Freddy Gray

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?

Jez he did! Jeremy Corbyn has just surprised absolutely nobody by calling Prime Minister Boris Johnson ‘Britain's Trump.’ He labelled Boris a ‘fake populist’ and a ‘phoney outsider.’ No doubt Labour speechwriters think this is a great attack line ahead of a general election.  But it might backfire – for two reasons. First, Trump is not nearly as toxic in Britain as everybody in political circles believes. Secondly, for Labour voters, the uncomfortable truth is that the British equivalent of Trump is not Boris, as everyone says. It’s Jeremy Corbyn.  Corbyn, 70, and Trump, 73, have far more in common than Boris and Trump. Jeremy and Donald are both anti-establishment insurgents who have been married three times.

There is not much to say about mass shootings. The violence horrifies us, depresses us, we move on — on social media, this process can take a few seconds. The other media routine follows: endless, circular debates on guns are given another spin in the barrel. If the killer is white, somebody important (step up Beto O’Rourke) angrily says it is Trump’s fault. That invites anger in return. Culture wars subsume the story. Sometimes, a frightening viral video emerges, or what hacks call a ‘disturbing insight into the mind of the killer’. These excite our emotions a little longer. Deranged maniacs know that, which is why we now increasingly see their ‘manifestos’ — long pseudo-intellectual declarations of purpose — posted online.

It seems a fitting end to an ill-fated premiership. As Theresa May prepares to leave No. 10, a major quarrel erupts between her government and its most powerful ally, the United States of America. Leaked diplomatic cables show Sir Kim Darroch, the British ambassador in Washington, calling President Donald Trump ‘inept’, ‘insecure’ and ‘uniquely dysfunctional’. The funny thing is, the words in his memo are just as applicable to Theresa May’s leadership. Within days, Sir Kim resigns. But every diplomatic crisis is a political opportunity, as President Donald Trump well understands. He even spelled this out in one of his Twitter rants. ‘The good news for the wonderful United Kingdom is that they will soon have a new Prime Minister.

If there were any doubt that the Mail on Sunday’s leaked British diplomatic cables scoop was not a dramatic story, Donald Trump has just removed it. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1148298497189392384 I can’t really believe that Trump’s skin is so thin. Plenty more have said plenty worse — however, ambassadors are not meant to cause such a fuss. But Trump, with his sharp instincts, can sense opportunity in the insult: the new prime minister will be keen to make amends. And, in his tweets, Trump is keen to hint towards the good news for the Special Relationship and the ‘wonderful’ UK. May and her government were indeed incapable of working with Trump.

On Friday, I had the pleasure of recording a podcast with Michael Wolff at his hotel in Mayfair. Wolff is on a tour for his book, Siege, the sequel to Fire and Fury, his mega-bestseller about the Trump presidency. We talked Trump, the Trump-Russia inquiry, media screw-ups, Steve Bannon and Boris Johnson. You can listen here: https://audioboom.com/posts/7295917-michael-wolff-the-mueller-indictment-document-sits-on-my-desk Perhaps the biggest bombshell in Siege is Wolff’s claim that Mueller laid out an indictment of the president, a long document detailing how such a move would work. Mueller’s office has denied the document’s existence. But Wolff insists he has it ‘in my hands … I tell you: it sits on my desk.

The strong favorite for the Nobel Peace Prize this year is Greta Thunberg, a girl who lectures grownups about climate change. In a sane world, the award would go to somebody who stops wars. In 2019, that somebody should be Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson. Carlson is a Fox News host, which means the smart people who give out awards will never take him seriously. In the last few weeks, however, he may have done more to advance the cause of peace than any other human on the planet. Anyone with half a brain can tell that some of President Trump’s cabinet and his advisers are itching to bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran — as the late, hawk Saint John McCain so delicately put it, to the tune of the Beach Boys’ Barbara Ann.

There is a reason Boris Johnson is avoiding the TV debates, and his name is Lynton Crosby.  Crosby is running the Johnson leadership campaign — in awkward conjunction, it seems, with Boris’s girlfriend Carrie Symonds. He is a veritable TV debatephobe. He has run the last two Tory general elections, and he ordered David Cameron and Theresa May to shy away from the TV debates.  In Crosby’s view, debate-ducking is the sensible course. He sees no upside. For frontrunners, especially, if the debate goes well, there is no real uptick in support. The only way a TV debate can influence an election is if a candidate has a massive gaffe, a viral FAIL that destroys his or her credibility. So best shunned.

Remember Betomania? It seems an age away, yet just three months ago, Beto O’Rourke was still being hailed as the Democratic messiah. There was all that gush about how his campaign in Texas inspired the country, even though he lost. There was the mad drooling over his Medium and Instagram posts. There was that appalling, emetic Vanity Fair cover through which he revealed he was running: ‘I was born to be in it.’ There was that competing rally with Trump on the Texan border, where he stood for openness as opposed to bigotry.He was cool, he was cute, he was impeccably progressive on issues such as climate change, gun control and LGBTQ rights. But he wasn’t too dangerously threateningly left to freak out the elites.