Us politics

Another week, another blow to the so-called Special Relationship. The latest sorry news is that Number 10 has been trying to orchestrate a meeting with President Donald Trump at Davos — but President Donald Trump reportedly isn’t interested. He’d rather hang out with President Macron of France instead. Oh dear. It looks as if the President wants us to grovel, and we probably will in the end. It’s hard not to feel for May. She spent a lot of political capital in being friendly to Trump in the early weeks of his presidency. While Macron got elected essentially by posing as ;'anti-Trump, she tried to present herself as a sort of middle ground between Trump's populist nationalism and Davos's neoliberalism.

Journalists can guffaw at the silliness of President Donald’s Trump’s Fake News Awards as much as they like. The truth is he’s right: the media is biased against him to the point of insanity. And the way Trump has presented the awards on Twitter, and whoever wrote the announcements on GOP.com, has been funny, perceptive, and social-media savvy. In the war that is Trump versus the media, Trump is winning. Through Twitter, Trump has turned media bias against him into his great political asset. Voters who aren’t pathologically anti-Trump can see that he has a point about how unfair the mainstream coverage of him is, and increasingly people tend to believe him not the press.

The Trump presidency has been a disorienting moment in American political life. Imagine a time traveller starting in the year 1990. He steps forward 25 years to 2015. Who are the leading candidates for president? Bush and Clinton — again! What are the top issues? Iraq and healthcare — again! Now step backwards 25 years from 1965. The most powerful men in Washington are the head of the AFL-CIO, a federation of 55 unions across the US, and J. Edgar Hoover. There’s a draft and a telephone monopoly and urban riots and liberal Republicans. It’s a different world. I sometimes feel that what Trump has done is restore motion to a political system that froze in place when the baby-boomers reached middle age. What’s coming next? Something radically different.

Donald Trump is playing hard to get. Asked yesterday at the White House whether he would meet with Special Counsel Robert Mueller for an interview, Trump began back-pedalling on his previous and emphatic '100 per cent'. Now, Trump said, 'we’ll see what happens'. For good measure, he threw in a few of his favourite terms of opprobrium such as 'witch hunt’ and 'Democrat hoax'. And in a tweet he lambasted 'Sneaky Dianne Feinstein' and said it was high time for Republicans to 'take control’ of the Russia investigations.

How the mighty have fallen! Only a year ago, Steve Bannon was being feted as the power behind the Trump throne, the stubble-faced grey eminence who would start a trade, if not an actual, war with China and create a new Republican Party that was based on populist rather than corporate interests. Now all that is gone. After a very public defenestration by Trump, which has resulted in him being ousted from Breitbart, Bannon stands almost bereft on the right. Even his former protege and ally, Steve Miller, stuck the shiv into Bannon, declaring on CNN that he is an ‘angry, vindictive’ person whose ‘grotesque comments are so out of touch with reality’. Bannon has no publication, no financial benefactors, and no influence. Or does he?

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 speech that pointed to 'a time when no one will have to say “Me Too” ever again'. 'A new day', she said, 'is on the horizon'. The kudos keep pouring in. Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, an inveterate Never Trumper, called it 'spine-tingling'. She’s certainly locked down the Hollywood contingent: Reese Witherspoon said: 'It sounds right'.

The most piquant part of Michael Wolff’s gossipy new book, Fire and Fury: Inside The Trump White House, is the ease with which he insinuated himself into the White House. Wolff explains that Trump initially thought he was interested in landing a job. When Wolff said he actually wanted to write a book about the administration, Trump expressed bafflement that anyone would want to write one but said it was OK for Wolff to talk with administration officials. Fox News is reporting that the communications team 'urged all of the senior advisors to cooperate. They thought this was going to be a positive book for the President'. So Wolff apparently hung out in the lobby of the West Wing and got great access.

Forget North Korea for a moment — President Donald J Trump today launched a devastating assault on Steve Bannon, his former chief strategist, and the man often credited as the architect of his success. Replying to bitchy comments Steve Bannon reportedly made in Fire and Fury, a new book about the Trump White House by arch-muckraker hack Michael Wolff, Trump exploded. His comments are worth reading in full: ‘Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind. Steve was a staffer who worked for me after I had already won the nomination by defeating seventeen candidates, often described as the most talented field ever assembled in the Republican party.