Joe biden

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

China’s rockstar-of-tech has fallen foul of Xi

FTSE indices soared as the Biden Bounce met vaccine euphoria, underpinned by the Bank of England’s announcement of another £150 billion injection of quantitative easing. It was heartening to see shares in airlines, hotels and Rolls-Royce, the aero engine maker, perking up — and hardly surprising to see lockdown winners such as Ocado and Just Eat among the fallers. Across the Atlantic, even mighty Amazon shed 5 per cent on Monday. But stock markets are one thing and real life is another. What matters in the short term is whether Boris Johnson can get us out of the lockdown he clearly didn’t want before the tide of redundancies, heading towards

Lionel Shriver

What the three types of Trump supporter really want

As Democrats’ colossal collective sigh of relief drives wind turbines even over in Britain, let’s not lose sight of the big story. However welcome, Joe Biden’s win was supposedly a dead cert. Even conservative commentators like Andrew Sullivan were hoping for a landslide. The real big story is that Donald Trump came within about 73,000 votes of winning the Electoral College. Democrats have celebrated the fact that their man got more votes than any other presidential candidate in history. But who got the second largest number of votes in history? Donald Trump. Of all people. And a 75 million vs 71 million popular vote gap is hardly yawning. Had a

Rod Liddle

Voters have lost their nerve

Elections teach us nothing. Instead, each tribe dredges succour from the minutiae, proving that they had been right all along. The moderate left — here and in the US — insists that tacking to the centre is the way to beat a populist right-winger, despite the fact that Joe Biden won by the skin of his teeth, through the votes of people who couldn’t be arsed to go to the polls on polling day and against a candidate of whom the most charitable description would be ‘fundamentally deranged’. The woke far left, meanwhile, argues the reverse, implying that the tightness of the vote was down to a lack of progressive

Saturday

Kate Andrews

Joe Biden wins the election

Four days after a (much closer than predicted) election, American networks have called the race for Joe Biden, who has secured more than the 270 electoral votes needed to win the race. CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox News (and now the BBC) project Joe Biden will become the 46th President of the United States, as vote counting in Pennsylvania gave the Vice President a big enough lead for them to say with confidence he had won. The additional 20 electoral votes from the swing state bring Biden to a total of 273. Based on current projections, Biden only needed one of the outstanding states (including Georgia or Nevada) to cross the finish line. In addition

Kate Andrews

What will Boris make of a Biden win?

President Donald Trump sees himself as a great friend to the UK: he backed Brexit, likes Boris, and has personal ties to Britain as well. He’s proud of his Scottish heritage, and long before he was running the nation, he was running golf courses in his mother’s home country. But it’s not obvious the UK government always appreciates the President’s expressions of support. The Johnson team made nothing of Trump’s endorsement for the Tory candidate during the 2019 general election. The government is notably squeamish whenever the President lavishes his praises. Perhaps this comes down to cultural differences, but it’s hard to overlook out the nervousness that accompanies a statement from

Friday

Daniel DePetris

Joe Biden should prepare for gridlock

The Democratic Party was anticipating a blue wave this fall, a victory of such magnitude that Republicans would be spending the next two years fighting amongst themselves rather than controlling the purse strings. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the top Democrat in the House of Representatives, was so confident of this blue wave scenario that she sent a memo to her Democratic colleagues outlining a list of bold policy proposals that unified Democratic government in Washington could achieve in the first several months. At the top of that list: a new coronavirus relief package and defending – and building on – the Affordable Care Act. Pelosi, however, got ahead of her skis.

Kate Andrews

Trump doubles down on unfounded election claims

Tensions over the election outcome are escalating in the United States, as President Donald Trump repeated unsubstantiated claims of election fraud. Nearly a day and a half after Trump prematurely declared victory, he took to the stage at a press conference held in the White House and did so again, arguing ‘if you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us.’ He also used the opportunity to double down on his assertions of foul play: ‘they’re trying to rig an election. They’re trying to steal an election,’ he said. Team Trump has not provided evidence for these serious allegations. The claims remain unfounded,

Thursday

Freddy Gray

Trumpism hasn’t been defeated

It’s all over, bar the litigation. Without some mind-blowing legal reversal in the coming days, Joe Biden will be the 46th president of the United States of America. Donald Trump must be extracted from the White House in the coming weeks, though if he is unwilling to leave nobody is quite sure how he’ll be removed. Trump believes the election has been stolen from him — so do many of the 70 million Americans who voted for him. Trust is a vanishingly rare commodity in American democracy. But Trump started crying foul weeks, even months ago. ‘This is a fraud on the American public,’ he declared in the early hours

Monday

Mark Gettleson

Why the Democrats are still haunted by Florida

As we get closer to the American election, Democrats in swing states like Pennsylvania and Arizona are sounding notes of cautious optimism. Others, in Texas and Georgia, are daring to dream that Joe Biden’s national poll lead (mainly driven by suburban women) might flip those consistently red states to their column. In Florida, on the other hand, the mood is one of cautious pessimism. As it always is. Democrats are still haunted by Al Gore’s loss in 2000, when the Supreme Court halted a recount in Florida, delivering the presidency to George W Bush. In 2018, the polls showed that Democrats were on course to win Senate and Governor candidates

Thursday

The Spectator

A Biden victory would be no great boon for Britain

It is remarkably uncommon for a US president to fail to be re-elected. It has happened just twice in the long lifetime of Joe Biden: with Jimmy Carter in 1980 and George H.W. Bush in 1992. On Tuesday, however, it looks likely that it will happen again. It is not just that Donald Trump is trailing badly and consistently in the national polls — he was behind in 2016 but won nonetheless — it is that his support seems to be draining most in his own heartlands. Biden appears to be well ahead in industrial ‘rustbelt’ states like Michigan and Wisconsin where Trump’s protectionist message gave him victory four years

Lionel Shriver

I’m voting to make America boring again

I just spent £2.50 in postage to bring about one of the last things I want. Specifically, the next-to-last thing I want. If the polls are right (and how should I know?), my absentee ballot will help leave Trump behind as a one-term historical aberration and install as US president an elderly Democratic lifer whose cognitive capacities remain uncertain. Many an ambivalent Biden voter will share my concerns about victory: Covid. Who is that masked man? Biden often flaunts his face coverings even when nowhere near another human being, while his party has embraced the mask as a badge of nobility, righteousness and partisan unity. Obliging computer modellers now posit

Friday

Amber Athey

This was Donald Trump's best debate performance yet

Donald Trump had arguably his best debate performance ever on Thursday night, for which he owes a big ‘thank you’ to the Commission on Presidential Debates. The CPD instituted a new rule for the debate in Nashville: each candidate would have their microphone turned off while their opponent was giving their initial two-minute response. This was intended to prevent the consistent interruptions that occurred during the first debate, which were primarily blamed on Trump but were started by former vice president Joe Biden. I suspect that the CPD, which has proved itself to be very biased, thought this would harm the President most. People who don’t like Trump tend to

Thursday

Andrew Sullivan

Why isn’t the germaphobe President afraid of coronavirus?

The weird thing about Donald Trump’s handling of Covid-19, alongside all the other weird things, is that he has always been a near-pathological germaphobe. He likes fast food, we’ve been told, in part because it is barely touched by human hands; he prefers not to press the lowest button on an elevator; he asks Oval Office visitors to wash their hands in a nearby bathroom; he routinely has a bottle of Purell sanitiser available whenever he has to touch hoi polloi; he lost some real estate deals in the past because he wouldn’t shake hands. Last year, Politico called him ‘the most germ-conscious man to ever lead the free world’.

Kate Andrews

Why this lifelong Republican has to vote for Biden

For as long as I was old enough to think about politics, I have been a Republican. When my dad told me, aged six, that Bill Clinton had beaten Bob Dole, I’m told I cried. I don’t remember this, but do have vivid memories of running around St Andrews in my first year at university in a handmade McCain-Palin T-shirt with ‘NO-bama’ sketched in sharpie on the back. I graduated into an internship on Mitt Romney’s campaign and when I moved to London I became a spokesman for Republicans Overseas. Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined the first time I voted Democrat would be to put Barack

Freddy Gray

If Biden wins, who will govern?

Joe Biden started spouting nonsense about his background again this week. Trying to sound all man of the people, he told a rally in Ohio that he would be the first president ‘in 80 or 90 years’ who did not attend one of those fancy Ivy League schools. Well no, Joe — Reagan didn’t go to an Ivy, nor did Carter, Nixon, Johnson, Eisenhower, Truman or Hoover. Joe also likes to claim that he is ‘the first in his family to go to college’. It’s a line he famously pilfered in 1987 from a Neil Kinnock speech. It also happens to be untrue. Three decades ago, people cared when Biden

Thursday

Freddy Gray

Veeps shall inherit the earth

‘Who am I? Why am I here?’ That was how Vice Admiral James Stockdale began the 1992 televised vice-presidential debate. It’s now regarded as a famous gaffe, yet Stockdale’s questions reflect the way most viewers feel about ‘veep’ debates. Who are these people? Why am I watching? Four years ago, 37 million Americans tuned in to watch now Vice President Mike Pence argue with Senator Tim Kaine, Hillary Clinton’s running mate. Even the most ardent followers of American politics would struggle to remember a single phrase. Last night felt different. It’s hard to claim that Pence, the Vice President, vs Kamala Harris, the running mate of former vice president Joe

Wednesday

Daniel DePetris

The US election is Joe Biden’s to lose

Donald Trump is back at the White House after a scary three-day stay at the Walter Reed medical complex. For the President, that’s the good news. The bad news: his bout with the coronavirus hasn’t won him any sympathy points from the electorate. In fact, his numbers have only gotten worse. CNN’s latest national survey saw Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden expand his lead to 15 percentage points. If the polling is any indication, Trump is four weeks away from being beaten like a drum a-la Jimmy Carter in 1980. For Biden, the last nine months have been a wild ride. There was a time not too long ago when

Thursday

Matt Purple

American meltdown: a democratic disaster

Tuesday night’s debate between President Donald Trump and Joe Biden was a hopeless mess — a national embarrassment. For 90 minutes, two cantankerous and incoherent old men ignored the rules, shouted over each other and ruined the event. Trump insulted Biden’s intelligence and his children. Biden told Trump to ‘shut up’ and called him ‘a clown’. The debate may prove useful in one sense, however — as a foretaste of the democratic meltdown that is coming America’s way after the election on 3 November. Again, the rules of the contest will not be accepted, each side will accuse the other of cheating and the whole occasion will turn into a

Saturday

Dominic Green

What’s the real reason behind Joe Biden’s Brexit threats?

Is Donald Trump taking the Democrats’ line on Brexit and the Irish border? We might think so from the Financial Times. On Friday, the FT quoted Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s special envoy to Northern Ireland, saying that the Trump administration, the State Department and the US Congress ‘would all be aligned in the desire to see the Good Friday Agreement preserved to see the lack of a border maintained’, and that no one wants ‘a border by accident’. Does this mean that the Trump administration agrees with Joe Biden? No, it doesn’t. Biden, along with House of Representatives leader Nancy Pelosi and a gaggle of Democratic committee leaders, is siding with

Thursday

Taki

Trump should take lessons in lying from Joe Biden

Gstaad It snowed on the last two days of August up here, and why not? We’ve traded freedom of speech for freedom from speech, so on an upside-down planet, snow in the Alps in August is the new normal. The world is suddenly a grim place, a sick prank when you think about it. It’s a kamikaze fantasy with the bad guys winning and being cheered on by the left and the media. The virus is now a metaphor, religion having been cast aside by the global elite who follow only their interests and think of the rest of us as cannon fodder. Reading the papers a couple of weeks