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It’s hard not to feel for François Fillon, the French presidential hopeful whose career is now imploding. He looked destined for the Élysée Palace — until Le Canard Enchainé, the French equivalent of Private Eye, broke the story about him paying his British wife too much to pretend to be his assistant. Sensible, small c conservative, Catholic France had
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America’s new visa policies are shocking, everyone agrees on that. Even Donald Trump’s administration calls its US entry vetting ‘extreme’. But before everyone calls Trump a fascist again, before everyone reaches once more for the Hitler and the Nazis comparisons, consider this: Trump’s ‘America First’ nationalism is defensive, not aggressive. It may be clumsy, it
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Well, Theresa May managed to lay on the praise towards Trump without seeming too sycophantic, which made their press conference a reasonable success. May congratulated Trump on his ‘stunning’ electoral victory while describing Britain’s future as ‘open to the world’. May seems to be presenting herself as a reassuring ‘third way’ leader between the frightening
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On Wednesday afternoon I went to the British embassy in Washington for ‘a tea and champagne reception’ to mark the inauguration of President Trump. Like most institutions, the embassy has struggled to come to terms with the Donald. We all know (thanks to Twitter) that Trump wants Nigel Farage to be the UK representative in
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He could be the greatest disaster ever to befall America. He could go down as the man that Made America Great Again. What’s certain is that Donald Trump is the most radical US president for centuries. Trump’s inaugural speech was predictable — in the sense that we have heard Trump say it all before. In
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Washington, D.C. I just witnessed an anti-Donald Trump protest, and it was nasty. About an hour ago, I looked out the window on the corner of 13th and Massachusetts Avenue and saw a crowd of roughly 300 people — most of them dressed in black and wearing bandanas and hoods — moving quickly through the
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Washington, D.C. Nigel Farage’s 2016 celebration of Nigel Farage’s 2016 is a party that might never stop. And it is a jolly affair. Yesterday, at the Hay-Adams Hotel, in Washington, DC, Nigel and his pals — let’s call them the champagne populists — had a US election bash. Nigel stood up to do his usual
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Freddy Gray, Paul Wood and Kate Andrews discuss Trump’s arrival at the White House: As president, Barack Obama was too cool for the special relationship. The romantic bond between the United States and Great Britain, which always makes Churchill fans go all soggy-eyed, left him cold. Obama was more interested in globalism, ‘pivoting’ to
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Donald Trump will not find satisfaction as the 45th President of the United States of America. He really wants to be king. Just look at the gilded-bling madness of his penthouse on the 66th floor of Trump Tower in Manhattan, or the sprawling exuberance of his holiday palace in Mar-a-Lago, Florida: Trump aspires to be
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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?
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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
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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
