Donald trump

Thursday

Lionel Shriver

Another election boost for Trump

Last Thursday evening a companionable London dinner party was just wrapping up when our hostess returned to the table brandishing the New York Times headline on her phone: in giant letters for such a tiny device, ‘TRUMP GUILTY ON ALL COUNTS’. Three American Democrats and one British Democrat-by-marriage, my fellow diners were exhilarated. One guest declared, ‘We got him’ – soon a triumphant refrain in my home state of New York. Democrats are so blinded by their own goodness that they fail to grasp how badly this strategy could backfire Technically a Democrat, sometimes as a sly rhetorical convenience, I was more muted, mumbling quietly once the cheers died down:

Douglas Murray

Britain is an anachronism as the world goes right

Some of us have vindictively long memories. I am one such person. So let me summon up just two stories from the not-so-distant past that have some bearing on our unhappy present. In 2009 the Dutch politician Geert Wilders was barred by Jacqui Smith, the then Labour home secretary, from entering the UK. In a letter explaining her decision, Smith (or rather her Home Office lawyers) wrote that Wilders’s ‘statements about Muslims and their beliefs would threaten community harmony and therefore public safety in the UK’. Perhaps Smith was partly influenced by the possibility that if Wilders came to the Houses of Parliament and gave his speech (in which he

Peter Jones

How would Athenians have dealt with Donald Trump?

Has Humpty-Trumpty had a great fall, or a great bounce? That will depend on what the Great American Public thinks was at stake in his trial. It was ever thus in the democracy of ancient Athens. In the absence of a state prosecution service, all legal cases in ancient Athens were brought by individuals. But a jury trial often had to await the result of an attempt to settle out of court. This consisted of two mediation processes: one private and, if that failed, the other public under an appointed arbitrator. If there was still no agreement, the case went to trial before a randomly selected jury of between 200

Wednesday

Freddy Gray

What’s the matter with America’s media?

28 min listen

Freddy Gray speaks to Ben Smith and Nayeema Raza from the Mixed Signals podcast. They discuss the state of American media, whether the US has any appetite for public service broadcasting, and whether America is too cynical about the press.

Thursday

Piers Morgan

Why won’t Rishi honour our £1,000 bet?

When I interviewed Rishi Sunak in February, I told him I thought his Rwanda plan for ‘stopping the boats’ was an expensive, unworkable dud and offered him a £1,000 bet to be paid to a refugee charity that he wouldn’t get any asylum-seeker planes taking off before the next general election. To my surprise, the Prime Minister clutched my outstretched hand and accepted the wager, sparking considerable revulsion. As the HBO comedian John Oliver put it: ‘Set aside the grossness on display here, imagine what a monster you have to be to put me in a position of genuinely wanting Piers Morgan to win something?’ Now Sunak has admitted no

Sunday

Freddy Gray

What is Trump’s new foreign policy?

26 min listen

Freddy Gray speaks to author Jacob Heilbrunn about what another term in office for Donald Trump might mean for America’s foreign policy, its relationship with Israel, and the war in Ukraine. How have his views changed since last time? And what will his relationship with Putin be like?

Friday

Freddy Gray

Would a conviction hurt Trump?

24 min listen

Next week the world may know whether Donald Trump becomes the first US President to receive a criminal conviction. But could this verdict help or hinder him? Tom Lubbock, co-founder of pollsters J L Partners, joins Freddy Gray to discuss. They also analyse the dynamics at play in current polling: why is Trump doing better in the sun-belt states? And is this election a referendum on Biden? Produced by Patrick Gibbons and Natasha Feroze. 

Thursday

Freddy Gray

Veep show: who will Trump pick for his running mate?

We are in the fifth week of Donald Trump’s ‘hush money’ trial and the real scandal is that it’s all so intensely boring. Sex, porn-star witnesses, shady lawyers, a president in the dock – the headlines are a tabloid dream. The crux of the case, however, is a bunch of tedious charges to do with tax reporting and accountancy. Who wants to read about that?   Trump is ‘not looking for an heir because that would be Macbeth or King Lear, a bloodbath’ Trump adores the attention, naturally. As the greatest showman of the 21st century he understands that we, the people, need fresh drama and new characters. That’s why, while

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

How to bottle Britishness

The US crackdown on trade finance for Russia from international banks – designed to impede imports needed for the continuing assault on Ukraine – is biting hard, reports the FT, quoting an investor who thinks ‘the logical endpoint of this is turning Russia into Iran’. Quite right too: sanctions like these are a vital non-military way to hobble Vladimir Putin’s campaign. But war and finance intersect in many different ways. Consider also the fate of 400 western-owned commercial aircraft that were leased to Russian airlines before the invasion in February 2022. Now stuck in Russia or its satellites, unmaintained to western standards and unfit to fly back into our airspace,

Wednesday

Freddy Gray

Trump’s trial has nothing to do with Stormy Daniels

Why did Stormy Daniels testify in court yesterday about her allegedly sexual encounter with Donald Trump? Anybody who has followed the Donald Trump story in recent years will have already heard most of Stormy’s account of her interactions with him. Daniels has a sense of humour. Like many others, she enjoys mocking Trump in public. And in our licentious yet strangely puritanical times, details such as the porn star spanking the 45th president with a rolled-up copy of Forbes magazine are just too much to resist.  The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Nobody seems to care much The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the

Saturday

Freddy Gray

Is Donald Trump really going to be a dictator?

23 min listen

Freddy speaks to Norman Ornstein, political scientist and emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. They discuss the possibility of Donald Trump becoming a dictator, his ongoing court cases, and if there’s a double standard in the treatment of Trump vs Biden.

Thursday

Freddy Gray

The Democrats have a Joe Biden problem

The Democrats dare to hope that this week will be a study in contrasts. On their side stands President Joe Biden, the veteran statesman, using all his diplomatic experience to stop a third world war breaking out in the Middle East. On the other, in the dock in Manhattan, sits Donald Trump, facing 34 criminal counts in a case relating to porn stars, adultery and hush money. As Biden urges Israel to ‘think carefully’ as it considers how to respond to Iran’s attack last weekend, Trump is, as ever, ranting away about himself. This speaks to Biden’s 2024 re-election pitch: it’s democracy (him) vs chaos (you know who). Trump can

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

There are three sides to every story

The psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who died last month aged 90, was perhaps most famous for his dictum that: ‘Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.’ This is often known as the focusing illusion. The theory explains, say, why a recent Lottery winner with bad toothache may, in the moment, be little happier than a skint person with bad toothache, since in both cases their attention is focused on the pain, not their financial situation. When Trump rails about ‘fake news’, I suspect this resonates with voters much more than journalists actually realise It is an important bias to understand, not

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Is Cameron upstaging Sunak?

The logic behind Rishi Sunak’s decision to make David Cameron foreign secretary was that he would be a ‘big beast’ on the world stage and wouldn’t need much instruction. Six months on, that plan is going reasonably well, insofar as Cameron appears to be setting his own agenda. It also means he’s making his own mistakes. In February, his foray into US politics misfired when, in an article for the website the Hill, he appeared to lecture Americans about support for Ukraine, telling them not to show the ‘weakness displayed against Hitler’. A key Donald Trump ally, Marjorie Taylor Greene, responded that ‘David Cameron can kiss my ass’. This week,

Thursday

Katy Balls

The Trumpification of the Tory party

Anthony Scaramucci, Donald Trump’s former director of communications, has a phrase that sums up his old boss’s effect on political debate: ‘the universe bends towards him’. In the US, discussion about this year’s election is all about Trump. But he is exerting the same gravitational pull in Britain, both on the Tories as they face opposition, and Labour as it mulls the likely dilemmas of government. Trump is resentful of those who have been ‘nasty’ about him: this includes nearly everyone in the Labour party Theresa May offers a case study in how not to deal with Trump. She hoped to befriend him and acquire some kind of post-Brexit trade

Thursday

William Moore

Why Trump can’t be stopped

36 min listen

This week: can anyone stop Trump?  The Spectator’s deputy editor Freddy Gray takes a look at Trump’s ‘second coming’ in his cover story. He says that despite Trump’s legal troubles, he is almost certain to receive the Republican nomination. Freddy joins the podcast alongside Amber Duke, who also writes in the magazine this week about the brides of trump: the women hoping to receive the nod as his running mate. Also this week: the old trope is that there is nothing more ex than an ex prime minister, but what about an ex MP?  In the magazine this week, The Spectator’s political correspondent James Heale says that Tory MPs expecting to lose their

Wednesday

Adam Begley

Fast and furious: America Fantastica, by Tim O’Brien, reviewed

It’s been said again and again but rarely so plainly illustrated: American life is now too berserk for fiction to keep up. Tim O’Brien’s wild, rollercoaster satire America Fantastica is as wacky as its title suggests; but it can’t compete with the daily trainwreck that calls itself the land of the free and the home of the brave. O’Brien tracks with furious contempt the spread of a highly contagious illness: mythomania and delusional conspiracy theories infecting the body politic and poisoning a defenceless citizenry in the dark pre-Covid days of 2019. The name ‘Trump’ is never mentioned in the novel, but the ‘avalanche of oratorical whoppers’ issuing from the White

Saturday

Freddy Gray

Freddy Gray, Kate Andrews & Lloyd Evans

20 min listen

This week Freddy Gray takes a trip to Planet Biden and imagines what would happen if little green men invaded earth and found a big orange one back in the White House (01:15), Kate Andrews finds herself appalled by the so-called ‘advice’ routinely handed out to women that can be at best, judgemental, and at its worst, slightly bullying (12:51), and Lloyd Evans spills the beans on searching for love on his recent blind date, courtesy of the Guardian (07:13). Produced and presented by Linden Kemkaran

Wednesday

Freddy Gray

Emergency on Planet Biden

‘If aliens attacked Earth, do you think we would be safer under Joe Biden or Donald Trump?’ That’s a question in a new poll of American voters, and 43 per cent of respondents opted for Trump, 32 per cent for Biden, while 25 per cent sagaciously picked ‘Don’t know’. It’s fun to imagine President Donald in charge against the extra-terrestrials. ‘Zogblark the Magnificent is a good friend of mine,’ Trump would shout from the White House lawn, as the helicopter blades of Marine One clattered away behind. ‘He’s said some very nice things about me. Believe me. Things you wouldn’t believe… But we can’t have him exerting the supreme authority

Wednesday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Scottish drug deaths, more strikes and the Lucy Letby verdict

Home The number of drug deaths in Scotland fell to 1,051 in 2022, the lowest since 2017, but still the worst record per head in Europe. Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, who in March had pledged ‘to stop the boats once and for all’, said that ‘there is not one simple solution and it can’t be solved overnight’. On a sunny Monday, 661 migrants landed in Britain in 16 small boats; one man, on making landfall, made the Albanian eagle gesture popular among football supporters. England was defeated 1-0 by Spain in the final of the women’s football World Cup; the Spanish Prime Minister said that Spanish FA president Luis