Us politic s

Sometimes it’s almost as if Donald Trump wants the world to think he’s a Russian patsy. Yesterday, Rex Tillerson, as Secretary of State, warned Putin that Russia’s alleged assassination attempt on British soil would trigger ‘a response’. Today he’s been sacked. Mike Pompeo, Director of the CIA, will become our new Secretary of State. He will do a fantastic job! Thank you to Rex Tillerson for his service! Gina Haspel will become the new Director of the CIA, and the first woman so chosen. Congratulations to all! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 13, 2018 But the firing almost certainly isn’t about Russia. It seems Trump asked Tillerson to go on Friday, a day after Trump agreed to meet Kim Jong-un.

For two years we’ve been hearing that Donald Trump is an 'isolationist', whatever that word is supposed to mean. Only now two op-ed writers in the New York Times have discovered that he isn’t — instead, Thomas Meaney and Stephen Wertheim write, 'Let’s call Mr. Trump’s vision what it is: radical American imperialism.' Let’s not, because it isn’t true. On the contrary, Donald Trump is the most anti-imperialist president in a generation, even if he is also far from being a mythical 'isolationist'. North Korea is isolationist, and perhaps Meiji Japan was, too. But Great Britain had a world empire when 'splendid isolation' was a maxim of Conservative leaders’ foreign policy in the 19th century.

I can understand some people not liking the current president of the United States. As Conrad Black put it recently, ‘Donald Trump is a strange cat and an acquired taste.’ What I don’t understand is people who should know better being afraid of Donald Trump. For example, how can it be that among all the experienced, eccentric and supposedly visionary denizens of Silicon Valley, only Peter Thiel recognised that Donald Trump is cut from the same cloth as the most celebrated tech titans: a disruptor, an innovator, a maverick, and an up-and-coming ‘crazy one,’ in the mould of the myth-makers to whom the famous 1980s Apple ads paid homage?

If accounts in the press are to be believed, President Trump has reached a fresh nadir. “These are the darkest days in at least half a year,” reports The Washington Post. “Sources close to President Trump say he is in a bad place,” chimes in the impressively-sourced Axios. Buried in the Post story is a contradictory take from close friend Chris Ruddy, the Newsmax chief: “I’m bewildered when I see these reports that he’s in turmoil. Every time I speak to him he seems more relaxed and in control than ever. He seems pretty optimistic about how things are shaping up.” At the end of the day, only the top man himself knows how he’s feeling. But read between the lines, and a compelling antithesis emerges.

Only very rarely in today’s Washington, D.C. is a cause so strong that it brings together America’s most famous progressive with one of the country’s most ideological conservatives. But the nasty, bloody, and intractable proxy war in Yemen - and the U.S. military’s involvement in it - is one of those causes. Yesterday afternoon, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and Utah Senator Mike Lee held a press conference on Capitol Hill to unveil the introduction of a resolution that, if passed by both houses of Congress, would compel a withdrawal of all U.S. military assets from the Saudi-led campaign against the Houthi rebels.

With the drop in his poll ratings to around 35 percent, Donald Trump faces a fresh peril. A further erosion in his numbers would threaten his ability to maintain his hold on a Republican Congress that he desperately needs to ward off the threat of impeachment. His old fighters from the primary campaign such as Corey Lewandowski have been urging him to cut loose as he did this past weekend at the annual meeting of CPAC. Their credo is ‘let Trump be Trump.’ But that would likely be a recipe for disaster. Trump’s popularity is sagging because he has been visibly floundering in recent weeks, from his mismanagement of his side Rob Porter, who was accused of beating several wives, to serial national security clearances for a variety of other aides.

Once in a while some Socialist Worker people set up a stall outside my local Tesco to shout slogans at the progressive middle-class folk who make up much of the local demographic. One of the phrases I’ve heard them use is ‘Refugees welcome! Tories out!’ which is great and everything, except – what if the refugees are Tories? But then there are Sacred Groups and Out Groups, and each has their role to play in the modern morality play that is leftist politics. Ideological tribalism is the subject of a new book by Yale’s Amy Chua, who argues that politics has replaced national or religious identity as a source of division.