America

How rare it is to be given a second chance. That’s what the American people have handed Donald Trump. His second shot at the presidency means avoiding past mistakes, which in TrumpWorld means finally harnessing the full power of the state. Even in the last year of his first term, Trump was struggling to fill all the political appointment vacancies he had at his disposal. This was the consequence of never developing a real plan for governing that went beyond chanting ‘Drain the swamp’. Elon Musk talked down Bessent as the ‘business-as-usual choice’, but that’s what markets are looking for This time round, things are going to be different. Trump

Welcome to the United States of Disruption. From his ‘Winter White House’ in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, Donald Trump has been busy lobbing hand-grenade cabinet appointments in the direction of Washington and watching on happily as each one blows up in a variety of stunning ways. Explosiveness is the point. ‘Personnel is policy,’ Trump’s transition team like to tell reporters with a wink. What they mean is that the second administration is setting itself up to be even more radical and incendiary than the first. The outsiders are in, the insiders are out, and the old world is driving itself mad trying to figure out what’s going on. It’s a mistake to

For the past decade, Donald Trump has been the most famous and influential man on the planet. But he had too many failures and electoral defeats to his name to be able to claim he dominated a whole political era. That changed on Tuesday night. Trump will be remembered as both the 45th and the 47th President of the United States. At the time of going to press, he is very likely to win full control of Congress. He is even likely to win the popular vote – making him the first Republican to do so in 20 years. All of this will allow him to impose his will on

You can hear it already. Rising from the tents of the dejected Democrat camp comes the whimper of self-reproach. It’s all our fault. Liberalism created this monster. There’s a distinct whiff of mea culpa in the air. Nostra culpa, nostra maxima culpa for the alienation of half the American people.  Donald Trump and his mob? It’s the fault of liberals for not feeling Trump-America’s pain. We fed their despair. Nigel Farage and his Reform party? Liberal Britain’s fault for being too stuck up to take Red Wall voters’ concerns seriously. Noses in the air (apparently), deaf to the woes of all those deplorables, and babbling about trans rights, preferred pronouns

A week away from the American election, and the polls cannot tell us who will be president. But can they ever? A poll is, as the pundits always remind us, a snapshot of public opinion, not a prediction. Nate Silver himself said that anyone dissecting an individual poll is ‘just doing astrology’. So what predictions are actual astrologers making about the election? She looks relieved when she draws the High Priestess: a trump card, but possibly not a Trump card Under the electoral college system, nationwide data is not as important as predictions for the swing states, so I look for astrologers in the seven states which will decide the election.

This is the last column I’ll file before the American presidential election, and I’ve dreaded writing it for months. (The next one, filed on election day itself, may prove impossible. Perhaps that’s when I’ll choose to share my recipe for parsley as a side vegetable.) Meanwhile, I’ve watched fellow ‘double haters’ squirm in print. There are two models for wrestling with this dilemma, one exemplified by Andrew Sullivan. The conservative commentator ‘came out’ in a September Substack newsletter – no, not in that dated sense: everyone knows he’s gay – in support of Kamala Harris, only to lavish the overwhelming majority of that column on what a ghastly candidate she