Freddy Gray is deputy editor of The Spectator
Donald Trump hasn’t given a press conference for 167 days, but this was some comeback appearance. The President-elect came out swinging, to put it mildly. Responding to sensational reports that Russian intelligence might have kompromat – a comprising piece of evidence, possibly a sex tape involving ‘golden showers’ – against him, Trump was angry, full of
It’s a shame that protocol, being protocol, prevents Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson from meeting President-elect Donald Trump during his trip to Washington. Boris can’t even meet Rex Tillerson, the man Trump has chosen as his Secretary of State, until Tillerson is confirmed by the senate. A Trump-Johnson encounter would be a meeting of considerable media
The ‘price of non-intervention’ is becoming one of those awful Westminster clichés. It is a phrase which, we can be sure, will be used to justify another half-cocked and disastrous military intervention in the not-too-distant future. There is growing consensus among the political class that, had wicked Ed Miliband not scuppered brave David Cameron and George Osborne’s
The choosing of Exxon mobil CEO Rex Tillerson as America’s next Secretary of State – which is expected to be confirmed today — seems a typical Donald Trump move: crass, profoundly annoying to the president-elect’s enemies, yet at the same time perhaps very clever. The political class is, naturally, aghast: a corporate titan in charge of
It might be better for everyone if, in the spirit of Yuletide Fake News, we all pretended that Donald Trump’s Twitter account was a spoof, or at least an alter of the man’s many egos. The President-elect, for one, doesn’t take his pronouncements on Twitter too seriously. Or does he? It’s safe to say that there is a
It is odd when someone you know becomes a world-famous Nazi. You may not recognise the name Richard Spencer, but my bet is you soon will. He’s an American white-power activist who is often billed as the inventor of the ‘alt-right’. In the age of Trump, when everyone is panicking about the rise of extremism
Yesterday was another mad day in Trumpland — or America, as it used to be called. The president-elect started the morning off by promising, somewhat mystically on Twitter, that ‘Great meetings will take place today at Trump Tower concerning the formation of the people who will run our government for the next 8 years’. But the
Is Donald Trump about to do the impossible? No, I don’t mean become President of the United States. That’s in the bag. I’m asking if he is going to Make Journalism Great Again? He has, as we all know, humiliated the media. The media which created him, then tried and failed to destroy him. Thousands
Donald J. Trump always keeps everyone guessing. Is the president-elect ditching his crazy act in order to bring in a conventional Republican government? Or ditching conventional Republican government in order to bring in his crazy act? Is he bringing together the anti–politics outsiders and the Washington insiders? Or is he playing them against each other?
The news that Donald Trump has appointed Reince Priebus, the Republican National Committee Chairman, as his Chief of Staff is shocking — shockingly conventional. In his victory speech on Tuesday night, Trump made it clear that he felt he owed Priebus a lot for his campaign’s success. ‘Reince is really a star,’ he said. ‘And
Washington DC Donald J. Trump’s long, triumphant march to the White House didn’t start on 16 June 2015, when he announced his candidacy at the Trump Tower in Manhattan. It began four years ago, on 19 November 2012. On that day, days after President Barack Obama had defeated Mitt Romney, Trump filed a trademark application
Hillary Clinton may have been a woeful candidate, but she just delivered a classy defeat speech. She did what everybody thought Donald Trump wouldn’t do — accept defeat graciously. ‘Donald Trump is going to be our president,’ she said. ‘We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead.’ ‘Our responsibility as citizens is
Washington, DC Unless something crazy is happening — and of course, 2016 is the year of crazy — Hillary Clinton is going to win tonight. ‘Hillary’s got this,’ I heard a former White House staffer say this morning, with breezy confidence. ‘We had a fright last week, but it’s better now.’ That is the shared
What can you say about Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton that hasn’t been said a million times? The 2016 election has been more discussed than perhaps any other, and people are disturbingly well-informed, so bluffers might regard Tuesday night with apprehension. Never fear, though, America is still the land of opportunity as far as blagging
It’s all fixed! Julian Assange, Infowars, Russia Today, millions of Internet users, and even Trump himself are convinced that ‘the powers that be’ will ensure Hillary is the next US president. The globalists will cheat democracy to maintain the status quo. Obviously. Or as Assange put it, Trump ‘won’t be allowed to win’. But what
Forget your state-by-state polling; your analysis of the voting preferences of suburban mothers in Pennsylvania; never mind your understanding of America’s shifting demographics; your breakdowns of the Latino vote in swing states, or your perception of America’s anger issues. This election, like most elections, will be decided by personality. We all know that Donald Trump
If Hillary Clinton does somehow lose the 2016 US presidential election, FBI director James Comey might turn into one of the most hated people on earth — hated even more, perhaps, than the incoming Commander-in-Chief, Donald J Trump. Comey’s curious intervention against Mrs Clinton – in case you missed it, the FBI has announced that it is
Hillary Clinton is infinitely wiser than Donald Trump, or so we are lead to believe. You might think, then, that she and her clever campaign team would be wary of hubris. They should know better than to take victory for granted, and that excessive pride leads to a fall. Well, they don’t. Clinton may have
Donald Trump needed to win bigly, as he would put it, in Las Vegas. He didn’t, and his campaign is still a disaster. The major news line from the final presidential debate is Trump’s hint that he may not accept the election result – to which Clinton replied that he is ‘talking down democracy.’ But Trump’s
Did you think, after the second presidential TV debate last week, that democracy couldn’t sink lower? Well, think again. Tonight’s clash between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in Las Vegas — already dubbed ‘fight night’ — looks certain to mark a new low for civilised politics, and a new high for elections as trash entertainment.
