America

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Racists will love it: National Theatre’s Death of England – Delroy reviewed

Death of England: Delroy is a companion piece to Death of England, which ran in February at the NT and examined the white working classes. Here the focus is on a successful black Briton, Delroy, who votes Tory and feels at home in multicultural society. The charismatic Michael Balogun plays him as a complex, shrewd and humane figure. He likes to mock white people who judge others according to superficialities like accent and pronunciation. And he recalls his horrified excitement when a white girl at school calmly placed her finger inside his boxer shorts. Delroy has plenty of white pals including his girlfriend, Carly, who is expecting their child. The

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

What the three types of Trump supporter really want

As Democrats’ colossal collective sigh of relief drives wind turbines even over in Britain, let’s not lose sight of the big story. However welcome, Joe Biden’s win was supposedly a dead cert. Even conservative commentators like Andrew Sullivan were hoping for a landslide. The real big story is that Donald Trump came within about 73,000 votes of winning the Electoral College. Democrats have celebrated the fact that their man got more votes than any other presidential candidate in history. But who got the second largest number of votes in history? Donald Trump. Of all people. And a 75 million vs 71 million popular vote gap is hardly yawning. Had a

Andrew Sullivan

Trump may have lost, but his agenda is here to stay

Donald Trump is now showing exactly why he had to be defeated. Well after the votes have been counted, with no evidence of anything but the usual minor glitches — none of which is sufficient to dent Joe Biden’s margin of victory — the President of the United States is doing what he did for four years: sabotaging American democracy because of his pathological narcissism. Trump remains what he has long been — a purely destructive force, a vandaliser, not a builder. But Trumpism? It did far better than anyone expected. The polls were off — again — missing Republican strength. Down-ballot, many Republicans seriously outperformed their nominal leader. During

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Voters have lost their nerve

Elections teach us nothing. Instead, each tribe dredges succour from the minutiae, proving that they had been right all along. The moderate left — here and in the US — insists that tacking to the centre is the way to beat a populist right-winger, despite the fact that Joe Biden won by the skin of his teeth, through the votes of people who couldn’t be arsed to go to the polls on polling day and against a candidate of whom the most charitable description would be ‘fundamentally deranged’. The woke far left, meanwhile, argues the reverse, implying that the tightness of the vote was down to a lack of progressive

Friday

Daniel DePetris

Joe Biden should prepare for gridlock

The Democratic Party was anticipating a blue wave this fall, a victory of such magnitude that Republicans would be spending the next two years fighting amongst themselves rather than controlling the purse strings. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the top Democrat in the House of Representatives, was so confident of this blue wave scenario that she sent a memo to her Democratic colleagues outlining a list of bold policy proposals that unified Democratic government in Washington could achieve in the first several months. At the top of that list: a new coronavirus relief package and defending – and building on – the Affordable Care Act. Pelosi, however, got ahead of her skis.

Thursday

Joanna Williams

How the ‘diploma divide’ helps explain the US election result

If the US election was a television drama, the drum-roll end credits of the penultimate episode played this week and we are now waiting for the denouement. Only, there was never supposed to be a cliffhanger. An exhausted nation should have chosen boredom. Biden was meant to have been the clear victor and the political clock reset to a pre-2016 normality. But, in a plot twist that is by now so familiar we have no excuse for not anticipating it, opinion polls and commentators alike called it wrong. It’s not just in the US. All around the world, elections have become more difficult to predict. Traditional party loyalties have been

Roger Kimball

Trump is right not to concede

I am happy to see that President Trump is acting on the maxim of the month: Don’t concede if you didn’t lose. Any other GOP president would be on the defensive now. ‘Yes, there was voter fraud, but, but, but…’ That dangerous conjunction is a fledging concession just waiting to spread its wings and fly. Donald Trump does not trade in concessions. It’s one of the things about him that infuriates people. It’s also one of the reasons he is so effective. He abhors clutter. He seizes upon the main issue – there’s too much illegal immigration, our trade practices are unfair to American workers, the deep state has created

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Trumpism hasn’t been defeated

It’s all over, bar the litigation. Without some mind-blowing legal reversal in the coming days, Joe Biden will be the 46th president of the United States of America. Donald Trump must be extracted from the White House in the coming weeks, though if he is unwilling to leave nobody is quite sure how he’ll be removed. Trump believes the election has been stolen from him — so do many of the 70 million Americans who voted for him. Trust is a vanishingly rare commodity in American democracy. But Trump started crying foul weeks, even months ago. ‘This is a fraud on the American public,’ he declared in the early hours

Douglas Murray

The cameras miss what’s really happening in Washington

Washington, DC On election day in the capital there is no thrill in the air, but there is a sound: that of hardboard being placed over all of Washington’s windows. Wherever you go in the centre of town, the area is either boarded up or in the process of being so. I enjoy my sausage and eggs on a sidewalk to the accompaniment of the last windows being drilled. ‘Was everything all right?’ my waitress enquires. ‘Delicious,’ I tell her. ‘If the city is still here tomorrow, I’ll be back.’ DC feels as if it is preparing for a natural disaster, not an election result. Like all other major cities

Monday

Mark Gettleson

Why the Democrats are still haunted by Florida

As we get closer to the American election, Democrats in swing states like Pennsylvania and Arizona are sounding notes of cautious optimism. Others, in Texas and Georgia, are daring to dream that Joe Biden’s national poll lead (mainly driven by suburban women) might flip those consistently red states to their column. In Florida, on the other hand, the mood is one of cautious pessimism. As it always is. Democrats are still haunted by Al Gore’s loss in 2000, when the Supreme Court halted a recount in Florida, delivering the presidency to George W Bush. In 2018, the polls showed that Democrats were on course to win Senate and Governor candidates

Thursday

The Spectator

A Biden victory would be no great boon for Britain

It is remarkably uncommon for a US president to fail to be re-elected. It has happened just twice in the long lifetime of Joe Biden: with Jimmy Carter in 1980 and George H.W. Bush in 1992. On Tuesday, however, it looks likely that it will happen again. It is not just that Donald Trump is trailing badly and consistently in the national polls — he was behind in 2016 but won nonetheless — it is that his support seems to be draining most in his own heartlands. Biden appears to be well ahead in industrial ‘rustbelt’ states like Michigan and Wisconsin where Trump’s protectionist message gave him victory four years

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Shopping bans in Wales, soft drinks in Scotland and stowaways at sea

Home Wales, entering a 17-day ‘firebreak’, closed most shops by law but then tried to stop supermarkets selling ‘non-essential’ items such as bedding, kettles and smoke alarms. At the beginning of the week, Sunday 25 October, total deaths (within 28 days of testing positive for the coronavirus) had stood at 44,745, including 1,166 reported in the past week, compared with 819 the week before. In England, Nottingham entered the most severe restrictions,Tier 3, taking the number of people so restricted to 7.9 million (in Liverpool, Greater Manchester, Lancashire, South Yorkshire and Warrington). About 54 Conservative MPs from the north of England wrote to the Prime Minister asking him to ‘show

Paul Wood

Michael Cohen: ‘I lied for Trump, but that doesn’t make me a liar’

When I met Michael Cohen in New York two years ago, he was a man visibly crushed by what life had done to him. His whole face sagged: he could have defined the word ‘hangdog’, a beagle caught peeing on the Persian rug. We stood outside his apartment building, which was Trump Park Avenue, Trump’s name bearing down on Cohen’s head in gold letters three feet high. We’d already had a long lunch and I was trying to say goodbye but as he spoke about one injustice or humiliation he remembered another, a torrent of self-pity. Everyone had treated Donald Trump’s former lawyer and fixer unfairly: the Feds, Congress, the

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

I’m voting to make America boring again

I just spent £2.50 in postage to bring about one of the last things I want. Specifically, the next-to-last thing I want. If the polls are right (and how should I know?), my absentee ballot will help leave Trump behind as a one-term historical aberration and install as US president an elderly Democratic lifer whose cognitive capacities remain uncertain. Many an ambivalent Biden voter will share my concerns about victory: Covid. Who is that masked man? Biden often flaunts his face coverings even when nowhere near another human being, while his party has embraced the mask as a badge of nobility, righteousness and partisan unity. Obliging computer modellers now posit

Douglas Murray

Trump’s humour is his weakness – and his strength

Earlier this summer left-wing activists announced a ‘semi-autonomous zone’ in the Capitol Hill area of Seattle. Denuded of law enforcement and any other signs of the American state, these activists deluded themselves that they were creating a blueprint for the perfect society. After a number of wholly predictable murders and rather more rapes, the state retook control. The area where the state formerly known as CHAZ briefly stood is now just another homeless encampment, overlooked by empty luxury apartments. Local businesses are suing the city for failing to protect them. All still have ‘Don’t hurt me’ signs in the windows. One, a hairdresser, stresses that it is ‘a minority-owned, women-led,

Thursday

Douglas Murray

The transatlantic mask divide

Should we wear our masks? The question has been on my mind as I have been battered that way and this by a variety of people with stronger feelings than mine on the matter. The week before last, while I was walking down Oxford Street, police outriders began to emerge. Like most of the public I stopped with interest and some excitement, wondering who the traffic might be halting for. Sadly it turned out to be neither the Queen nor Matt Hancock. Instead the traffic was being stopped for several thousand anti-lockdown protestors. Those of us who had hoped to catch a glimpse of, or even a wave from, the

Noor Bin Ladin

Being pro-Trump has caused me more grief than being Bin Laden’s niece

Americans are, in my experience, the warmest, most kind-hearted and open-minded people in the world. I have found this to be true for my whole life, despite being the niece of Osama Bin Laden and sharing the same surname (albeit spelled slightly differently — Bin Ladin is the original translation). Americans base their judgment on the content of someone’s character and actions, not on the colour of their skin — or their last name. This was reaffirmed last month, after I voiced my love for America and support for President Trump. The response to ‘My Letter to America’ has been overwhelmingly wonderful, and I am most thankful to all those

Daniel DePetris

What was missing from the vice presidential debate

Democratic vice-presidential nominee Kamala Harris is a former prosecutor. Vice President Mike Pence is a career politician. The debate between them was always going to be less lively and dramatic than the name-calling last week between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. But it wouldn’t be a snooze-fest – nothing in this election cycle is. Harris began the night with an impactful opening pitch: the Trump-Pence administration is a dumpster-fire sitting on a wrecked economy, a mountain of lies, and the worst pandemic in a century. Trump’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic has been the ‘greatest failure of any presidential administration’ in history. President Trump was informed early on about the deadly

Wednesday

Daniel DePetris

The US election is Joe Biden’s to lose

Donald Trump is back at the White House after a scary three-day stay at the Walter Reed medical complex. For the President, that’s the good news. The bad news: his bout with the coronavirus hasn’t won him any sympathy points from the electorate. In fact, his numbers have only gotten worse. CNN’s latest national survey saw Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden expand his lead to 15 percentage points. If the polling is any indication, Trump is four weeks away from being beaten like a drum a-la Jimmy Carter in 1980. For Biden, the last nine months have been a wild ride. There was a time not too long ago when

Thursday

The Spectator

Who started America’s presidential debates?

Word for word US presidential debates are often traced back to the first televised debate, between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy in 1960. But they were inspired by a series of seven debates held between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas while contesting an Illinois senatorial seat in 1858. The debates would have stretched a modern audience — they were each three hours long. It is hard to imagine, too, how modern candidates would have coped with the format: the first speaker was invited to speak for an hour, the second for 90 minutes, and then the first candidate was allowed a further half-hour. Douglas won the seat and, two