As I write this, my Twitter timeline is filling up with tributes to Billy Graham, who has died at the age of 99. Donald Trump describes him as ‘the GREAT Billy Graham’. Well said, Mr President; for once, those Trumpian capital letters are perfectly judged. What’s interesting is that so many of those tweets come … Read more
‘If Mueller was looking at your finances and your family finances, unrelated to Russia — is that a red line?’ Trump: ‘I would say yeah. I would say yes. By the way, I would say, I don’t — I don’t — I mean, it’s possible there’s a condo or something, so, you know, I sell … Read more
Has Barack Obama become a flower child? His new presidential portrait, which is over seven feet high, depicts him on a chair staring ahead somewhat pensively as he’s framed by various flowers that reference Kenya, Hawaii and Chicago. It’s a fitting backdrop to a president who not only embodied the multi-cultural aspirations of America, but … Read more
Donald Trump had a lot to prove during his first ever State of the Union address this week. He had to demonstrate to the millions of Americans watching on television that he could deliver a semi-unifying and presidential speech and stay in one place for more than an hour without diverging into tangents. He had to show … Read more
Why aren’t spy stories sexy anymore? The revelations last year that Beijing destroyed America’s espionage ring inside China a few years ago, including executing a number of US informants, got a brief flurry of attention and then subsided beneath the waves. News reports of American bureaucrats arrested for passing information to the Chinese have also barely raised … Read more
I found Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book We Were Eight Years in Power surprisingly engaging. It combines a calm, friendly voice with a message of cold extremity. The message is that the sin of white supremacy is the true plot of US history. By trying to cure it, Obama exposed its true torrential force. The geniality of … Read more
I found Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book We Were Eight Years in Power surprisingly engaging. It combines a calm, friendly voice with a message of cold extremity. The message is that the sin of white supremacy is the true plot of US history. By trying to cure it, Obama exposed its true torrential force. The geniality of … Read more
Here’s an aspect of Donald Trump’s personality that I’ve never got past: his hatred of dogs. When Trump tweeted on 5 January that his former aide Steve Bannon had been ‘dumped like a dog’, he recycled an insult he has hurled more than a dozen times since declaring for president, according to the indispensable TrumpTwitterArchive.com. … Read more
How quickly Steve Bannon’s dark star has collapsed. Not so long ago, friends and enemies talked him up as a media genius. He was a political guerrilla operative you underrated at your peril. He was ‘Trump’s Rasputin’, or ‘President Bannon’, the man who really controlled the White House. Then he lost his job in said White House, fell out with … Read more
Will the Trump presidency be replaced by the Winfrey one? The hunt is on for a celebrity to take on Donald Trump and right now America has been seized by feverish speculation that Oprah Winfrey is it. On Sunday night, Winfrey accepted the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the Golden Globes, where she delivered a … Read more
Donald Trump is becoming increasingly unbuttoned. Last night, he tweeted referring to Kim Jong–un that: ‘I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my button works!’ To Trump, size matters. Yesterday was a big—or bigly—day for Trump. He started it off by taking a swipe … Read more
It has not gone unnoticed that a number of commenters to my occasional Spectator blogs harbour keen, if not outright enthusiastic, views of the current occupant of the Oval Office – a touching display of faith that suggests there truly is something special about the relationship between America and the United Kingdom. So in the … Read more
In this giant, prodigiously sourced and insightful biography, John A. Farrell shows how Richard Milhous Nixon was the nightmare of the age for many Americans, even as he won years of near-adulation from many others. One can only think of Donald Trump. Nixon appealed to lower- and lower-middle-class whites from the heartland, whose hatred of … Read more
In this giant, prodigiously sourced and insightful biography, John A. Farrell shows how Richard Milhous Nixon was the nightmare of the age for many Americans, even as he won years of near-adulation from many others. One can only think of Donald Trump. Nixon appealed to lower- and lower-middle-class whites from the heartland, whose hatred of … Read more
President Donald J Trump, the man who never sleeps, hasn’t woken up to the awful news from Las Vegas. Or at least he hasn’t yet gone on to Twitter to rave at the world, as he normally does after any terrorist attack or incident of mass violence. No doubt he will any moment. Until he … Read more
Growing up in Raleigh, North Carolina, I took the monuments around the state capitol for granted. The first Confederate soldier killed in the Civil War, Henry Lawson Wyatt, has leaned into the wind on those grounds for 100 years. Atop a pedestal inscribed, ‘To North Carolina women of the Confederacy’, a mother in billowing skirts … Read more
