Usa

To clear up any confusion, American SATs are closer to A-levels than to British primary-school SATs. In my day, this hours-long test of maths and language mastery in the final year of high school was a bullet-sweating business. That score would dictate which colleges we could get into, and we took the results to heart as proof of how smart we were (or not). The exam’s aim, as I understood it, was to objectively assess intellectual aptitude on your basic level playing field. We all took the same test in the same amount of time, regardless of our backgrounds, to earn numerical scores that were comparable across the cohort.

Is the United States, the oldest democracy in the world, bumbling into a constitutional crisis of its own making?  Like most things in life, it depends on where you sit. For the Democratic Party, the answer is somewhere between a “we are getting there” and a “yes, we are living it.”  Donald Trump is not only violating the traditional norms of the presidency, but is taking a sledgehammer to the walls of America’s constitutional republic in order to protect himself from political embarrassment, scandal, and possible legal jeopardy after he vacates the office.

Writing in September 2015, I predicted Donald Trump would win the White House — and was ridiculed by political ‘experts’ for being so dumb. Now, I predict that President Trump will be re-elected in 2020. Why? First, because the Democrats are being dragged so far left by ranting young firebrand socialists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez they can’t possibly beat a guy who’s got the US economy purring, job numbers flying, Isis fleeing and China blinking. Second, because the Trump-bashing mainstream US media undermined their collective credibility with over-the-top 24/7 coverage that Special Counsel Robert Mueller would find Trump colluded with Russia to fix the 2016 election — only for Mueller to clear him.

Washington, DC is a town full of tradition. There’s the State of the Union address at the beginning of the year and the cherry blossom festival in March and April, when tourists around the world descend on the nation’s capital. There’s the ritualistic glad-handing, ego-stroking, and gossip-milling. And, of course, there’s the never-ending infatuation with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—the transatlantic security body that helped keep Europe whole, free, and at peace during the Cold War. The Soviet menace, however, has been dead and buried for close to 30 years. Ever since that infamous day in 1989, when the world woke up to the news that the Soviet machine was tumbling down, Nato has struggled to justify its existence.

The world knew him as ‘Bush 41’. I knew him by a different name -during the time I worked for him as his speechwriter when he was vice president. In those days, the staff called him ‘the Vishnu’. (Bear with me.) It was his own devising. He’d been to India on a state visit, where they’d presented him, amid much pomp and ceremony and clanging of brass, with a statue of the four-armed Vedic deity. Its plaque described the Vishnu’s numerous godly qualities, among them: omniscience, omnipotence, and his title ‘Preserver of the Universe’. Mr Bush immediately recognised a kindred godhead. He began referring to himself, in staff memos and aboard Air Force Two’s loudspeakers, as ‘the Vishnu’.

China’s leadership knows it has badly underestimated the Trump administration’s will to raise the stakes on the trade front. They therefore hope that today’s meeting between the president and Xi Jinping in Buenos Aires produces a return to the status quo ante. The ideal outcome for Beijing would be agreement to establish an on-going dialogue similar to the one conducted earlier this century in which China could dictate the pace of concessions in order to alleviate the pressure from sanctions. This would be based on making the most of the Trump’s positive evaluation of his personal relationship with the Chinese leader and concern in the administration at the impact of tariff escalation on US consumers and inflation.

Another day, another case of Donald Trump ignorantly tweeting from the hip. Or maybe not quite so much. On Saturday, the President blamed the deadly forest fires in California, which have killed over 40 people in the town of Paradise near San Francisco and devastated celebrity-inhabited areas outside Los Angeles, on poor forest management. It drew a furious response from, among others, singer-songwriter Neil Young whose home was reduced to a smouldering ruin and who posted on his website: 'California is vulnerable – not because of poor forest management as DT (our so-called president) would have us think. We are vulnerable because of climate change; the extreme weather events and our extended drought is part of it.

It says something about the level of political discourse in America that Donald Trump decided to trumpet sanctions on Iran not with a speech, but a Twitter meme in reference to Game of Thrones. 'Sanctions are coming,' he says - in a picture that might be funny if it were not so serious. The White House is, in its head, playing out a drama where it imposes sanctions and brings the Ayatollahs to heel. In reality, things are working out very differently. When it comes to the goal of containing Iran, Trump is indeed living in a fantasy land. The date in Trump's tweet is 5 November, the day America ratchets up already devastating economic sanctions against Iran, following Washington’s unilateral withdrawal in May from the nuclear treaty brokered by Barack Obama.