Freddy Gray

I’m delighted to announce that Amber Athey is The Spectator’s new Washington editor, joining us from the Daily Caller next month. We’re thrilled to have her on board. Amber is a highly talented and accomplished young journalist and a very gifted writer. She’s been an excellent White House Correspondent for the Caller, where she’s broken countless great stories and regularly questioned the president, Mike Pompeo, Steve Mnuchin and other officials. She has already written some excellent stuff for us and she’ll be invaluable in giving The Spectator a presence in DC. The Spectator’s US edition goes from strength to strength. We are already on to our fifth print edition of the monthly magazine and we feel we are getting better and better.

Just four months ago, Elizabeth Warren seemed poised to storm the Democratic nomination. In the first days of October, she briefly eclipsed Joe Biden atop the polls. Her supposed rival on the left, Bernie Sanders, had just suffered a heart attack. His candidacy appeared to be fading. Suddenly, Warren was all the rage: she was a woman, which matters a lot to the Democratic media. She talked like a radical leftie, but she didn’t frighten the establishment horses in the way Bernie did. The bookmakers made her strong favorite to win: everybody assumed Warren would hoover up Sanders’s votes as his presidential aspirations vanished once again. Well, the opposite has happened. Bernie Sanders’s campaign has ended up devouring Warren’s.

‘We are not looking to start a war with Iran,’ said defense secretary Mark Esper today. ‘We are looking to finish one.’ Iran just replied by firing off at least a dozen missiles at American targets in Iraq in an effort supposedly dubbed Operation Martyr Soleimani. It doesn’t mean all out war yet — but all the Trump administration’s talk about ‘de-escalating’ the situation sounds like hot air. As I write, the details of Iran’s retaliation are unclear — we don’t know if the strikes were aimed at American troops or infrastructure. Is it a face-saving measure? A decoy? Why did Iran attack Erbil and Al-Asad, rather than more obvious US bases? Have the fortified American defenses at these bases worked?

Democrats like to make out that Donald Trump is terrified of the impeachment juggernaut they are driving at his head. The president is dissembling on Twitter, they say, because he’s in deep trouble. He knows he’s cornered. He’s flailing. He’s spooked. Resistance to the resistance is futile. The problem is, Trump — and, even more so, his online persona @realDonaldTrump — seems to be relishing the impeachment saga. He does his phony melancholy routine, in which he says how sad it is because we should all be focusing on his many achievements. Don’t believe it. He is simultaneously courting the whole Ukraine brouhaha, dragging it out himself. Why else would he have live-tweeted it last week?

This week, a malign foreign actor invaded the British media, spreading disinformation and seeking to meddle in the general election. A malevolent force exploiting our democracy to advance its own interests. That’s right, Hillary Clinton has been in London. She has another book to promote, The Book of Gutsy Women, and she’s again talking about male authoritarian-ism, why Britain needs to be ‘forward-looking’ (i.e. not leave the European Union), and the menace of Russia. It doesn’t take an intelligence expert to decode her message: ‘I didn’t win in 2016 and I’m still livid.

Comey. Cohen. Strzok. Page. Blasey Ford. Kavanaugh. Mueller. Taylor and Kent. Are you fed up yet? It sometimes feels as if the last three years in politics have consisted of a series of show testimonies or hearings. All have been furiously hyped by the media. All have proved tedious, the possible exceptions being Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh. Those became fascinating in a disturbing way. The rest have just been dull. Governmental enquiries and hearings generally are. Idiots on Twitter LOL and snark at the silly ‘popcorn’ moments. But nobody really cares. We all move on and look ahead the next ‘blockbuster’ moment, which never materializes. It’s odd. We are told, disapprovingly, by anti-Trump voices that this is the reality TV presidency.

Is President Donald Trump spooked? The Democrats just pushed through a Halloween raft of impeachment rules. Nancy Pelosi's smile has begun to break through the plastic on her face. This is just the first formal vote: the first of many. Everybody voted along party lines, except for two Democratic congressmen, Rep. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey and Rep. Collin Peterson of Minnesota. The Republicans all voted against the impeachment measures – suggesting that suspiciously timed reports of a GOP rebellion against Trump are way off the mark. Not in the House, anyway. Brace yourselves for a tsunami of political effluence from Washington, DC. Democrats will say the Americans deserve to know the truth: democracy demands it. The Republicans will call it a Kafkaesque assault on democracy.

We should be bored by now — perhaps we are. Certainly, the anger against Donald Trump’s tweets isn’t quite as vociferous as before. We are used to @realdonaldtrump now. Three years in, who cares if he sounds presidential? But the media outrage machine still limbers up, on demand, at every provocation. Today’s doozy: Trump compared the Democratic attempts to impeach him over Ukraine to a ‘lynching’. Sure enough, the media explainers did their job. Lynching, we are told by every wired copy monkey who has to file 600 words to their line editor, is a ‘racially charged/loaded term’ that refers to — here I quote the BBC — ‘historic extrajudicial executions by white mobs mainly against African Americans.

How do you know Elizabeth Warren is the Democratic front-runner? Well, the polls give you a clue. But the more significant evidence is that the other presidential candidates went for her at the CNN debate last night. When they turn on you like that, it means you are winning. Warren was attacked by various candidates — by Pete Buttigieg and by Amy Klobuchar most effectively. She wobbled a bit, especially on her vague Medicare plans, but she didn’t falter. It’s clear that she isn’t the devastatingly brilliant candidate establishment progressives so want her to be. She sounds a bit hurt and feeble when attacked: how will she cope with 2020?