Politics

America is no longer just angry. We have become a nation of wrath. It is a risky emotional condition, recognizable by our desire to obliterate our opponents. Wrath doesn’t seek reconciliation. It wants revenge. Nor does wrath want to accommodate what it can’t control. It wants to rub the slate clean. There is a wrathfulness of the political left, stemming from visceral hatred of Trump and his supporters. But as the left is ascendant in the seats of power, it can pursue its effort to extinguish its opposition via the instruments of state. The wrathfulness on the political right is another story. Wrath reaches its zenith when people feel not just abused but hopeless in the pursuit of any redress.

J.D. Vance is the man Republicans have been praying for since the day Donald Trump stormed to the party’s presidential nomination five years ago. He has a lot of the traits conservatives liked about Trump: Vance, too, is a political outsider with proven appeal to an audience beyond politics, thanks to his bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy. Like Trump, Vance offers himself as an avatar for the people who have been discarded by globalization and demonized by a left-wing media and education establishment. And he is as radical as Trump — maybe more so — in his willingness to reject the merely liberal side of American conservatism. Trump defied elite orthodoxy on trade and immigration. Vance adds proposals to curb the tech companies and tax Ivy League endowments. But if J.D.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s June 2021 World edition. Click here to subscribe. Somewhere along the way, Jon Stewart discovered he could make stupid people laugh by smirking at Fox News clips — and the world has never been the same since. Stewart, who anchored The Daily Show until 2015, is often remembered as the progenitor of a long line of left-wing topical comedians, from Stephen Colbert to John Oliver to Samantha Bee. Yet before that he was something else: the most gloriously subversive personality on television. The Daily Show’s heyday came at the turn of the century, just after Stewart had taken it over from Craig Kilborn.

From 1969 to today, presidents have appointed eighteen men and women to the U.S. Supreme Court. Of those eighteen justices, Republican presidents have seated fourteen justices to just four justices making it to the highest court under Democratic presidents. All four of those justices are still serving, with Bill Clinton naming 87-year-old Ruth Bader Ginsburg and 81-year-old Stephen Breyer and Barack Obama appointing Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. Theoretically, that means that conservatives should hold a 5-4 majority on the court. Theory, however, rarely applies in the swamp that is Washington, D.C. Despite appointing nearly 78 percent of justices over the last 51 years, conservatives have watched as the Supreme Court established or upheld liberal precedents such as Roe v.

Let’s face it: Donald Trump remains the best thing to happen to his enemies. Former FBI director James Comey’s forthcoming memoir is already an advance Amazon bestseller. Porn star Stormy Daniels is milking her standoff with Trump lawyer and all-purpose fixer Michael Cohen for publicity and earnings; this Sunday she’s slated to appear on CBS’ venerable 60 Minutes show. Cynthia Nixon, the former star of the cable series “Sex and the City” is following in his footsteps by trading on her celebrity and running for Governor of New York. But all of this is just a warmup to the Mueller investigation. Trump has been breathing fire about Robert Mueller for several days, declaring that the investigation should never have been started.

Throughout the course of the inquiry on Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, White House lawyers have attempted to drill a message into the president’s head. It is a simple one: whatever you do, don’t go after Robert Mueller personally or suggest in any way that you will shut down the investigation.  You can go after the probe’s integrity, attack the congressional Democrats making political hay over the probe, and push your own counter-narrative about the silliness of it all, but leave the special counsel alone. It is smart, conventional advice that most conventional politicians would take into serious consideration. But Donald Trump, to state the obvious, is not a conventional politician. He does not respond well to being told to be restrained.

It’s hard to stop watching cable news. Trump sues a former porn star, Stormy Daniels for $20m for saying they had an affair. Three other porn stars claim they were involved with Trump. No! Wait! Six more women are ready to come forward. Stormy Daniels promises a tell-all TV interview. Felix Sater – the former mobster who was Trump’s business partner – actually does his version of a tell-all TV interview. Then, like a manic episode of The Apprentice, come a series of headlines about firings. Trump will fire his National Security Advisor. No! Wait! McMaster survives. At least until next week. Trump’s Secretary of State is fired in a phone call as he – the Secretary of State –sits on the toilet. ‘Tillerson canned on the can.

Donald Trump recently disparaged Britain’s National Health Service for “going broke and not working,” leading Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt to express his pride in a system “where all get care no matter the size of their bank balance.” But the news has been filled for months with stories of people unable to access care they need under the NHS, regardless of their efforts or financial resources. Beyond the nationalistic pride and defensiveness of politicians both sides of the Atlantic, how do British and American healthcare really compare? Are both sides as crazy as the other imagines, or do they each know something the other can learn from? Sweeping generalizations regarding the nature of American health insurance are so popular because the reality is so complicated.

Donald J Trump’s State of the Union was as expected: long, boastful, cheesy — and largely right. Trump says he is creating a ‘new American moment’ — and it’s hard to deny that he is. Before he was president, and even in his inauguration speech, Trump painted only a vision of America in ruins. Now, after a year of him in charge, his message is reassuring and upbeat. It’s not the same as Reagan’s sunny optimism — it’s more post-modern and surreal than that — but it’s not far off. You could call it Trump’s electric sunbed optimism. It’s feel-good, it’s a bit orange, and it seems to be rubbing off on the world. ‘Our families will thrive,’ he said in conclusion.