Freddy Gray

Goodbye EU, hello AU? It’s been evident for a few months now that Donald Trump’s second administration will be more geostrategically ambitious than his first. Yesterday, in another extraordinary press conference in Mar-a-Lago, we got a glimpse of what Trump and his advisers are thinking for the planet in 2025 and beyond.  Trump reiterated his desire to annex Canada and Greenland. He declared that the Gulf of Mexico should be called the Gulf of America, said the United States should take back control of the Panama Canal, and told Hamas ‘all hell will break loose’ if its Israeli hostages are not returned before his inauguration.

Another day, another UK volley from the one-man media universe that is Elon Musk. At 07.51 this morning, Musk posted a yes/no poll on his X feed: ‘America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government.’ At the time of writing, 70 per cent of 170,000 X users replied in the affirmative.  Musk seems determined to drive our national conversation, in the way that newspapers and then TV/radio networks still claim to do, and the British political and media class seem strangely content to enable him.   In a speech this morning, the Prime Minister Keir Starmer just turned another of his big ‘reset’ moments into an angry diatribe in response to the Musk-led assault on his and Labour’s record over the grooming (raping) gangs scandal.

It’s hard to think of a political oration that has backfired as famously as Jimmy Carter’s ‘crisis of confidence’ speech, delivered from the White House on 15 July, 1979.  The fact that it is still today called the ‘malaise’ speech, despite the fact he never used the word, speaks to the scale of its failure.  Amid an energy and inflationary crisis, Carter, who died yesterday, wanted to redefine the political moment by addressing America’s tendency ‘to worship self-indulgence and consumption’.  He aimed to inspire Americans to rediscover their self-sufficiency and lose their dependence on foreign oil.

Have the plutocrats of the internet age finally realised that all Donald Trump wanted was their love? This week, Jeff Bezos had dinner at Mar-a-Lago. The Amazon founder has said he’s ‘actually very optimistic’ about all the regulation slashing that Trump plans to introduce in his second term, and he’s contributed a million dollars to the Trump 47 inauguration fund.Jeff and Donald have come a long way in eight years. Bezos’s Washington Post was a leading voice of the anti-Trump resistance between 2016 and this year. The paper changed its slogan to ‘democracy dies in darkness’ in 2017 as a sort of clarion call against what it perceived as the ills of Trumpism. Amazon and Trump have had legal battles, too. For now, however, that’s old news.

The meeting between Nigel Farage, the property developer Nick Candy and Elon Musk has prompted an all-too-predictable fit among media commentators.  Are we proud, democracy-loving Britons just going to stand by and watch as American billionaires and the radical right buy out our politics? Are we going to let hedge-funders and the real-estate tycoons gut British institutions for gain, privatise our beloved NHS, and finally execute the great neoliberal scheme to enrich the very few at the expense of the very many?  It’s almost as if, by posting a picture of himself, his new money-man Candy and the world’s richest man, Farage was trying to annoy his opponents. Heaven forbid.

Joe Biden’s whole presidency has been built on untruths. We were led to believe, for instance, that since 2021 the Commander-in-Chief has been fit and well enough to serve, when everybody could see that he was not.  So the latest proof-of-dishonesty over the pardoning of Hunter Biden comes as no great surprise. Of course, Joe was going to grant clemency to his errant and only living son. He just pretended he wouldn’t all year for electoral reasons. The maudlin love of the father used to dress up the presidential deceit ‘I believe in the justice system,’ said the president in a statement. ‘But as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice.