31 min listen
Freddy Gray is joined by political operator and consultant Roger Stone, a Floridian, to discuss Trump’s cabinet appointees. Susie Wiles, Marco Rubio, Matt Gaetz are all part of Trump’s new team – what’s behind Florida’s growing influence within the Republican Party?
Of all Donald Trump’s cabinet appointments this week, his selection of Robert F. Kennedy Jr to lead the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is in some ways the least surprising. Yet it could prove the most controversial. RFK Jr’s mistrust of Big Pharma and Big Food resonates widely If confirmed, RFK Jr will oversee a sprawling federal agency of some 80,000 employees. HHS shapes which drugs Americans can access, the food they consume, and directs billions of dollars into medical research. Given Kennedy’s radical views on the downsides of processed foods, certain vaccines and widely prescribed medicines, his leadership could place a Republican administration in direct conflict with
28 min listen
As Donald Trump selects his new cabinet, Elon Musk has been chosen to head up the new efficiency department. Douglas Murray, Spectator columnist, joins Americano host Freddy Gray to discuss. How will their relationship shape Trump’s presidency? What will Musk’s ownership of X, formerly Twitter, mean for free speech? And will their newfound friendship last the stretch of Donald Trump’s second term?
On 13 July this year, an assassin’s bullet grazed the ear of Donald Trump as he turned his head on stage in Butler, Pennsylvania. The whole world saw it and his response: ‘Fight, fight, fight.’ For Elon Musk, this was not just a news event but a galvanising and clarifying moment. He immediately posted a video of the shooting to X and wrote: ‘I fully endorse President Trump and hope for his rapid recovery.’ Musk is different from most people. For him, going all-in really means going all-in. When Trump returned to Butler last month, he was joined on stage by the billionaire. Musk is now one of the most
24 min listen
Freddy Gray is joined by Todd Bensman, journalist and fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies. They discuss the border crisis that Trump will inherit from the Democrats, and whether he can do anything to solve it.
14 min listen
As Trump announces the appointment of Elon Musk to tackle US government efficiency, James Heale speaks to Katy Balls and editor Michael Gove about the dynamics of Labour’s relationship with the tech billionaire. Musk had a public spat with Labour figures over the UK summer riots, the Center for Countering Digital Hate – co-founded by Starmer’s Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney – is facing a congressional investigation, and some Labour figures are even calling on the party to quit X/Twitter. Should Musk’s closeness to president-elect Trump worry the Labour government? But first, the team discuss Health Secretary Wes Streeting’s proposed NHS changes, and Liberal Democrat attacks on Labour’s National Insurance
A huge surge of support from the Latino community helped Donald Trump to victory in the US election. I could never envision myself voting for Donald Trump. But my aunt in New York, who became a citizen many years ago did just that: last week she cast a ballot for the Republican candidate. So why did she, and so many other Latinos, turn to Trump? There has been an outpouring of racism and xenophobia from liberal circles aimed at the Latino community for choosing to back Trump. Jokes about mass deportation and accusations of how ignorant, uneducated or misogynist the community is for voting Republican are thriving. But my aunt isn’t a stupid woman who doesn’t know
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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?
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
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
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
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.
‘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
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