Freddy Gray

I once worked with an attractive woman who had a strange encounter with Joe Biden. As a young reporter on Capitol Hill, she got stuck in a melee of reporters shouting questions at the senator. Biden saw her plight and invited her to join him as he marched into an elevator. My former colleague was delighted: here was a rare interview opportunity. As soon as the elevator doors closed, though, Biden took out a Snickers bar and inserted the whole thing into his mouth. He then masticated heavily throughout the ascent and walked off without a word. That’s Joe Biden, the man who could well be the next president of the United States. He’s a weird dude. He may be even weirder than Donald Trump. Lots of politicians are gaffe-prone: for many, their lack of smoothness is winning.

Michael Bloomberg is not running in 2020 but he wants Donald Trump to lose, we all know that. He will spend $500 million trying to undermine the president. That’s quite an animus. But who does Bloomberg want to win? Speaking to the Bermuda Executive Forum, his favorite sort of event, the media titan didn’t endorse anyone. He moaned about the state of politics and mocked two leading contenders for the Democratic nomination, Joe Biden and Beto O’Rourke. Bloomberg said that he realized he would not be a successful presidential candidate, ‘unless I was willing to change all my views and go on what CNN called ‘an apology tour.’ And he’s too much of a man to apologize, you see.

 Washington, DC Republican strategists have long complained about how, every election, the Democrats mobilise minority groups against them. Now they’re trying to turn the tables. Right-wing social media warriors, encouraged by @realDonaldTrump, have spent months talking about ‘Blexit’: a black voter exit from the Democratic party. This week, the President and others have begun calling for a ‘Jexodus’ — a Jewish exodus — too. How Trump must delight in those clunky portmanteaus. He knows that, while black voters usually vote Democrat, they are not altogether anti-Trump. He also senses that Jewish voters, traditionally the most left--liberal people in America, are alarmed at a new Democrat tendency to bash Israel.

Tune out all the noise around Brexit, and read what Donald Trump said today: ‘I’m surprised at how badly it’s all gone from the standpoint of a negotiation,’ he told reporters at a bilateral meeting with Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar. ‘But I gave the Prime Minister my ideas on to negotiate it and I think you would have been successful. She didn’t listen to that and that’s fine, she’s got to do what she’s got to do, but I think it could have been negotiated in a different manner, frankly. I hate to see everything being ripped apart now. I don’t think another vote would be possible because it would be very unfair to the people that won … But I thought it would happen, it did happen, it’s a very tough situation.

The Democratic nomination process for 2020 is a race and Bernie Sanders should be the overwhelming favourite. He’s just announced his candidacy, and he’s the form horse, having come a close second in 2016. He won 46 per cent of elected delegates and 23 states. He smashed all sorts of fundraising records. He has a huge movement behind him, something which none of the other announced Democratic candidates have. Somehow, by hook and crook, the Clinton machine scuppered his candidacy last time. But the Clinton machine is nearly destroyed. Who can stop him now? Bernie has consistently polled as the most popular politician in America. He’s a social-media phenomenon who probably doesn’t know what Instagram is.

It will be a delicious irony when the 2020 Democratic nominee ends up being another rich white dude. Picture the scene in July next year, at the party’s National Convention in Milwaukee. After all the talk of a new, rich diversity, after all the noisy women candidates have canceled each other, after Cory Booker’s self-righteousness sets itself on fire, and after the superdelegates figured out another way to block Bernie Sanders, the Democrats have done the dumb thing and plumped for Beto O’Rourke. He gives a tiresome, Obama-lite oration on the need to put history back on track and rediscover a spirit of open-borderness. He gives the second half of the speech in Spanish. The media sings his praises.

Trump caved, Trump caved, Trump caved. That’s the incantation, and if you repeat it long enough, the words begin to feel right. The president’s capitulation was ‘total’, say the media heads. He has been ‘humiliated.’ Nancy Pelosi ‘took him to the cleaners’ and ‘kicked his behind.’ This, apparently, qualifies as high-level political analysis. The trouble is, it isn’t true. Trump didn’t cave. He backed off. He may have folded, temporarily, but what journalists and many Democrats struggle to understand is that elections are not won and lost in news cycles. The irony is that many of Trump’s opponents accuse him of having ADD, of being a Twitter addict who watches too much 24-hour rolling news.

Government shutdown stories aren’t sexy, everyone can see that. Nevertheless, it is curious that the journalists who most loathe Trump are so willing to distract their audiences from a political crisis which polls show is hurting the President, in order to focus again on the exhausting Russia conspiracy, which isn’t. This weekend, we saw another flurry of noisy Trump-Russia scoops. These latest feel thinner than usual. Still, they dominated the airwaves and Twitter feeds of media VIPs. On Friday, the New York Times related that the FBI ‘became so concerned’ about Trump’s firing of FBI director James B. Comey that they began investigating whether the President was indeed working for Russia.