Joe biden

Having won more votes than any presidential candidate in American history, Joe Biden might have hoped for a triumphant entry into Washington. Instead, he travelled to the inauguration in a private plane to deliver his speech to more members of the National Guard than guests. A combination of the pandemic and security fears ruined normal proceedings: the event had become a target, crowds too great a risk. The emptiness embodies the problem Biden needs to overcome: not just the spats between left- and right-wing politicians, but the unravelling of trust in American politics. His challenge goes beyond governing. It is the question of how to unite the country — or,

He did it. Donald Trump made it through four years, not an accomplishment many of his detractors thought he would achieve, or even wanted him to. ‘See you soon,’ Trump said. A promise or a threat? The truth is that Trump has been badly diminished by his antics in the past few weeks, starting but not ending with the melee on 6 January. His enemies didn’t torpedo his presidency. He torpedoed himself. Trump’s valedictory remarks on Tuesday gave the game away. He couldn’t bring himself to breath the name of Joe Biden. He assumed zero responsibility for the pandemic, barely restraining himself from referring to the ‘Kung Flu’. And he

Kim Jong-un marked the new year by treating North Koreans to several days of lengthy speeches followed by a display of North Korea’s nuclear and missile capabilities. Behind this show of power lies a truth that Jong-un and his country faces a series of unprecedented challenges this year. Sanctions continue to bite and, combined with the coronavirus pandemic, the North Korean economy remains paralysed. Yet this doesn’t mean the task for Joe Biden in dealing with a problem like North Korea will be easy: in fact, with domestic problems exacerbating, it will make Biden’s task even harder. In 2018, the North Korean leader set out a ‘new strategic line’. In

The fallout from last week’s storming of Congress by a pro-Trump mob of misfits and criminals has made the controversy over the infamous 2016 Access Hollywood tape look like a cakewalk. In the week since the worst political violence in Washington, D.C. since the British burned the White House and the Capitol Building in 1814, three cabinet secretaries have resigned in disgust over Donald Trump’s response to the melee. The White House is now stocked with dead-enders and hangers-on. Some of Trump’s most loyal allies, including former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, senator Lindsey Graham and former White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, have either denounced the president or

‘Send in the troops. The nation must restore order. The military stands ready.’ Aficionados of the New York Times may recall that these sentences appeared as the headline of Tom Cotton’s op-ed in June that led to the departure of the paper’s editorial page editor James Bennet. Bennet resurfaced as a guest author of Politico’s Playbook newsletter last week. But how the times have changed! These days it is Washington DC mayor Muriel Bowser who has embraced the Cotton Doctrine. She is demanding that the city be placed into what amounts a state of martial law. Ten-thousand National Guard troops, up to 15,000, are slated to guard the city against the motley

Twitter’s banning of Donald Trump is like bolting the stable door after the QAnon shaman has gone. The damage was done long before the assault on the Capitol was planned on social media. Long before Donald Trump tweeted his way to the White House, social media had reduced American democracy to a lurid freak show. The ban also shows how far the big-tech oligarchs are prepared to go in order to retain their absurd and damaging monopolies. After the 2016 elections, social media promised to clean up their act. The digital fiascos of the 2020 election and its aftermath confirm that Big Tech is incapable of being the value-free guarantor

A day of infamy but also a clarifying one. The scenes at the US capitol building yesterday were both a wholly predictable and a predicted finale to Donald Trump’s wretched presidency. Predictable because it was obvious four years ago – at least it was obvious to those who cared to open their eyes – that Trump was a festering threat to America’s great democratic experiment. And predicted because everything Trump has said and done since losing the presidential election in November led inexorably to this final, shabby, shameful coda to his presidency. For if you spend years lying to people and years telling them they are being cheated, you cannot