Matt Purple is the online editor of The Spectator's World edition
From our UK edition
When I first heard Donald Trump threaten North Korea with “fire and fury,” I immediately despaired—because I’m sick and tired of hackneyed Game of Thrones references. Amongst American pundits, mentioning the hit show has become a desperate way of showing off one’s knowledge of popular culture. To that end, Steve Bannon isn’t Rasputin or Jean-Paul Marat; he’s
From our UK edition
Imagine the gale-force political winds that it takes to make Donald Trump do something he doesn’t want to do. Yet that’s what happened earlier this week when the president grudgingly approved a new suite of sanctions on Russia passed overwhelmingly by both houses of Congress. That he signed the bill in private signalled his extreme
From our UK edition
How are things in your country? In mine, we’ve spent the last week and a half being governed by a mid-aughts buddy comedy named ‘Donald and The Mooch’. That latter sobriquet belongs to Anthony Scaramucci, Donald Trump’s erstwhile PR man who went on a 10-day profanity-laden bender across Washington proper before even the President realised
From our UK edition
I’m not sure how it is with the BBC and Sky, but here in the United States the news channels prefer to cover a few stories obsessively rather than many stories thoroughly. Things have become even worse since Donald Trump was inaugurated, as that already-myopic keyhole view has narrowed into a monomaniacal focus on Russia. MSNBC
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Am I the only one who was hoping Donald Trump would skip the State of the Union address? The annual harangue to Congress, vernal solstice on America’s civic calendar, is provided for in Article II of our Constitution, which requires the president ‘from time to time’ to ‘give to the Congress Information of the State
From our UK edition
Well there you have it. After almost two weeks of braying and spluttering about Donald Trump’s immigration plan, it turns out the public supports the proposed visa ban after all. Here in the United States, a poll by Morning Consult and Politico last week revealed that 55 per cent of voters back Trump’s executive order, while only 38 per cent oppose it.
From our UK edition
Among Donald Trump’s many neologisms is the ‘What the hell is going on’ evidentiary standard. It was introduced by Trump during his presidential campaign as his biggest dare yet: ‘a complete and total shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on’. A high
From our UK edition
Of all the specimens in the Donald Trump menagerie—Charming Trump, Vicious Trump, Soapbox Trump—Subdued Trump may be my least favorite. It is true that the restraint my president showed during his press conference with Theresa May is in both our countries’ interests, but it is also uncomfortably artificial, like watching a space alien trying to
From our UK edition
Washington, D.C. is a police state even in good times. Unique in the land of the free, only there do you find officers casually toting assault rifles outside of Union Station as though Amtrak has just staged a coup within, or vast swaths of road abruptly shut down because the secretary of agriculture has decided
