Freddy Gray

Freddy Gray

Freddy Gray is deputy editor of The Spectator and the editor of the US edition. He hosts Americano on YouTube.

Thursday

Freddy Gray

Why Trump can’t be stopped

36 min listen

This week: can anyone stop Trump?  The Spectator’s deputy editor Freddy Gray takes a look at Trump's ‘second coming’ in his cover story. He says that despite Trump’s legal troubles, he is almost certain to receive the Republican nomination. Freddy joins the podcast alongside Amber Duke, who also writes in the magazine this week about the brides of trump: the women hoping to receive the nod as his running mate. Also this week: the old trope is that there is nothing more ex than an ex prime minister, but what about an ex MP?

Freddy Gray

Is 2024 the ‘regime referendum’?

36 min listen

Freddy Gray speaks to Daniel McCarthy, editor of the conservative review Modern Age, about all things Donald Trump. Do his ongoing trials help or hinder his campaign? Do the Democrats want him to be the Republican candidate or not? And is there a bureaucratic 'permanent power' that Trump would overthrow if he succeeds? The Spectator is hiring! We are looking for a new producer to join our broadcast team working across our suite of podcasts – including this one – as well as our YouTube channel Spectator TV. Follow the link to read the full job listing: https://spectator.

Freddy Gray

Why Trump can’t be stopped

Donald Trump has dominated Republican politics for so long that it can be hard to remember the time when he did not. It’s easy to forget that at the beginning of 2016 he started the Republican primary process by losing the Iowa caucuses to Ted Cruz, his more conservative rival. ‘He stole it,’ Trump tweeted afterwards, graceful as ever in defeat. ‘The State of Iowa should disqualify Ted Cruz from the most recent election on the basis that he cheated – a total fraud!’ Trump went on to stun the world, of course, by winning the Republican nomination, then the White House. American politics would never be the same again. Skip forward to 2024 and Trump is still grumbling about stolen elections. But he’s no longer the maverick Republican insurgent.

Wednesday

Freddy Gray

Do Trump’s Republican rivals have any hope?

23 min listen

Freddy Gray is joined by pollster James Johnson, co-founder of JL Partners. They speak about the upcoming Iowa caucuses, the New Hampshire primary, and whether Trump's opponents have any chance of beating him. They also discuss the impact of Trump's trials, and JL Partners' viral word cloud which both Biden and Trump have been attempting to use to their advantage. (Photo credit: JL Partners) The Spectator is hiring! We are looking for a new producer to join our broadcast team working across our suite of podcasts – including this one – as well as our YouTube channel Spectator TV. Follow the link to read the full job listing: https://spectator.

Friday

Freddy Gray

Biden’s bogus memorialisation of 6 January

It’s fright month in Joe Biden’s America, folks. Today, 5 January, the US President will travel to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, to mark the third anniversary of the riot on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC on 6 January 2021. He would have done it on the day but the event had to be rescheduled due to an incoming storm. Biden also likes to rest on the weekends.  Still, near the spot where George Washington and his continental army survived the brutal Revolutionary War winter of 1777-78, the increasingly ethereal 46th president will endeavour to summon the tough ghosts of America’s founding. He will deliver yet another warning about the petrifying threat which ‘MAGA extremists’ (i.e. Donald Trump supporters) pose to the soul of the nation.

Wednesday

Freddy Gray

Is America heading towards Civil War?

52 min listen

Freddy Gray speaks to classicist, military historian and author Victor Davis Hanson.  In an end of year review, they talk about antisemitism in the US today, the battle between right and left since 2016, and a potential future Trump presidency.

Freddy Gray

The lawfare against Donald Trump is increasingly farcical

Does kicking a popular candidate off the electoral ballot protect democracy? Or is that in fact deeply anti-democratic?  These are the questions that many Americans are pondering today after Colorado’s Supreme Court voted four to three to block Donald Trump from running in its state in the election next year, citing the insurrection clause in the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution.  The ruling is a clear attempt to establish that Trump, by ‘inciting an insurrection’ on January 6, is persona non grata in American elections The court’s decision refers only to Colorado’s primary on March 5. But, if upheld, the ruling would almost certainly apply to the presidential election on November 5.

Monday

Freddy Gray

Nikki Haley’s popularity is probably because of media desperation

Nikki Haley is now the favourite ‘not Donald Trump’ candidate in the race for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. The former Ambassador to the United Nations has been making a big push among Republicans in New Hampshire ahead of the state’s primary vote on 23 January. And her efforts seem to be paying off.  A new CBS polls from New Hampshire puts Haley on 29 per cent, behind Donald Trump on 44 per cent, with flailing Ron DeSantis a distant third on 11 per cent. The survey suggests Haley making inroads among New Hampshire’s more moderate voters thanks to her less right-wing positions on issues such as abortion and because she is seen as the candidate least similar to Trump in terms of personality.

Friday

Freddy Gray

Is an impeachment inquiry good for Biden?

25 min listen

The House of Representatives has voted to open an impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden, after three Republican-led committees alleged bribery and corruption during his time as vice-president. Could it actually be good news for Biden? Freddy speaks to Jacob Heilbrunn.

Thursday

Freddy Gray

Brace yourselves for the Great American Election Freak-Out of 2024

‘If Trump wasn’t running,’ said Joe Biden last week, ‘I’m not sure I’d be running.’ That’s a curiously uninspiring remark for an American leader seeking re-election to make. Yet ever since 2019, Biden’s pitch for the presidency has been essentially negative: if you don’t support me, you’ll get him. The trouble for Joe is that, as we approach the start of another election year, it’s beginning to look as if he can’t stop Trump. Brace yourselves, then, for the Great Election Freak-Out of 2024. For Democrats, the numbers are alarming. Biden’s job-approval rating has just dipped below 40 per cent again; in December 2019, at the same stage in his presidency, Trump was on 43 per cent.

Freddy Gray

Hunter Biden’s MAGA attack won’t throw Republicans off the scent

Hunter Biden was lost and now he’s found. That was the subtext of the president’s prodigal son’s speech outside Congress yesterday. ‘For six years, I have been the target of the unrelenting Trump attack machine shouting ‘Where’s Hunter?’,’ Hunter Biden told reporters. ‘Well, here is my answer, I am here.’ If Hunter’s statement was meant to put the Republicans on the back foot, it did not work. House Republicans James Comer and Jim Jordan vowed instead to launch contempt of congress proceedings against Hunter. Hours later, the thin Republican majority in Congress voted to formalise its impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden.

Friday

Freddy Gray

Does the legacy of Prohibition still haunt America?

21 min listen

Freddy Gray speaks to journalist and author Niko Vorobyov who wrote Dopeworld: Undercover in the secret war on drugs. 90 years after Prohibition ended, what are some of the biggest misperception about that era? And what has been the legacy of repealing the 18th amendment?

Saturday

Freddy Gray

Is Cop a busted flush?

25 min listen

World leaders are in Dubai this weekend to discuss climate change, but are these Cop summits pointless? Joe Biden isn’t attending this year’s get together, allegedly because he’s focusing on the war between Israel and Hamas. Meanwhile, there have been reports that the Emiratis are using the convening power of the summit to sign new oil contracts. Freddy Gray speaks to author and journalist Robert Bryce about whether Cop is a busted flush.

Friday

Freddy Gray

Ron DeSantis just isn’t presidential material

Sans Trump, the Republican presidential debates of 2023 have mostly been piddling contests in a shallow pool. We’ve seen nasty insults — most aimed at or directed by Vivek Ramaswamy — and that’s fun to watch. But you can catch those bits on social media and the rest hasn’t been worth tuning in for. Maybe the problem isn’t just the lack of the Big Orange on stage. Maybe it’s just that the TV debate format doesn’t really work in the internet age. It’s never a battle of compelling ideas. It’s a clash of off-putting egos, each looking to land the big viral moment. DeSantis is just hard to like: he lacks Trump’s sense of humour. He’s just too serious in a time when all everyone wants is online LOLs Take last night’s experiment on Fox News.

Thursday

Freddy Gray

Did Israel-Palestine protests push Geert Wilders’s election victory?

Geert Wilders’s victory is another slap-in-the-face moment for the European Union. The complexities of Dutch democracy may mean that he struggles to form a strong government. But his victory, which seemed impossible just a few weeks ago, reminds us that, whether we like it or not, anti-immigration politics is the most potent force in 21st century western democracies. It also raises interesting questions about how the Israel-Palestine war may be influencing elections far outside the Holy Land.There are of course many factors behind Wilders’s latest ascent — his ‘Nexit’ position against the European Union, his Freedom alliance with Dutch farmers against the eco-left, and his broader objections to the Green agenda all contributed.

Wednesday

Freddy Gray

Have we seen the last of Mitt Romney?

Freddy Gray talks to McKay Coppins, author of the New York Times bestselling book 'Romney: A Reckoning'. Romney has announced he will not seek reelection in 2024. What next for the 'never-Trumper', could he support the creation of a new centrist party? And how does he feel about the significant losses in his career?

Saturday

Thursday

Freddy Gray

The 2024 veep show has already started

Vice presidents are meant to be dependable – and in a funny way Kamala Harris is exactly that. Joe Biden knows that, no matter how bad his poll numbers, hers will be worse: she’s the most unpopular vice president since polling began, according to one recent survey. Biden can afford to be pitifully vague in public partly because she is so painfully annoying. He loses his thread; she loses the plot.  That’s one of the reasons why, for all the alarm in Washington circles about the Commander-in-Chief’s ‘job performance’ and the distinct possibility that he might lose to Donald Trump next year, the Biden-Harris ticket seems locked in place for 2024. Why would Biden nominate someone else when Harris is so reliably unthreatening?

Wednesday

Freddy Gray

‘The party of abortion’ is winning

Not so long ago, Republicans called Democrats the ‘party of abortion’ as an insult, or a pre-election attack line. Now, it is the Republicans, as the party against abortion, who are losing. This is a grim reality for Americans who believe that the unborn deserve protection.    Since Dobbs, in elections where abortion is on the ballot, the party of abortion keeps winning Since June last year, when the Supreme Court ruled on Dobbs, overturning the right to an abortion under Roe vs Wade and returning the issue back to state legislatures, the Democrats have won over and over in elections all over America by campaigning to ‘preserve access’, as they like to say, to abortion services.

Tuesday