Joe biden

The Democratic takeover is nearly complete

From our UK edition

In the days following the US presidential election in November, political centrists reached a hasty verdict. Never mind all the squabbling about voter fraud — they had won. The extremes had lost. Donald Trump, the maniac, was out; Joe Biden, the moderate, was in. Yes, the increasingly radical Democratic party still controlled the House of Representatives, but as long as the Republicans won one of two Senate run-off races in Georgia in January, the crazies would be checked by a Republican majority in the Senate. The markets rallied. All was well in establishment la-la land, despite the pandemic. Well, guess what? On Wednesday morning, it became clear that the Democrats had won both those Georgia races.

Who’s who in the Biden clan

From our UK edition

The electoral college has confirmed it: the US will have its 46th president on 21 January next year - Joseph R Biden Jnr. While Scranton Joe might not have much in common with his predecessor in many departments, there are (some) similarities when it comes to their personal lives. As grandfathers in their 70s, both men preside over large broods, who have helped build the family political brand - and who have generated their fair share of media intrigue along the way. Here’s the guide to who’s who in the Biden clan: (Dr) Jill BidenDr Jill Biden (Image: Getty) An English professor with nearly two million followers on Instagram, Jill Biden is no stranger to the White House.

The EU is taking a gamble with China

From our UK edition

It took Brussels and Beijing seven years to agree an investment deal. A deal that, until its conclusion a few days ago, had been largely eclipsed by the Brexit process. Once the negotiations had concluded, however, the European side suddenly came under intense criticism — China, detractors said, was not the sort of country the EU should be cosying up to. That the deal was finalised on the penultimate day of the year was a sure sign that Angela Merkel was pushing for closure. She had stated before the pandemic that advancing EU-China relations would be one of the goals of Germany’s EU Council presidency (now passed on to Portugal). A goal for Germany perhaps, but there was substantial opposition to the deal among European heads of states.

Farewell, Donald

From our UK edition

Madeleine Kearns To Trump or not to Trump? Whether ’tis nobler on the page to be a morbid cynic or a self-righteous arse? That is the question those of us working in American right-wing media have been staring in the face for four years. Looking back, the Trump years feel like one of those awful ‘would you rather?’ games that teenagers play. ‘Would you rather be half-fish from the waist up or from the waist down?’ ‘Would you rather have pubes for teeth or teeth for pubes?’ You know the sort. Of course, you can make the case for either option if you really want to (and some people do), but the most sensible answer remains, ‘This game is rubbish. I’m not playing.’ Biden is also rubbish, as it happens. And Harris is terrifying.

Who would want to be Joe Biden’s attorney general?

Whoever Joe Biden picks for attorney general is in a lose-lose situation. Why is that job so hard? At least three reasons stand out:  The ongoing criminal investigations of Joe Biden’s family A boiling cauldron of divisive legal questions facing the new administration, particularly immigration and gun control Pressure to investigate everything the Trump administration ever did All those will land in the attorney general’s lap. The first one, involving the Biden family, is especially vexing.The probe into Biden’s grifting kin will face the AG immediately. The President-elect’s son Hunter and brother James both grew rich by trading on the family name. That, in itself, is not illegal.

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The hypocrisy of Donald Trump’s death penalty critics

From our UK edition

Everyone is entitled to complain about Donald Trump's behaviour after the presidential election. No one should be surprised. He is acting entirely in character. It was always certain that he would become the worst loser in history. In comparison, Ted Heath, the incredible sulk, seems almost gracious. But there is one respect in which the President's detractors, including Joe Biden, may be guilty of hypocrisy: when it comes to the death penalty. In recent weeks Donald Trump has faced much criticism for allowing executions to take place during the presidential transition period. Previous outgoing Presidents had taken the view that if a condemned federal prisoner had exhausted every hope except Presidential clemency, that decision should be left to their successor.

Portrait of the year: Coronavirus, falling statues, banned Easter eggs and compulsory Scotch eggs

From our UK edition

January Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, signed the EU withdrawal agreement, sent from Brussels by train. Sajid Javid, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, promised ‘an infrastructure revolution’ in the Budget. An American drone killed Qassem Soleimani, an Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard commander, near Baghdad airport. Iran carelessly shot down a Ukrainian airliner taking off from Tehran, killing 176. Bush fires raged in New South Wales. Cases of acute viral pneumonia were noticed in Wuhan in central China. February Eighty-three British evacuees from Wuhan were quarantined on the Wirral. The Department of Health classified Covid-19 as a ‘serious and imminent threat’. In Hubei 68 million people were made to stay at home.

The absurd outrage over Dr Jill Biden

From our UK edition

The Electoral College has confirmed Joe Biden’s presidential victory. Now America puts weeks of mad discussions about stolen elections and Venezuelan voting machines behind it, and conversation turns to what kind of president Biden will be. Will he make good on his pledge to bring America together? Will he heal the wounds of the Trump era? Well, if the past few days are anything to go by, his administration will certainly stand up for the rights, for the dignity, for the humanity, of people with advanced academic degrees. I’m referring to the Dr Jill furore, which just may be the most phoney bit of elite outrage from 2020 (in a very crowded field). It centres on Jill Biden, the soon-to-be first lady.

Closing time at the Barr

William P. Barr is out. Joe Biden is in. And Donald Trump has a few more weeks left to bemoan his fate and lash out at his subordinates now that the Electoral College vote has taken place. Poor Trump! He wanted a no-holds-Barred assault on the election. But Barr, who was supposed to be Trump’s faithful janissary, has proved less than reliable in recent weeks, earning him the ultimate opprobrium of the President today, who declared that at least Robert Mueller, in contrast to Barr, would have set the record straight about Hunter Biden. Yup. Mueller. He would have 'set the record straight’, Trump claimed. So the author of the putative Russia witch-hunt is now being used to highlight the shortcomings of Barr?

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US Supreme Court ends Trump’s last hope

From our UK edition

This is the end, my only friend, the end. The Supreme Court yesterday struck down Texas’s legal bid to challenge Joe Biden’s election. Donald Trump said the Court ‘really let us down’, but the truth is that the case was a legal Hail Mary. It has failed. Now the quixotic campaign to challenge the official 2020 election result really is all over, bar the tweeting. It’s actually been over for a while, but a lot of Trump supporters refuse to see it. There’ll be more cases and many more allegations. But whatever the truth of any claims, the fact is the Trump campaign and its Republican supporters have failed to make a sufficiently powerful argument to do something as dramatic and unprecedented as overturn an election.

Hunter becomes the hunted

Are the chickens coming home for Hunter Biden? It certainly seems so, though experts differ on the critical question of whether they are coming home to roost or roast. Wednesday’s news, splashed via an official communiqué from his father’s transition operation, that Hunter is being investigated by the US Attorney’s Office for possible tax fraud makes me want to bet for ‘roast’ not ‘roost’. Here’s Hunter’s statement from Wednesday, in full: ‘I learned yesterday for the first time that the US Attorney’s Office in Delaware advised my legal counsel, also yesterday, that they are investigating my tax affairs.

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No one wins in the race race

From our UK edition

After the explosion of international self-abasement over George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis, much theatrical soul-searching ensued. So your basic man or woman on the street might have reason to puzzle why it is that in the wake of all this hyper-awareness about race (which the left simultaneously instructs us both does not exist and explains everything), relations between the hues seem only to decay. In order to redress ‘structural racism’, the state of Oregon (impressively still extant, given the determination of both nature and Portland’s Antifa activists to burn it down) has reserved $62 million, out of a total Covid relief fund of $200 million, for black people.

Biden’s burden: can he save the free world?

From our UK edition

Joe Biden talks a lot about restoring America’s standing in the world. But the truth is that if he now has the chance to reshape America’s relationships for a new era, it’s because Donald Trump has already done the awkward stuff. The question is: can Biden and his team swallow their collective pride and build on Trump’s legacy, or will vanity and partisanship send the American Atlas tumbling to his knees? Trump won the 2016 election by forcing the difficult questions on to the national agenda. In office, he developed an alternative to the spent consensus of the 1990s. Call it vulgar realism, the lowest common denominator of American interest.

Biden’s speech impediment

Does Joe Biden write his own speeches? Surely not. Yet his campaign says Biden was his own speechwriter for the address he made to the nation a week after the election, when he stressed his campaign theme: ‘We must restore the soul of America.’ The Soul of America is the title of a book by the historian Jon Meacham and the New York Times figured out that Meacham had helped with the speech. The campaign’s national press secretary, TJ Ducklo, was forced to concede that, yes, Biden had ‘consulted a number of important, and diverse, voices as part of his writing process, as he often does’.

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Republican resurrection

When Donald Trump took his famous escalator ride, the Republican party was too attached to abstract principles at the expense of the material interests of its own voters. It wasn’t even doing a particularly good job of adhering to its preferred ideological abstractions. Whatever the Democratic party’s ideological failings, its leadership understands the importance of delivering tangible benefits to the electoral coalition that puts them in power (although their newfound suburban voters could be in for a rude awakening if the Democrats ever get too much power). Trump presented an opportunity to change this.

populism republican

Brace yourselves for President Harris

Although the electors for the presidential election of 2020 do not cast their votes until December 14, and their votes are not certified — and hence the election is not officially ratified — until December 23, it is eminently possible that by the time you read this the world will know whether the election was won by Donald Trump or Joe Biden. That is emphatically not the case now, in mid-November. The media narrative would have you believe otherwise. According to the received script, Biden won on November 3, or at least in the wee hours of November 4, when mail-in ballots, tens of thousands of them, began appearing like manna from heaven.

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Meet the pollster who doesn’t suck at his job

The winner of this year’s presidential election may be different than the last, but the struggles of the polling industry continue.Although, one lesser-known but historically successful poll appeared to have predicted the exact result: IBD/TIPP, headed by Raghavan Mayur, president and founder of TechnoMetrica. But Mayur, an immigrant from India with a strong Hindu faith, could care less. He’s too focused on his work to worry about the excuses of his competitors.‘At the end of the day, there’s an Indian saying: the dancer who doesn’t know how to dance will say the stage is crooked,’ Mayur told The Spectator.

raghavan mayur

Biden’s Brezhnev vibes

Like many other Americans who had the misfortune to live under socialism, I’ve been having lots of flashbacks lately. In particular, I find that the presumptive President-elect Joe Biden gives out serious Brezhnev vibes. The general secretary of the Soviet Union from 1964 to 1982, Leonid Brezhnev was not a healthy man. He was a chain-smoking workaholic who’d been appointed to a series of very stressful positions — you try to rise in ranks under Joseph Stalin. He served in World War Two, when he was wounded, and suffered a concussion. Brezhnev’s mind and body took a toll; his first, minor stroke happened in 1951, when he was still in his forties.

brezhnev

Portrait of the week: Tiers, Scotch eggs and a devastated high street

From our UK edition

Home The Commons voted by 291 votes to 78 for new coronavirus regulations putting 55 million people in England into the restrictive Tier 3 or the little less restrictive Tier 2, apart from the 700,000 or so folk of Cornwall, the Isle of Wight and the Scilly Isles. There were 55 Tory rebels, whom the government had attempted to placate by publishing a 48-page dossier, generally regarded as thin stuff. There would, they were also assured, be a review on 16 December of the areas put into tiers. ‘We do want to be as granular as possible,’ Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, told the Commons encouragingly. Labour let the regulations go through by abstaining, though 15 Labour MPs voted against. Wales prohibited pubs from selling strong drink and made them close at 6 p.m.

Iran vs the rest: the Middle East has reached a tipping point

From our UK edition

Last year, in the cigar bar of an opulent London hotel much favoured by visiting Arabs, an interesting conversation took place. My friend was rich enough to have two private jets and claimed to be doing private shuttle diplomacy between Israel and one of the Gulf states. Smoke curled around our heads and a young Qatari in Gucci trainers passed by with a woman my friend assured me was a Russian prostitute. My friend’s phone was out now and he was on a video call with a man he said was a senior official in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. He asked him about a drone strike on Saudi Arabia’s two biggest oil refineries. The man chuckled. ‘Ah yes, that was us.