Donald trump

Thursday

Paul Wood

The plots against Trump

From our UK edition

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

From our UK edition

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

From our UK edition

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

From our UK edition

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

From our UK edition

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

From our UK edition

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

From our UK edition

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

From our UK edition

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

From our UK edition

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

From our UK edition

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

From our UK edition

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

From our UK edition

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

From our UK edition

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.

Wednesday

Paul Wood

Can Donald Trump really be a compromised agent of Russian influence?

From our UK edition

During the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, American parents found politics to be a painfully embarrassing subject to discuss in front of their children. The TV news stayed off at dinner time. But even before taking office, Donald Trump has surpassed Bill Clinton. The details of what’s said to have taken place in a Moscow hotel room with a group of prostitutes are lurid enough to damage even someone with Trump’s sexual history. Trump himself has described the allegations as “fake news”. Their significance is that, if true, the President-elect of the United States would be vulnerable to blackmail by the Russians.

Rob Crilly

Will we see a different Donald Trump at today’s press conference?

From our UK edition

When Donald Trump steps from his golden elevator in Trump Tower to address the assembled ranks of the world's media later today, it will be 167 days since his last press conference - the one, you’ll remember, when he encouraged Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails. After November’s election he did say he would announce how he planned to reconcile his business interests with holding the post of world’s most powerful man on December 15. But that was cancelled and since then the accusations, concerns and questions have simply piled up. Another bombshell came last night when reports emerged that US intelligence officials believe Russia may have collected compromising information about the President-elect.

Tuesday

Donald Trump is right to take action against China

From our UK edition

It’s a mistake to think of Donald Trump as a protectionist, as Boris Johnson will have discovered during his recent visit to New York. Theresa May has said that some protectionist instincts are starting to creep in and that the UK should be a champion of free trade. Her remarks are widely interpreted as a reference to policies planned by Donald Trump, but his plans can just as easily be seen as a defence of a rules-based international trading system. One of the 28 pledges made in his Contract with the American Voter was to 'identify all foreign trading abuses that unfairly impact American workers' and to use 'every tool under American and international law to end those abuses immediately'.

Friday

Rob Crilly

Is Trump rowing back on his threat to make Mexico pay for the wall?

From our UK edition

When Donald Trump began his run for the White House, he put building a wall with Mexico at the heart of his campaign. 'I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words', he cried after gliding down his golden escalator way back in June 2015. Mark his words indeed. For while the wall is still very much the backbone of his plans for government all the indications are that he will use a rather more prosaic form of funding to achieve it, using the standard Congressional appropriations procedures rather than a brazen cross-border raid. House Republicans have begun preparing the ground.

Tom Goodenough

What the papers say: Britain’s booming economy and ‘whinging’ Whitehall

From our UK edition

The front page of the Times makes happy reading for the Government this morning with its news that Britain’s economy grew at a faster rate than any other leading economy in the world last year. But while politicians are keen to act as cheerleaders on occasions like this, they are somewhat more reluctant to mention another ‘metric of success: immigration’. So says the Guardian in its editorial in which it argues that foreign workers wanting to come to Britain is a sign of just how healthy our economy is. Theresa May faces a challenge, the paper says, in addressing the worries of workers who want immigration to be controlled, while not ignoring the demands of various sectors for workers from overseas. So what’s the solution?

Thursday

Toby Young

Why meritocrats are the new aristocrats

From our UK edition

After Sir Stafford Northcote and Sir Charles Trevelyan completed their report on civil service reform in 1854, in which they made the controversial recommendation that recruitment should be based on a competitive exam, the government carried out what today would be called a consultation. Among the more interesting objections was the view that the reforms would make the civil service less democratically accountable. This argument was summarised by Helen Andrews, an Australian policy wonk, in a fascinating essay entitled ‘The New Ruling Class’ published last summer: ‘Civil servants who felt they owed their jobs to no one and nothing but their own merit would be independent, which was also to say impervious to checks and balances.

Joanna Williams

The ‘Women’s March’ on Washington is a protest against democracy

From our UK edition

The 'Women’s March' on Washington might not have actually happened yet but it can already be judged a success. Few demonstrations in recent years have attracted such advance publicity, inspired so many supportive column inches, or prompted such an abundance of ‘how to’ guides for the novice protester. The march, planned for 21 January - the day after Trump’s inauguration - and now scheduled to take place across a further thirty American cities as well as in London, Sydney and Zurich, has clearly captured the imagination of those determined to signal their distaste for the incoming administration. More than 200,000 people are expected to participate in Washington alone with trains and hotel rooms now reportedly fully booked.