America

Monday

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

How did pollsters get Trump’s victory so wrong?

Was Donald Trump’s win unexpected? Not if you followed the betting markets, which had Trump at a two-thirds chance of winning days out from the election. The polls, on the other hand, told a different story. Analysis of polls carried out in 15 competitive states in the three weeks before last Tuesday’s election shows that whatever the method of polling used, there was a clear and consistent bias in favour of the Democrats. Pollsters spent an estimated half a billion dollars (£388 million) on this election, but most polling methods were still biased towards Kamala Harris by around three percentage points. One method – recruiting participants by mail – managed

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Why Farage should – and shouldn’t – be UK ambassador to Trump

It is very kind of Nigel Farage to offer his services as a kind of intermediary between our government and the new American president. Keir Starmer certainly needs one, because protest though he might, nobody believes the line that Donald Trump is hugely impressed with the Labour government or that JD Vance has a new best friend in the magnificently dim David Lammy. I fear that Farage’s yearning to be in Washington DC rather than the agreeable Thames-side resort of Clacton-on-Sea spells trouble for Reform For eight years, Labour has behaved abominably towards Trump, flinging at him every conceivable insult, a number of its MPs demanding he not be allowed

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Peanut the squirrel shows Elon Musk is wrong about the mainstream media

Was it Peanut wot won it? One of the stranger and more incendiary aspects of the run-up to the recent US election was a Twitter/ X howl-round about Peanut the squirrel. The house where Peanut lived was raided, and this blameless rescue-rodent euthanised, after a complaint was apparently filed to a government agency by a neighbour. And Peanut’s story went super-viral.  The shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later approach to ‘news’ can leave any or all of us riddled with bullets. Just ask Peanut Rather than seeing it as a local hard-luck story, many social media users supposed this to be a paradigmatic instance of what was at stake in the election. This wasn’t human

Sunday

David Christopher Kaufman

Trump’s plan to make America safe again

Donald Trump’s critics like to paint his supporters as hardcore right-wingers. The truth is rather plainer: many of those who voted for Trump are refugees from the conservative establishment desperate for a leader unafraid to speak their truth.  We Americans are scared. Literally  Shamed by the elites, mocked for their beliefs – sidelined by rising ‘wokeness’ and DEI-culture for being white or straight or male – they saw in Trump a man-of-action sympathetic to their back-to-basics worldview. Tired of being told what to say and how to feel, Trump’s supporters were ready to reclaim their voices in the safest space possible: the ballot box. The anti-elitist populism that swept Trump

Matthew Lynn

Elon Musk’s support for Donald Trump is a masterstroke

Elon Musk contributed huge sums of money. He campaigned relentlessly. And his social media network X provided a platform for the candidate. Of all the architects of Donald Trump’s return to the White House this week, arguably none was more influential than Musk, and certainly none were playing for such high stakes. If he had lost, the X owner would have faced a furious regulatory backlash. As it happens, however, the election has been a triumph for Musk – and will make him more powerful than ever. Even from this side of the pond, it was hard to escape Musk’s presence during the US election. The entrepreneur behind Tesla and

Saturday

Paul Wood

Paul Wood, Sean Thomas, Imogen Yates, Books of the Year II, and Alan Steadman

30 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Paul Wood analyses what a Trump victory could mean for the Middle East (1:16); Sean Thomas gets a glimpse of a childless future while travelling in South Korea (8:39); in search of herself, Imogen Yates takes part in ‘ecstatic dance’ (15:11); a second selection of our books of the year from Peter Parker, Daniel Swift, Andrea Wulf, Claire Lowdon, and Sara Wheeler (20:30); and notes on the speaking clock from the voice himself, Alan Steadman (25:26).  Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Friday

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Will Trump make good on his election promises?

32 min listen

Kate Andrews, standing in for Freddy Gray is joined by Nick Gillespie, host of The Reason Interview and Freddy Gray himself. They discuss whether Trump 2.0 could be different in his final time in office. Will he ‘drain the swamp’? And will the Democrats learn the lessons from their election loss?

Lara Brown

Labour must learn from Kamala Harris’s transgender muddle

Donald Trump’s remarkable election victory has been rightly attributed to the long shadow of inflation combined with mass illegal immigration across the southern border. While these factors dominated the national swing, an under-discussed element of the Republican campaign was the relentless targeting of voters in swing states with paid advertising linking Kamala Harris to radical trans ideology. Why was this – and what lessons should be drawn for Labour in the UK? The ads were simple. Their tagline: ‘Kamala Harris is for they/them. President Trump is for you.’ The ads were simple. Their tagline: ‘Kamala Harris is for they/them. President Trump is for you.’ They showed clips of her, from

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

Why did so many Christians vote for Trump?

It’s hard to know what to say about Donald Trump. Well, maybe it’s easy enough if you’re a fan, or if you are an opponent who’s very sure that the liberal case just needs to be reiterated more forcefully. But for the rest of us it’s difficult. It’s a special sort of difficulty, a difficulty of tone. As a liberal Christian, my main response is to be aghast that most Christians voted for him – the ratio was almost two-to-one. Why don’t these people have more respect for liberal democracy, and common decency, I am tempted to ask. Why don’t they have more fear of crude bullying and authoritarianism?  The

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Trump’s tariff plans don’t have to spell bad news for Britain

On the face of it, Donald Trump’s threat to impose general import tariffs of 10 to 20 per cent on all goods – and much higher levies on those from China – is bad news for Britain, the US and the world. That protectionism makes us poorer is a lesson which seems to have to be re-learned every generation. The last time America was forced to learn the hard way was when George W Bush tried to protect the US steel industry with punitive tariffs on imports of steel in 2002. A US government review later concluded that the tariffs had cost 200,000 jobs in US by increasing the prices

Terry Barnes

Could Kevin Rudd’s Trump tweets cost him his career?

If British Labour ministers and officials find dealing with President Donald Trump 2.0 a formidable challenge, their Australian Labor cousins may find the task of working with a president with an elephantine memory for slights even more daunting. As ministers – including Foreign Secretary David Lammy – are rediscovering to their chagrin, you can delete embarrassing social media posts, but they never disappear. That’s something that may cost former Australian prime minister, and now Australia’s ambassador to the United States, Kevin Rudd, his diplomatic career. Rudd has been posted to Washington for the best part of two years as current Labor prime minister Anthony Albanese’s envoy to the Biden administration.

Jim Lawley

Trump’s triumph has infuriated the Spanish left

‘Everybody’s lost but me,’ mutters a teenage Indiana Jones emerging from a cave in the middle of the desert to find that the boy scouts with whom he arrived have now disappeared without trace. Spain’s left-wing prime minister might be excused for thinking much the same. Relentlessly upbeat about the benefits of immigration, Pedro Sánchez now finds himself more or less alone in the European Union. And just when he was hoping that fellow progressive Kamala Harris would win the US election, he finds instead that he’s going to have to contend with Donald Trump.  ‘We will work on our strategic bilateral relations and a strong transatlantic partnership,’ Sánchez said, presumably

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

Kamala Harris and the death of the celebrity endorsement

Poor old Bruce Springsteen. The legendary rocker bet the farm on an endorsement of Kamala Harris and may well have alienated about half his audience as a result. The ‘Boss’ who had built his career on empathising with the hard-grafting, blue-collar, Bud-swilling ‘deplorables’ with his anthems of white working-class alienation, recorded a folksy recommendation from the counter of a (real or staged – who knows?) diner. ‘Freedom, social justice, equal opportunity, the right to love who you want’ are on the ballot, pleaded Springsteen, adding that Trump’s ‘disdain for the constitution’ should disqualify him from office. Harrison Ford followed suit in two ads run just before polling day. The Star

Thursday

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

Trump’s comeback, Labour’s rural divide, and World of Warcraft

37 min listen

This week: King of the Hill You can’t ignore what could be the political comeback of the century: Donald Trump’s remarkable win in this week’s US election. The magazine this week carries analysis about why Trump won, and why the Democrats lost, from Freddy Gray, Niall Ferguson and Yascha Mounk, amongst others. To make sense of how Trump became only the second President in history to win non-consecutive terms, we’re joined by the journalist Jacqueline Sweet and Cliff Young, president of polling at Ipsos (00:58). Next: is Labour blind to rural communities? The changes to inheritance tax for farmers are one of the measures from Labour’s budget that has attracted the

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Are we about to see Trump unleashed?

32 min listen

Kamala Harris has delivered her concession speech, signalling the start of the Democrat post-mortem. Donald Trump has secured a total victory, the kind which gives him a mandate to make some pretty radical reforms. Americano guest host Kate Andrews is joined by Jacob Heilbrunn, editor of The National Interest, to discuss what a second Trump term will look like: from domestic to foreign policy. And what about the Democrats? Where do they go from here? 

David Christopher Kaufman

I voted for Kamala Harris – but I’m not surprised she lost

In the end, I voted for Kamala Harris, but I always knew she was destined to lose. After all, if Harris was having trouble convincing me – a mixed-race gay Northern Californian – to get behind her, her chances were worrisomely slim. And the Harris campaign – rushed and reckless, relying on the same tired playbook that failed Hillary Clinton in 2016 – appears to have lost the vast American middle in spectacular fashion. Harris had plenty more to offer – if only she hadn’t been so afraid to let it loose The biggest problem for Harris is that she wasted every opportunity to make herself seem interesting. Here is

Daniel DePetris

What does Trump’s win mean for America’s allies – and its enemies?

When Donald Trump won his first-ever election in 2016, the world woke up the next morning in a collective state of shock and disbelief. Washington’s allies in Europe were caught completely unprepared; all of a sudden, they had to contend with a leader who relished needling them for all kinds of sins, real and perceived. America’s allies like Japan and South Korea, whose defence policies depend almost entirely on a stable alliance with the United States, were now forced to deal with a man who threatened to use those alliances as leverage to extract greater defence spending in Tokyo and Seoul. Latin America didn’t know what to believe, and frankly

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

American titan: inside Donald Trump’s remarkable political comeback

Palm Beach, Florida Donald Trump’s bid to take back the White House has been triumphant. It is a decisive victory and even Trump’s bitterest enemies should recognise him for what he is: an American titan, the most extraordinary politician of our time. He has just pulled off arguably the biggest comeback in US history – a feat greater even than Richard Nixon’s Lazarus-like return in 1968. To understand the scale of his victory, recall how weakly he began. On 15 November 2022, when Trump launched his now-triumphant bid to regain the presidency, he did not seem himself. His formal campaign announcement, delivered in the ballroom of his club in Mar-a-Lago,

Wednesday

Matt McDonald

Kamala Harris finally concedes defeat

US Vice President Kamala Harris finally took the stage at her alma mater, Washington, DC’s Howard University – a day later than anticipated, to deliver a 12-minute concession speech. She walked out at 4:24 p.m. ET Wednesday, somewhat ironically, to the chorus of Beyoncé’s ‘Freedom’: Freedom, freedom, I can’t loseFreedom I can’t lose ‘The outcome of this election is not what we wanted, not what we fought for, not what we voted for – but hear me when I say that the light of America’s promise will always burn bright as long as we never give up and as long as we keep fighting’, Harris said. She added: ‘I am

Svitlana Morenets Svitlana Morenets

Ukrainians brace for Trump’s return

‘Donald Trump is like the light at the end of the tunnel’, an American told me last night at the only Washington DC bar throwing a pro-Trump election party. For many Ukrainians, though, he’s more like the end itself. Trump has called himself ‘good friends’ with Vladimir Putin. He said ‘Ukraine no longer exists’ and that ‘even the worst deal [with Russia] would be better than what is now’. Ukrainians got the hint and hoped for a Kamala Harris’s victory. But Americans have chosen, and now Kyiv will bend over backwards, trying to convince its biggest military backer not to abandon Ukraine.  Trump has called himself ‘good friends’ with Vladimir