Freddy Gray

If you have heard of Alexander Nix, you probably think he’s a villain. He is the former head of Cambridge Analytica, the data analytics company that helped Donald Trump win the presidential election. Nix and his colleagues have been accused of all sorts of other dastardly deeds: conniving with the Kremlin to hack democracy, ‘dark messaging’ people with racist ads on Facebook in the run-up to Brexit, and more and worse. Nix lost his job after a Channel 4 investigation into Cambridge Analytica in March last year — the exposé won a Bafta last weekend. By May, Cambridge Analytica and its parent company SCL had gone into administration, and Nix had been widely condemned as a Machiavellian crook. A year has passed, and Nix is ready to talk.

Ah Biden, Sleepy Joe, the gaffe machine from Scranton, Penn. He’s familiar to everyone, but an unknown quantity as a presidential candidate for 2020. Yes, he has failed before, twice. Yes, he’s doddery. But he keeps coming top in the polls and we keep being told that President Trump fears him the most. One thing is certain, however: for as long as Biden’s campaign goes on, he’ll boob and boob and boob again. His ability to say something stupid is mind-boggling. And in a perverse way, it is one of his strengths as a candidate. His near-senility makes him strangely memorable. Recall the Summer of Trump in 2015, when the Donald blew up the news cycle at least once a day with some outrageous remark?

One doubts very much that Donald Trump knows who Jeremy Corbyn is. So the Labour Party leader’s decision to ‘snub’ the US President on his state visit to the UK in June won't rupture the special relationship. However, it is quite rude. 'Theresa May should not be rolling out the red carpet for a state visit to honour a President who rips up international treaties, backs climate change denial, and uses racist and misogynistic rhetoric,’ said Corbyn, as he confirmed that he would not attend the state banquet for the Commander-in-Chief of Britain’s greatest ally.   Corbyn’s stand is hardly a shock. He has promised before that, as Prime Minister, he would not invite Trump to Britain’s shores.

For so long, Democrats thought that the Mueller investigation would bring down President Donald Trump. The truth could be the opposite: without the Mueller investigation, President Trump is sunk. For two years, all that FAKE NEWS, as he so often called the allegations of collusion with Russia on Twitter, was the BEST NEWS Trump could have hoped for. The whole story was such obvious elite media madness that it induced mass sympathy towards him among the saner public. Trump knew that. Hence all the tweeting. For two years, Trump could make out that he would have already Made America Great Again were it not for the establishment collusion WITCH HUNT, and most people would say he had a point. Take away Mueller, and the heavy impeachment talk, and support for Trump starts to vanish.

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.