Us politics

Is Mitt Romney the mouse that roared? Or does he pose a real threat to President Trump? In his Washington Post op-ed, Romney bludgeons Trump: ‘the president has not risen to the mantle of his office.’ Move over Elizabeth Warren. It looks like the real civil war will be in the Republican, not the Democratic, party. Romney has been all over the map when it comes to Trump, seeking his endorsement seven years ago, importuning him for the Secretary of State post, only to denounce him once he’s floundering.

Jon Sopel, the BBC’s North America editor, has given us a pithy and perceptive account of today’s USA in his book If Only They Didn’t Speak English. He described the mood there in 2016 as ‘fearful, angry and impatient for change’. It was the year when Donald Trump was going to be elected to the world’s most powerful position. Could something similar also explain the unpredicted swings in European elections and across the world? If so, does it mean that people are so fed up with the status quo that they will opt for anything contrary? The oft-quoted aphorism from G.K. Chesterton comes to mind: ‘When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.

We’re closing 2018 by republishing our ten most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 8: Lionel Shriver on the Brett Kavanaugh hearings: Following Christine Blasey Ford’s Senate testimony about being sexually assaulted by the US Supreme Court nominee when he was 17, numerous women on American news reported that listening to her terrible story made them cry. I didn’t cry. Indeed, my reaction to Ford’s statement was at such odds with the garment–rending anguish of my fellow Democrats that I had to wonder whether either I’d missed something or maybe there was something wrong with me. So I just read the entire transcript. I hadn’t missed anything. As for whether there’s something wrong with me, I’ll leave that for others to judge.

One of the most important duties of being an ambassador is serving as a counsellor of sorts. When relations between two countries are on the rocks – or a president or prime minister says or does something another nation regards as hostile – the ambassador is often called on to ensure that any diplomatic fallout can be contained and the relationship itself can be repaired. Apparently Gordon Sondland, the US ambassador to the European Union, didn’t get the memo.   In an extraordinarily frank interview with Politico Europe this week, ambassador Sondland blasted the EU as an archaic, obstructionist, elitist European superstructure whose primary objective is to keep itself in business.

Emmanuel Macron's hosting of sixty world leaders in Paris last weekend to commemorate the centenary of the Armistice has turned into a public relations disaster. The president of the Republic not only infuriated Donald Trump, but he also put the Serbian president's nose out of joint. According to reports, Aleksandar Vucic was not amused with the seating arrangements at Sunday's service of remembrance. While Kosovo's president Hashim Thaçi was behind the leaders of France, Germany, Russia, and the United States, Vucic was shunted off to the side. "You can imagine how I felt," Thaci is quoted as telling the Serbian media. "I couldn't believe what I was seeing before me, knowing the sacrifice that the Serbian people made in World War One.

As soon as Donald Trump says ‘I’ll be honest,’ which he did at his press conference today, you know he’s about to tell a lie. The media, he proclaimed, ‘really does bring disunity.’ No, it doesn’t. What it brings is coverage of his administration rather than the beatification that he craves. Trump’s performance was more than ordinarily intemperate. He was clearly nettled by CNN reporter Jim Acosta’s questions about the Russia investigation, deeming him ‘a rude, terrible person’ who behaves in an ungentlemanly fashion toward his press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders. After NBC reporter Peter Alexander tried to defend Acosta, Trump barked, ‘Well, I’m not a big fan of yours either.

The Trump economy has defied all sceptics and naysayers. Unemployment is at half-century record lows, wages are up, and Wall Street opened November by bouncing back from a rocky October. Trump was supposed to be a reckless leader who would panic the markets. He hasn’t. His tariffs were supposed to torpedo the economy. They haven’t. If Americans vote on jobs, wages, and the business climate come Tuesday, Republicans will keep the House of Representatives and expand their Senate majority. But do voters ever think of midterm elections as a referendum on the economy? Conventional wisdom says no, but the reality is more complicated.

Once again, America is under attack. If it's not hordes of migrants swarming over the border, it’s murky jews financing un-American attacks on the president of the United States, aided and abetted by a 'fake news' media in hock to the Democrats, liberals, and other malignant handmaidens to American weakness and decline. Of course we know what’s going on here. We know these eruptions of Trumpery are intimately connected to the mid-term elections and the administration’s need to rally conservative voters to the cause, to stave off possible Democratic advances. But it is not just that and we know this too. This is Trump embracing the freedom of being Trump. Trump, lazy and incompetent and proudly ignorant, does at least know about winning and losing.