Donald trump

Monday

Rob Crilly

The Republican convention will be like an episode of ‘At Home with the Trumps’

After weeks of speculation and teasers, hints of A-list stars and promises of razzle dazzle, the programme for the Republican National Convention finally arrives on the eve of proceedings. At the last possible moment. And if you were expecting Donald Trump to remake the GOP election-year gathering in his own image, well, you won’t be disappointed. In fact the week’s convention is looking a lot like an episode of a new reality TV show: At Home with the Trumps. Six are among the 20 headline speakers. On Monday we have his wife and possible future first Lady Melania discussing how to 'make America safe again'. Until now she has preferred cosy TV chats to stump speeches, managing only a 90-second effort in Milwaukee.

Saturday

Rob Crilly

Trump’s choice for VP shows what a canny operator he is

In the end Donald Trump's vice-presidential pick emerged in typical style, blurted out on Twitter. On Thursday night, as the horrors from Nice played out on TV screens, the bombastic billionaire said he was cancelling Friday's event to unveil his running mate. A rare moment of sensitivity. It didn't last. Hours later he ended speculation with a Twitter announcement. 'I am pleased to announce that I have chosen Governor Mike Pence as my Vice Presidential running mate. News conference tomorrow at 11:00am,' he wrote. It marked the end of what CNN had clumsily dubbed the VPprentice, with Trump publicly announcing his three final candidates almost as if it were a reality TV show.

Friday

Freddy Gray

Is Donald Trump becoming boring? His choice of running mate suggests so

After some confusion, it is confirmed: Donald Trump has picked Indiana Governor Mike Pence as his vice-presidential running mate. After the terrorist attack in Nice last night, the Trump campaign announced, somewhat melodramatically, that it had postponed its Veep announcement  ‘out of respect’. This led some pundits to suggest that all the reports yesterday saying that Trump had settled on Pence as his running mate had been misinformed. Well, they weren’t: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/753965070003109888 Mike Pence ticks a lot of right-wing boxes, and helps Trump appeal to old-fashioned Republican voters. Pence is a straight conservative, Reaganite figure. 'Get government out the way' is his core message.

Thursday

Toby Young

The truth about ‘post-truth politics’

The departure of Andrea Leadsom from the Conservative leadership race was a blow to pundits who claim we’re living in an age of ‘post-truth politics’. According to Michael Deacon, the Telegraph’s political sketchwriter, she was an ideal candidate because she embodied the ‘anti-factual’ mood of the country. ‘Facts are negative,’ he wrote, parodying the attitude of Leadsom’s knuckle--dragging supporters. ‘Facts are pessimistic. Facts are unpatriotic.

Christopher Caldwell

Cops and killers

 Washington, DC Considering how heavily its citizens are armed with pistols, hunting rifles, shotguns, military semi-automatics, crossbows and nunchucks, considering how ethnically diverse and historically divided the place is, and considering that it is home to a third of a billion more or less rootless people, it is surprising Americans don’t kill each other more. The United States is well policed, even if it has been hard to say so lately. In the space of a couple of days in July, black men were shot dead by policemen in two separate incidents in Louisiana and Minnesota. Video flew round the internet.

Thursday

Deborah Ross

Erectile dysfunction

Anthony Weiner is the American politician who made a comeback after a sexting scandal and stood for New York mayor. He was topping the polls, when a second sexting scandal broke, which proves what, probably, none of us had suspected all along: that thing you do where you send women pictures of your erect penis must be awfully hard to quit. This fly on the wall documentary was, happily, already filming Weiner and his fascinating wife (Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s long time aide) when his career imploded, and the result is as supremely entertaining, painfully funny and queasily riveting as you might have hoped, with one caveat: why is it so awfully hard to quit? Why is it so awfully hard not to press ‘send’?

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 30 June 2016

On referendum day, my mother leaned on my arm for support and we walked slowly and carefully up the steps of the village hall, wondering if this was to be the last time either or both of us would be voting in a national plebiscite. Here again was the paper ‘Polling Station’ poster pinned to a five-bar gate. Here again were the weeds flourishing between the paving slabs in the forecourt, and the plaque on the wall commemorating the opening of the village hall by some local mauve-faced grandee in 1952. Here again were the handrails showing signs of rust and the two sets of institutional double doors reminding me of school.

Freddy Gray

Our antidote to Trump

Is Donald Trump an idiot or a genius or a mad idiot genius? He seems driven by some demented force that even he doesn’t understand. What else made him come to Scotland on Friday last week? The ostensible reason, and probably the motive in Trump’s head, was that he wanted to reopen one of his golf courses. That’s weird enough in itself, given that he is the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee, and in a few months could be leader of the free world. What’s he doing still jetting about promoting his businesses? What’s even weirder is that The Donald landed on Brexit day, of all days.

Wednesday

Martin Vander Weyer

Business holds the antidote to acts of voter insanity on both sides of the Atlantic

Good news: ‘My sources in the Gulf tell me they’re poised with big cash to buy into sterling, UK equities and property on any weakness,’ says an email from a reader who does business across the Middle East. Will the phenomenon I once called ‘the Curse of Qatar’ be the horse that pulls us out of the post-referendum quagmire and tramples the short-sellers? Might it even be strong enough to save the professional services firm, dependent on inward investors, whose owner told me he expects to make 50 of his 180 staff redundant if the vote goes the wrong way? We have flirted with what the Washington Post called ‘an act of economic insanity’.

Thursday

Freddy Gray

Trump’s train wreck

If you think the Conservative party is in a bad way over Europe, spare a thought for the Republicans of Washington DC. Their presidential candidate is Donald Trump, and he’s a nightmare. The party can’t stand him, he can’t stand the party, and somehow they’re supposed to win an election together. The omens don’t look good. Even the influential Republicans who wish Trump well — and there aren’t many — can’t figure out how to get along with him. ‘I just have no idea how you get an idea into Trumpland,’ says Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, who is known as ‘the most powerful conservative in DC’. He adds, ‘In any campaign, the circle of trust shrinks as the campaign goes on.

Rod Liddle

Rise of the atrocity exhibitionists

Life is speeded up. It used to be that when a hideous atrocity occurred people waited a day or two, even a week, before co-opting it into their political armoury. Now it happens while the smell of cordite is still in the air and before the blood has dried. There is a breathtaking shamelessness about it and a certain narcissism, if not outright solipsism and an eagerness to demand a sort of acquired victim status. The revolting murders in an Orlando nightclub are a case in point. Some 49 people dead and 53 injured after a Muslim, presumably what we are enjoined to call a radical Muslim, ran amok with a gun.

Thursday

Lionel Shriver

Diary – 9 June 2016

When an old friend X came to dinner in London, I sampled what it must have been like during the American Civil War, when families were split asunder from aligning on opposite sides of the Mason-Dixon. Lo, this warm-hearted, well-read, intelligent Midwesterner is backing Donald Trump. This was my husband’s introduction to X, whose electoral preference clearly queered the first impression. Our threesome didn’t talk long on the matter. The disconnect being so absolute, there was little to say. X is the only Trump supporter I wittingly know. But I was chilled by the difference between this and countless heated-but-civil suppers of yore, at which a dinner guest plumped rambunctiously for a candidate I opposed — Romney, McCain, even George W.

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 9 June 2016

Showered and shaved and wearing a stiff new Paul Smith candy-stripe shirt, I took an Uber to the party. I love London and it was grand to be back and to be driven through the sunny streets by Yusef, one of the many new arrivals adding vibrancy, energy and diversity to our great city. Diversity is strength! Diversity is our greatest strength! (I used to believe that unity is strength, but I have lately recanted of this foolish and evil idea.) ‘Will you be voting in or out, Yusef?’ I said in a comradely manner, as one perplexed citizen to another. ‘I think stay in, sir,’ he said. ‘Better for the economy.’ ‘What economy?’ I said. ‘The global economy is a parasitic Ponzi scheme and the EU is already hollowed out.

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

A monkey-brained case for Donald Trump

A few years ago I was asked to speak at a conference in New York. ‘Where would be the best place to stay?’ I asked my assistant. ‘Well, you’re booked into The Trump SoHo’, she said, careful to pronounce the capital H. ‘Are you completely deranged? Do I look like a man with a craving for gold taps and Swarovski-encrusted towelling robes?’ ‘The conference organiser has booked it. They’ve got a special rate.’ So a few weeks later a Lincoln Town Car (which after a long flight, for some unfathomable reason, is the best car in the world) dropped me in front of The Donald’s hotel.

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Voters have no time for the flaccid centre

A depression has settled on the Liddle household ever since Norbert Hofer narrowly failed in his bid to become the president of Austria. I like a man who keeps a Glock pistol in his jacket pocket, and there is something noble in the cut of his jib. Norbert was thwarted by the voters of Red Vienna and the usual fraudulent postal ballots, most of which will have come from immigrants, as happens time and again in this country. So he lost. Instead the Austrians are saddled with a lunatic, Alexander Van der Bellen, a hand-wringing Green halfwit representing what George Orwell was habituated to call the ‘pansy left’. Interestingly, both of the two leading candidates for the job of president seem to loathe Austria and wish for it to be abolished.

Thursday

Taki

High life | 19 May 2016

   New York I have never seen anything like it. If Adolf Hitler were running for president, he would match Donald Trump’s negative coverage. If Benito were in the race, his notices would be far more favourable. When The Donald emerged as the last man standing, certain New York Times columnists became unhinged. One hysterical woman pundit accused Trump of ...not having any money. The one I liked best came from a colleague of hers, who is usually unreadable because of his wordy and flat prose. That particular fool had declared that the word Trump would never appear in his column. Once Donny baby had wiped the floor with his opponents, the fool did mention his name, describing him as ‘an unbelievable joke’.

The Spectator

Letters | 19 May 2016

Republican party schisms Sir: Jacob Heilbrunn astutely analyses the predicament Donald Trump creates for America’s neoconservatives (‘Lumped with Trump’, 14 May). But the ideological schisms within the Republican party are even more profound than he indicates. In fact, Trump not only divides the populist right from movement conservatives — and neoconservatives — based in Washington, DC, he also divides neoconservatives against themselves. William Kristol, the neoconservative kingpin in Washington, has lately found himself under intense attack by David Horowitz, a California-based ex-radical-turned-rightist in the classic neoconservative mould. Horowitz has excoriated Kristol for dividing Republicans and effectively helping Hillary Clinton.

Christopher Buckley

The age of Hillary

Predicting what might happen in a Donald Trump presidency is easy. Day 1: A fabulous, really great inaugural, the best ever, with amazing entertainment by fabulous, top people. Day 2: War with Iran. Day 3: War with North Korea. Day 4: Mexico builds a wall to keep out Americans. But let’s not go there. (Please.) Let us instead conjure what four years of a Hillary Clinton administration might bring. After all, she is, despite the media-led panic about Trump’s improving polls, still strong favourite to become the 45th President of the United States. So what would Hillary’s America look like?

Ben Schott

Jeeves and the Cap that Fits

The Secret Service said it would investigate Donald J. Trump’s longtime butler over Facebook posts laced with vulgarities and epithets calling for President Obama to be killed. — New York Times, 12 May 2016 I had only just risen from a deep slumber, when in shimmied Jeeves with the cup that cheers. ‘Does the day look fruity, Jeeves?’ I yawned. ‘Indeed, sir,’ he assented, opening the curtains to an expanse of cloudless sky, ‘decidedly clement.’ ‘Perfect conditions for a perusal of the racing form in the long grass, would you say?’ ‘I would, sir. However your aunt has asked me to inform you that she desires you to entertain a guest this morning.’ ‘A guest? What guest?

Thursday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Lumped with Trump

 Washington, DC A few weeks ago, I attended the 40th gala dinner of a Washington think tank called the Ethics and Public Policy Center at the St Regis Hotel, just down the street from the White House. William Kristol, editor of the neoconservative Weekly Standard and unrepentant champion of the Iraq War, was the MC and Paul Ryan, -Speaker of the House, the star guest. Kristol began by noting that Donald Trump had referred to him in various tweets as ‘dopey’, the editor of a ‘slightly failing magazine’ and ‘very embarrassed to walk down the street’ because of his failure to endorse Trump. Kristol joked: ‘It’s been a tough two or three months of rehabilitation for me.