub to win £1 million in the National Lottery.

Paul Wood

The true Trump scandal

From our UK edition

 Washington DC The National Enquirer presented Trump watchers with a mystery last week. Why did it print an attack on Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort? A headline screamed: ‘Trump advisor sex scandal — Paul Manafort’s sick affair.’ A 68-year-old man’s alleged dalliance with a ‘hottie half his age’ might seem a trivial subject to discuss as the US convulses over the issue of race once again, this time after a white supremacist killed a woman protester in Charlottesville, Virginia. President Trump has electrified supporters and opponents alike by siding with those who want to keep the town’s statue of the Confederate general, Robert E. Lee.

Wednesday

Stephen Daisley

The true nature of Trumpism can no longer be denied

From our UK edition

There is a strain of wickedness so contagious that it infects every pore of the places it touches. It can be found in the failed human beings who snatch at glory by the mass slaughter of children; they have changed forever the towns of Dunblane, Newton and Columbine. New York and Paris have emerged from the violent fantasies of terrorists but Utøya, Enniskillen and Ma’alot likely never will. Charlottesville joins the grim roster of cities that stand as metonyms for racial hatred and intolerance. The Virginian municipality has been here before — it was ground zero of the Stanley Plan — but it is the arresting display, in 2017, of white supremacism that will forever bracket it with Selma and Birmingham. Evil can sometimes be terribly useful.

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Trump’s presidency will stain America for years to come

From our UK edition

It is amazing what a crowd - or a basket - of deplorables can do. Sometimes they can even strip away cant and reveal the truth. Such has been the case since a few hundred neo-Nazis and assorted other white supremacists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, at the weekend. They were protesting the planned removal of a statue honouring General Robert E. Lee, a statue typical of the American south’s longstanding emotional sympathy for the Confederacy. The Confederates might have been wrong, but they were romantic and, besides, they were our kind of wrong. Of course they should still be honoured by statues that serve as consolation prizes or participation trophies. America’s original sin endures, you know.  And it lives in the White House too.

Saturday

Andrew J. Bacevich

Trump hasn’t drained the swamp – he’s put the military in charge of it

From our UK edition

Dwight Eisenhower was right to warn Americans in 1961 of the ‘military industrial complex’, but perhaps it is now the only thing that stands between the US and chaos. The new White House chief of staff, General John F. Kelly, is the third general Donald Trump has appointed to his cabinet. Kelly is already getting a good press for introducing military discipline and order to the Trump White House. His first move was to fire the attention-grabbing billionaire Anthony Scaramucci as head of communications, and he’s said to have told even members of Trump’s family that they must book ‘face time’ with the President through him.

Friday

Matt Purple

Trump is treating Kim Jong-un like a rival New York real estate developer

From our UK edition

When I first heard Donald Trump threaten North Korea with “fire and fury,” I immediately despaired—because I’m sick and tired of hackneyed Game of Thrones references. Amongst American pundits, mentioning the hit show has become a desperate way of showing off one's knowledge of popular culture. To that end, Steve Bannon isn’t Rasputin or Jean-Paul Marat; he’s Qyburn, of course, and Sean Spicer is Hodor. Now this lazy form of posturing has infiltrated even the highest levels of the United States government. What have we come to?

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

London calling | 10 August 2017

From our UK edition

What is the Edinburgh Fringe? It’s a sabbatical, a pit stop, a pause-and-check-the-map opportunity for actors who don’t quite know where to go next. Alison Skilbeck has written a ‘serio-comic celebration’ of Shakespeare and her performance attracts a decent crowd for a show that starts at noon. She plays a fruity-voiced thesp, Artemis Turret, who delivers lectures about the Bard’s older females to groups of layabout pensioners gathered in a scout hut. It’s pure Joyce Grenfell. Good fun, too, but without much potential beyond the fringe. Dominic Holland’s show, Eclipsed, is about his life as a fallen comedy god. In the 1990s he was on telly all the time and he accepted the royal command to perform at Prince Charles’s 50th birthday party.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 10 August 2017

From our UK edition

Home British negotiators are prepared to pay up to £36 billion to the EU to settle the so-called divorce bill for Brexit, according to the Sunday Telegraph. By voting for Brexit, ‘the old have comprehensively shafted the young’, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, Sir Vince Cable, aged 74, wrote in the Mail on Sunday, ‘imposing a world view coloured by nostalgia for an imperial past on a younger generation much more comfortable with modern Europe.’ Lord Neuberger, who will retire as president of the Supreme Court next month, said that the government should ‘express clearly what the judges should do about decisions of the European Court of Justice after Brexit.

Jacob Heilbrunn

Going nuclear

From our UK edition

Wednesday marked the 72nd anniversary of the dropping of the bomb on Nagasaki. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki prompted Emperor Hirohito to announce Japan’s surrender in a radio address, though fanatical war hawks tried to stop him. After 1945, Japan developed a pacifist movement and a so-called peace constitution. No country has deployed these fearsome weapons since. Can it really be a coincidence that the day before this eerie anniversary, Donald Trump issued his implicit threat to unleash an unprecedentedly devastating nuclear attack on North Korea that would apparently eclipse Hiroshima and Nagasaki? ‘North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States,’ said the President.

Andrew J.

General rule

From our UK edition

Dwight Eisenhower was right to warn Americans in 1961 of the ‘military industrial complex’, but perhaps it is now the only thing that stands between the US and chaos. The new White House chief of staff, General John F. Kelly, is the third general Donald Trump has appointed to his cabinet. Kelly is already getting a good press for introducing military discipline and order to the Trump White House. His first move was to fire the attention-grabbing billionaire Anthony Scaramucci as head of communications, and he’s said to have told even members of Trump’s family that they must book ‘face time’ with the President through him.

Rod Liddle

England Lost/Gotta Get A Grip

From our UK edition

Two songs in which Sir Michael informs us that he is distressed by both Brexit and Donald Trump. Released with, according to the 70-year-old singer, ‘urgency’: he can see that we are in trouble and was naturally anxious to help us out. The first, ‘England Lost’, is at least redeemed by a soupçon of wit. Jagger explains that he went to see England play football but that they lost, and he got wet in the rain. But it then turns into a sort of state of the nation thing, by the simple addition of an apostrophe and the letter ‘s’. England’s lost, he bemoans, and chucks in an incoherent allusion regarding our preoccupation with immigration. Then there’s ‘Gotta Get A Grip’, unburdened by any kind of wit at all.

Wednesday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Is Trump really about to rain down ‘fire and fury’ on North Korea?

From our UK edition

Today is the 72nd anniversary of the America atomic bombing of Nagasaki, a lovely port city that also served as a Japanese naval base during the second world war. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki prompted Emperor Hirohito to announce in a radio address Japan’s surrender, though fanatical war hawks tried to stop him. The atomic bombings saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of American soldiers, but they remain the only time that a country has actually deployed these fearsome weapons. Donald Trump’s implicit threat to unleash an unprecedentedly devastating nuclear attack on North Korea that would apparently eclipse Hiroshima and Nagasaki offers a reminder that in this regard America remains unique. Nuclear weapons are the great taboo—or at least they have been.

Thursday

Michael Hann

His dark materials | 3 August 2017

From our UK edition

Randy Newman is already struggling to keep up with himself. His dazzling new album, Dark Matter, was written before the changes of the last year, and no matter how pointed and current some of it is, there’s something missing. ‘There was a newspaper article that said Donald Trump is like a character in a Randy Newman song,’ he says. ‘I didn’t think there were any real people like the guy in “Political Science” or “My Life Is Good”. But he’s close.’ He’s had a bash at something for the Potus. ‘I just had an idea for a Trump song,’ he says, sounding rather like Yogi Bear’s rather smarter brother. ‘But then I didn’t do anything about it.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 3 August 2017

From our UK edition

Home Philip Hammond, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, appeared to wrest control of plans for Brexit from cabinet rivals, while Theresa May, the Prime Minister, was in Italy and Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary, was in Australia. Mr Hammond foresaw a ‘transitional deal’ ending by June 2022, when the next general election is due. He said it would be ‘some time before we are able to introduce full migration controls between the UK and the European Union’. Liam Fox, the International Trade Secretary, insisted that the cabinet had not agreed to a three-year transition. Mr Johnson said he was unaware that Amber Rudd, the Home Secretary, had announced a year-long inquiry about the costs and benefits of EU migration.

Tom Goodenough

What the papers say: Trump is good news for Britain

From our UK edition

Jeremy Corbyn might be ‘on a high’ but he shouldn’t be allowed to forget his party’s ‘highly inconsistent, profoundly confusing’ position on the issue of the day: Brexit. Labour’s stance became yet more tangled yesterday, says the Daily Telegraph, with Keir Starmer saying the party wanted to keep Britain in the single market - ‘only 10 days ago Jeremy Corbyn said the opposite,’ points out the paper. It’s time for the Tories to take the fight to Labour, says the Telegraph, which argues that while ‘young voters, have been motivated and energised’ by Corbyn this doesn’t mean they should be allowed to get away with such a contrary position on Brexit.