Donald trump

Thursday

Peter Jones

Thucydides on Donald Trump

‘America’s journey into the great unknown’, screamed a headline greeting Donald Trump’s election as next President of the United States. Most of us call it the future, which has a long and distinguished tradition of being unknown. In the ancient world there was quite an industry in attempting to foretell the future: oracles, auguries, dream interpreters and so on. But to rely on the supernatural was to put one’s trust in something equally unknowable, and the great Greek historian Thucydides (5th century BC) proposed a better way: as doctors’ evidence-based analysis of the course of an illness enabled them to generalise about the course of any future example, so human

The Spectator

Letters | 17 November 2016

Wisdom of crowds Sir: According to Matthew Parris (‘Can we trust the people?’ 12 November), I have become part of the mob. Nevertheless, I have never really thought of myself in that way. Although it may be reasonable to criticise the antics of Farage or Trump, surely it is wrong to characterise all those who voted for their causes as a mob? My motives in voting for Brexit were simple and reasonable. Many of my generation — who lived as children through the 1940s when our parents went to war to preserve our sovereignty, our justice system and control of our borders — voted to leave the EU because they saw

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 17 November 2016

On a day when much fuss was being made about ‘false news’ on the net, it was amusing to study the Times splash of Tuesday, greedily repeated by the BBC. It concerned a ‘leaked’ memo, ‘prepared for the Cabinet Office’ and ‘seen and aided by senior civil servants’. The memo, from a Deloitte employee, was in fact unsolicited. It was not a bad summary of why the government’s Brexit plans are confused, but its status was merely that of journalism without an outlet. By the use of the single word ‘leaked’, a piece of analysis was turned into ‘news’ — false news. At least two former Spectator figures understood things

Taki

High life | 17 November 2016

New York   The only thing worse than a sore loser, I suppose, is a sore winner, but thank God we don’t run into too many of those. Thirty years ago, The Spectator and I lost a libel case that cost the then proprietor and yours truly a small fortune. As it turned out, after the plaintiff had gone to that sauna-like place below, everything that I had written was the truth and nothing but. (The hubby of the woman who sued me came clean after her death, but a lot of good that did the Speccie and me.) The sainted editor at the time was Charles Moore, and in

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 17 November 2016

I started watching The Crown, the £100-million television series on the early years of the Queen’s reign, on Netflix but turned it off during the second episode because I couldn’t bear the endless coughing by her father, George VI, as he died of lung cancer. The coughing, performed with eager realism by the actor Jared Harris, who played the king, was made harder to bear by the fact that he kept on smoking at the same time. The link between cancer and smoking may not then have been established, but it is well known now; and exposure to both at the same time is not for the squeamish. For me,

Gerard Baker

Diary – 17 November 2016

Nobody knows anything. William Goldman’s famous first law of the movie business — that no one can say before the fact what’s going to be a hit or a flop — is our new rule of political punditry. Pollsters, experts, markets tell us with scientific certainty what’s going to happen. Then the voters come along and ruin everything. Brexit. Trump. Ed Balls and Strictly Come Dancing. Who knew? As last Tuesday dawned in New York, the US election was deemed a formality. Newsrooms had lovingly compiled their historic ‘First Woman President’ editions. The final polls pointed to a clear Hillary win. And then the actual votes rolled in, uncannily like

The Spectator

Barometer | 17 November 2016

Long divisions Donald Trump reaffirmed his plan for a border wall between the US and Mexico, but said parts might end up as a fence. Who has the longest, highest barriers? India-Bangladesh India is still building a 2,545-mile three-metre-high barrier of barbed wire and concrete. Morocco-Western Sahara Separated by a 1,700-mile sand berm, typically two metres high, reinforced with land mines. US-Mexico 580 miles of fence already exist along the 1,950-mile border. Israel-Palestinian territories 440-mile barrier: part concrete wall, part barbed wire. Hungary-Serbia To thwart migration there is a 110-mile, four-metre-high fence. Catholic and Protestant Belfast 25-mile long ‘peace lines’ up to 8.5 metres high still separate some communities. Unpopular

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Is Donald Trump Making Journalism Great Again?

Is Donald Trump about to do the impossible? No, I don’t mean become President of the United States. That’s in the bag. I’m asking if he is going to Make Journalism Great Again? He has, as we all know, humiliated the media. The media which created him, then tried and failed to destroy him. Thousands upon thousands of journalists are now feeling ashamed of themselves — even if they can’t yet admit it — for having got the story so wrong. But is their industry suffering? Is it heck! Trump’s decision to carry on attacking the New York Times on Twitter even after winning the election might upset the paper’s

Owen Matthews

Moscow rules

 Moscow To the Union Jack pub on Potapovsky Lane for a US election night party. The jolly Muscovite Trump supporters who organised the event had gone to the effort of providing girls with tight–fitting Trump-Pence T-shirts and Make America Great Again baseball caps. In pride of place beside the bar hung a specially commissioned triptych of oil paintings — heroic Soviet-style portraits of Russia’s new heroes: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen. Among the guests were a group of young men from Tsargrad TV, Russia’s popular new Orthodox nationalist channel. Sporting neatly trimmed beards and sharp suits, they were a Russian version of Republican evangelicals. In one corner

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

The Breitbart conspiracy

Donald J. Trump always keeps everyone guessing. Is the president-elect ditching his crazy act in order to bring in a conventional Republican government? Or ditching conventional Republican government in order to bring in his crazy act? Is he bringing together the anti–politics outsiders and the Washington insiders? Or is he playing them against each other? Are we witnessing the usual scramble for power that accompanies every incoming administration? Or is the Trump transition a new kind of shambles? The answer to all these questions is yes, probably. Take the role of Steve Bannon, executive chairman of the right-wing website Breit-bart (aka ‘Trump Pravda’), who served as the Donald’s campaign manager

Patrick Allitt

Trump’s inside man

Let’s take stock. Donald Trump, until last week, had never done a government job or held an elected office. He ran for president as a kind of anti-politician, ignoring the conventional wisdom about how to win. Amazingly, he won. It was, in its way, an impressive feat, overturning much conventional wisdom. Still, there’s no getting around the fact that, as president, he’s got to be political and must surround himself with politicians. Mike Pence, his vice-president, may turn out to be the most important of the lot. The two men did not previously know one another, but have become friends over the past five months, and recognise each other’s merits.

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The new normal

-What was your favourite response from the liberals to Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election? Actress Emma Watson handing out copies of a Maya Angelou book to bewildered commuters in New York? Cher announcing that she wasn’t simply leaving the USA, ‘but Planet Earth too’ — a move some of us assumed she had made at least 40 years ago? The hysterical protestors who set fire to their own shoes because they thought the said shoes were pro-Trump? The hyperbolic hatred spewed out towards those who voted for the Donald, or Matthew Parris suggesting that maybe this democracy caper has gone too far, or the teachers telling tearful

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

How the left wastes its energy

There are only three infallible rules in advertising. Be distinctive. Make a lot of noise. And try to feature a cute animal somewhere. Had Donald Trump followed my advice and bought a springer spaniel he would have won California. For a man with such tiny hands to be elected to the world’s highest office, I think we can all agree, is a tragic loss to proctology. But it is also a remarkable lesson in how to play the media. Hillary had $2 billion to spend; what Trump miraculously found was that with each outburst of political Tourette’s, he got more airtime than her, and for free. So eager were the mainstream

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

In Trump’s Texas, the oil men awaken to hope of new prosperity

 Houston, Texas It’s hard to find anyone in polite society here who admits to having voted for Trump, even among the oil men. But 4.7 million Texans did so, giving him 53 per cent of the popular vote. In redneck rural counties the Donald carried four fifths of the ballot, but Hillary Clinton was ahead in urban Houston, whose citizens pride themselves on good relations between white, black and Latino communities and on the welcome they offer to newcomers — including, a decade ago, a quarter of a million refugees from hurricane-hit New Orleans. But still this is predominantly an oil town, and an industry that has suffered losses and slashed

James Delingpole James Delingpole

The moral arc of the universe bends towards me

So I made £250 betting on Trump to win the presidency. It would have been more, except that every time I got close to topping up my stake, this boring, mimsy, responsible voice in my head kept saying: ‘Now, now James. Don’t be silly. All your sensible friends who know much, much more than you do about politics have been telling you that President Trump just isn’t going to happen.’ One of them was m’learned colleague Toby Young. Until recently we used to do a podcast together. Because it was partly aimed at a US audience, we’d usually chat about the presidential race and I’d go into my crazy spiel

Wednesday

Theo Hobson

Donald Trump’s victory shows why liberals must go back to basics

It is time to bother thinking about the tricky terms ‘liberal values’ and ‘liberalism’. ‘Liberal values’ is what unites us in Western democracies; it means a broad, vague belief in equality, human rights, the rule of law. Liberalism, on the other hand, is a political and cultural agenda. It claims to express liberal values in terms of a concrete political programme. Or let’s put it this way. There is a ‘basic liberalism’ that unites us (or almost all of us). It says that all human lives matter, that racism is bad, that people should be free to choose how to live, and so on. And there is a ‘sharp liberalism’

Tuesday

Daniel Jackson

Can the liberal worldview survive?

There is a latent consensus among political scientists and highbrow columnists that the liberal era is over and that, following Brexit and Trump, we are entering a period of neo-nationalism. This consensus will develop further if, as I suspect she will, Marine Le Pen wins the French presidential election next May. Two recent editorials in the Economist demonstrate how quickly this is happening. In July, it was argued that ‘the new divide in rich countries is not between left and right but between open and closed’. Last week, we were told that ‘the long, hard job of winning the argument for liberal internationalism begins anew’. The challenge to liberalism is still seen

Rob Crilly

What now for the ‘Never Trump’ Republicans?

Plenty of Republicans were not in the mood to celebrate on election night. About 200 gathered at the Lincoln Restaurant in Washington DC, where they had hoped they could watch a heavy defeat for Donald Trump and begin the process of returning their party to its centre-Right origins. Instead, people began drifting home before midnight. Since then, Republicans of the Never Trump variety have had to wrestle with what comes next, questioning whether the party of Lincoln can ever recover and what their place in it might be. People like Meghan Milloy, who has been a Republican since her school years but who campaigned against her own party by helping set up

Monday

Alex Massie

Donald Trump is going to be a dreadful president. Let’s not suddenly pretend otherwise

Life, like they say, comes at you fast. Just a week ago the reality-based world worried that the American people might send a con-man to the White House. Now serious people intoning serious thoughts implore us to think it’s a good thing that Donald Trump is a con-man. This is the peg from which hope hangs, at any rate: Trump is a liar and a fraud and a man who doesn’t have any core convictions, so, you know, perhaps everything will be fine. Or not as bad as you thought. We can put away all that stuff we heard on the campaign trail because, like, he doesn’t – or can’t

Rob Crilly

Trump’s immigration policies aren’t all that different from Obama’s

Bit by bit, Donald Trump’s policies and priorities are emerging into view. We know who his chief of staff is to be and in an interview last night he started to explain his plan of action after his inauguration. It begins, as you might have predicted, with immigration: ‘What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers, where a lot of these people, probably 2 million, it could be even 3 million, we are getting them out of our country or we are going to incarcerate. But we’re getting them out of our country. They’re here illegally.’ The issue was