Donald trump

Thursday

Rodric Braithwaite

Peter Mandelson’s rocky path to Trumpworld

The muddle about who’s to be the next British ambassador in Washington has been only a small part of the grandiose confusion which surrounds Donald Trump’s assumption of power. Sir Keir Starmer announced that Lord Peter Mandelson would bring ‘unrivalled experience to the role and take [the Anglo-American] partnership from strength to strength’, apparently without checking first that President Trump would be willing to accept him. The US President’s campaign manager, Chris LaCivita, said Mandelson was ‘an absolute moron’ who should ‘stay home’. He did nothing to improve his prospects when he described Trump as ‘reckless and a danger to the world’ How ambassadors get appointed is a mystery to

Monday

Freddy Gray

How is round one of Trump’s deportations plan going?

33 min listen

Colombia has agreed to accept military aircraft carrying deported migrants from the US – avoiding a trade war between the two countries. Donald Trump had threatened sanctions on Colombia to punish it for initially refusing military flights following a rapid immigration crackdown. What are the challenges of deportation flights, and what’s Trump’s vision for Latin America? Freddy Gray is joined by Todd Bensman, Fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, and author of ‘Overrun’. 

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Is Donald Trump warming to Keir Starmer?

16 min listen

Starmer and Trump have finally spoken, with a 45 minute phone call taking place between the two leaders. The pair reportedly discussed the ceasefire in Gaza, and trade and the economy, with Starmer attempting to find common ground by talking up his plans for deregulation. Cindy Yu speaks to Katy Balls and Kate Andrews about their relationship. Do these early signs suggest it will be wholly positive, or are there thornier issues to come?  Also on the podcast, Rachel Reeves is set to deliver a speech this week outlining her plans for growth – just how important is this week for her? Produced by Patrick Gibbons and Cindy Yu.

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Would it be worth Trump buying Greenland?

London’s capital market needs a kick in the pants, as I write every week, and ‘activist investors’ are no bad thing if they provoke sharper corporate performance. The assault by the New York hedge funder Boaz Weinstein on seven UK investment trusts – demanding shareholder votes to replace directors with his own people and take the management of the trusts into his own firm, Saba Capital – looks like the kind of intervention that might bring positive change to the UK’s historic investment trust sector, which accounts for a third of FTSE 250 companies but according to critics offers lacklustre returns, with share prices too often stuck at discounts to

Douglas Murray

Britain is losing friends – and making enemies

Whatever way you voted in 2016, I suspect that many of us have the same image of post-Brexit Britain. It is easier to capture in a cartoon than in prose but it looks something like this. A chap tries to make a leap across a canyon, falls ever so slightly short and as a result gets wedged in a crevice. And there he is – stuck. Neither on one side or the other and gaining the benefits of neither ledge. The Conservative party obviously carries a large amount of responsibility for this – not least for the fact that European law still dictates our insane migration policy. But the current

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

The Pope’s revenge: why the new Archbishop of Washington is such a controversial choice

For an 88-year-old man who has spent only five days in the United States and doesn’t speak English, Pope Francis is a surprisingly partisan observer of American politics. For most of his life he was, like a typical Argentinian, viscerally but vaguely anti-American. Robert McElroy’s nickname among Catholic conservatives is ‘the wicked witch of the west’ But by the time he became Pope in 2013 both he and the Democratic party had embraced the ideology of the globalist left. And so they became allies. In 2016, Francis gave his blessing to the Hillary Clinton campaign’s Catholic front organisations, motivated not just by a shared obsession with anti-racism and climate change

Toby Young Toby Young

The Trump I (barely) know

I can’t say I know the new President of the United States very well, but during the five years I lived in New York between 1995 and 2000 we were on nodding terms. That is to say, when I turned up at a party and he was there too, we would politely acknowledge each other. This was for two reasons, neither of which reflects particularly well on me. The first is that I was briefly the party columnist for Vanity Fair, deciding whose photos should appear in the monthly round-up. Donald Trump was keen for his picture to appear as often as possible, obviously, hence the nod. The second and

Bruce Anderson

The Reagan effect on wine lists

Let us indulge in a slight paraphrase. What rough beast slouches towards the White House to be reborn? The inauguration ceremonies remind us that many Americans still hanker after monarchical splendour. Even as contentious a figure as Donald Trump is accorded the dignities appropriate to a head of state. The same of course is true of M. Macron, who carries them off better. The dignified portion of the constitution, or the efficient one? It could easily be argued that President Trump is better in the latter role. In his early phase, President Macron wanted us to see him as a Napoleonic figure. Indeed. Napoleon le Petit. If a bottle was

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Will Trump remember his allies?

I had thought that having to be inaugurated indoors would have cramped Donald Trump’s style. Not so. The rhetoric with which he would have tried to fill the chilly air on the steps of the Capitol was even more exciting inside the crowded Rotunda. Only feet away from Trump, poor Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and behind them the Clintons shrank in their places, like captives paraded in ancient Rome after a military triumph. I experienced contradictory reactions. On the one hand, I felt a surge of joy that an American president at last has the confidence to do obviously right things – control the southern border, get out of the Paris

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

The Trump resistance is dead

The special relationship is dead, long live the special relationship. On Friday, at a ‘Stars and Stripes & Union Jack Celebration’, British and American right-wingers mingled gladly atop the Hay-Adams hotel, which overlooks the White House. Nigel Farage and co smoked cigarettes with their Republican brethren and shared Trump war stories. Dolled-up American girls took selfies with Liz Truss. And Steve Bannon showered Lord Glasman, the Labour peer, with admiration. The horseshoe theory has gone full circle. I bumped into Truss at the bar. ‘You’re a Gove shill,’ she told me, in that delightful, easygoing manner of hers. How did she think Kemi Badenoch was getting on, I asked, trying to

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Trump’s inauguration, Israel-Hamas ceasefire and cardboard humans comfort lonely fish

Home Axel Rudakubana, 18, pleaded guilty to the murder of three girls in a knife attack at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class at Southport on 29 July 2024, and to ten attempted murders as well as possessing al Qaeda literature and producing the poison ricin. He had been charged with murder on 31 July but police insisted then that the incident was not being treated as terror-related; the culprit was charged with two terrorism offences on 29 October. From 30 July, rioting had swept the country for a week. Now it was disclosed that the murderer had been referred three times to Prevent, the anti-terrorism programme, when he was 13

George Osborne

Give David Beckham a knighthood

Donald Trump descends on Davos as if he were in Apocalypse Now. Four years ago I saw his cavalcade of helicopter gunships fly over the town. With the noise echoing off the mountain valley sides, he drowned out all the other conversations. This week his inauguration speech in the Congress Rotunda – watched in huddles around screens at Davos – had a similar effect. Withdrawing from the Paris climate talks and the World Health Organisation, the President was napalming the global international order which is celebrated here. And yet, apart from Bill Clinton in his final year in office, no American president has come to the World Economic Forum –

Thursday

Paul Wood

The Donald’s plans for the Middle East

The former US president Jimmy Carterdied, at the age of 100, just before news of an imminent deal to free the last of Israel’s hostages in Gaza. Carter’s presidency was crippled by his own hostage crisis, American diplomats held captive in Tehran. Freeing them became his administration’s highest priority, and he worked on it for every single one of the 444 days the crisis lasted, often to the exclusion of anything else. By contrast, the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, resisted massive domestic pressure to do a deal for his hostages in order to pursue the war aim of destroying Hamas. You could call this statesmanship, or something else, but

The Spectator

The folly of Keir Starmer’s Chagos Islands deal

It would be natural to assume that sinking bond markets would be the government’s priority this week, as low UK growth and high borrowing rattles investors. Yet remarkably the Prime Minister’s attentions seem to be focused elsewhere: on advancing a deal to cede sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius in the days before Donald Trump is inaugurated for his second term as US President. Trump is an opponent of the deal for good reason. The US military base on Diego Garcia proved invaluable during the two Gulf Wars. Keir Starmer is yet to meet an international tribunal he won’t genuflect before Keir Starmer, a former human rights lawyer, appears

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Tulip Siddiq quits, Sturgeon splits from husband and Trump spared jail

Home Tulip Siddiq resigned as economic secretary to the Treasury, although she was found not to have broken the ministerial code; she had, however, lived in a flat provided by allies of her aunt, Sheikh Hasina, the deposed prime minister of Bangladesh, apparently under the impression that the flat was a gift from her parents, despite having signed a Land Registry transfer form for it. Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, flew to China and met He Lifeng, one of the four vice-premiers. In her absence the cost of government borrowing rose again, with the yield on 30-year gilts rising to 5.42 per cent, the highest for 27 years. Downing Street

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Empire of Trump: the President’s plan to make America greater

‘The mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation,’ said William McKinley, America’s 25th commander-in-chief, who happens to be one of Donald Trump’s favourite presidents. Trump, who barely dodged a bullet in 2024, shares a number of traits with McKinley, who was assassinated in 1901: Scottish blood, ferocious work ethic, an affinity with the super-rich that somehow appeals to the working classes, a faith in tariffs as a means of safeguarding industry, and a willingness to expand America’s empire to boost future prosperity. ‘I keep speaking to Europeans and British embassy people and telling them he really means this stuff’ ‘I’m talking about protecting the freeworld,’ said Trump

James Orr

J. D. Vance is the future of MAGA

The vice-presidency of the United States has always been the butt of jokes. ‘I don’t plan to be buried until I’ve died,’ quipped Daniel Webster when he declined William Henry Harrison’s offer of the role. John Nance Garner, who served as FDR’s vice-president, dismissed it as ‘not worth a bucket of warm piss’. Even John Adams, the first to hold the office, was equivocal: ‘I am Vice-President. In this I am nothing, but I may be everything.’ He may prove to be a more effective standard bearer for Trumpism than Trump himself That ‘everything’ has proven elusive. Fewer than a third of vice-presidents have gone on to occupy the Oval

Thursday

Katy Balls

‘There’s been a vibe shift’: welcome to the new political disorder

Donald Trump isn’t back in the White House yet, but already his victory is being felt across the world. Greenland is pondering the prospect of an invasion after the President-elect refused to rule it out during a Mar-a-Lago press conference. In Canada, the last western leader from the days before Trump has just exited the stage. Justin Trudeau, the one-time liberal hero, quit earlier this week in the face of tanking ratings. Nick Clegg, the former Liberal Democrat leader, is out at Meta and the billionaires of Silicon Valley are bracing themselves for what comes next. Mark Zuckerberg has announced sweeping changes (including an end to fact-checkers) in response to

Saturday

Ian O’Doherty

Ireland is not ready for Trump

It will be an uncertain year for Ireland. The Irish economy has for a long time been artificially propped up by the billons it accrues in tax revenues from American tech companies based in the country. Many dread Donald Trump’s return, fearing he will force these firms to move back to the US. Those fears have been compounded by the Irish government’s bizarre quest to stigmatise and sanction Israel – perhaps the only country in the world to be more popular in American minds than Ireland. In February, then-taoiseach Leo Varadkar and Spanish President Pedro Sanchez wrote to EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and asked her to conduct

Tuesday

Freddy Gray

Are migrants ‘self-deporting’ in fear of Trump?

26 min listen

Springfield Ohio became a talking point in this year’s Presidential election after Donald Trump referred to Haitian migrants ‘eating the cats and dogs’. Steven Edginton, GB News US Correspondent has been to Springfield Ohio to speak to some of the migrants there, investigate some reports that migrants are fleeing America in fear of a Trump presidency, and find our from locals about how Springfield has changed since the arrival of around 15,000 Haitian migrants.